Read and watch the news about Baltimore City and you?d think it was 1968 and riots were about to explode. You?d hear about a noose in a firehouse and a 7-year-old boy arrested and handcuffed for riding a dirt bike ? and his family?s $40 million lawsuit against the Baltimore City Police Department. You?d learn about a 26-year-old white woman and her boyfriend brutally beaten on a bus by nine black middle school students, the attack allegedly spurred by a racial slur.
We know a black firefighter placed the noose and that an officer way overstepped his bounds with a child, albeit one breaking the law. We do not yet know the full story about the attack. What we do know is that the inflammatory nature of these stories make them compelling news.
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So they are everywhere. Racial hatred is not. It exists. But it is not the driving narrative of this city, which just elected its first black woman as mayor and where three other black women run its day-to-day affairs.
This is a city which, for the first time in over 50 years, added new residents last year. And it is one destined to draw more people of all races from every corner of the world to Johns Hopkins medical centers with the research to emerge from its planned biotechnology park. If that is not enough evidence, go to a service at New Song Community Church in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood in West Baltimore.
New Song is a community of people of all races committed to helping one another live up to the potential God gave them; celebrating one another?s successes; caring for one another when someone falls; and holding one another accountable so that people in the community do not repeat mistakes. Its members and leaders have turned block after block of decrepit housing into refurbished, owner-occupied homes. In the context of today?s stories, it defies comprehension. It shouldn?t. It?s only one church, one community among many, working to make Baltimore more habitable for each of its residents.
But Baltimore residents have a choice. If we want to go back 40 years, we can. We could choose the image of Baltimore local and national commentators from left and right and black and white want. They want a city and a nation where “the centre cannot hold” because destruction would prove their point. But that?s a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Four incidents don?t make a city, by any stretch of the imagination. We must not let the seductive call of their simplistic worldview undo all that we know to be true.
