Tag Archives: baltimore

White People Could Learn a Thing or Two About Talking About Race From the Orioles’ Manager

by BessieHatley Posted on April 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, after the Baltimore Orioles trounced the Chicago White Sox in front of over 48,000 empty seats at Camden Yards, Orioles’ manager Buck Showalter offered a blunt assessment of the ongoing protests happening just beyond the stadium gates.

More coverage of the protests in Baltimore.


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Obama: It’s About Decades of Inequality


Rand Paul: Blame Absentee Fathers


What MLK Really Thought About Riots


Photos: Residents Help Clean Up


Orioles Exec: It’s Inequality, Stupid


These Teens Aren’t Waiting Around for Someone Else to Fix Their City


Ray Lewis: “Violence Is Not the Answer”


Bloods and Crips Want “Nobody to Get Hurt”

When a Baltimore resident asked what advice Showalter would give to young black residents in the community, the manager explains emphasis added:

You hear people try to weigh in on things that they really don’t know anything about. … I’ve never been black, OK? So I don’t know, I can’t put myself there. I’ve never faced the challenges that they face, so I understand the emotion, but I can’t. … It’s a pet peeve of mine when somebody says, ‘Well, I know what they’re feeling. Why don’t they do this? Why doesn’t somebody do that?’ You have never been black, OK, so just slow down a little bit.

I try not to get involved in something that I don’t know about, but I do know that it’s something that’s very passionate, something that I am, with my upbringing, that it bothers me, and it bothers everybody else. We’ve made quite a statement as a city, some good and some bad. Now, let’s get on with taking the statements we’ve made and create a positive. We talk to players, and I want to be a rallying force for our city. It doesn’t mean necessarily playing good baseball. It just means doing everything we can do. There are some things I don’t want to be normal in Baltimore again. You know what I mean? I don’t. I want us to learn from some stuff that’s gone on on both sides of it. I could talk about it for hours, but that’s how I feel about it.

Fans watched from outside the stadium gates after demonstrations in response to the death of Freddie Gray forced the team to play the first game behind closed doors in Major League Baseball history. At Wednesday’s press conference, outfielder Adam Jones, who related to the struggles of Baltimore’s youth as a kid growing up in San Diego, called on the city to heal after the unrest.

Jones goes on to say:

The last 72 hours have been tumultuous to say the least. We’ve seen good, we’ve seen bad, we’ve seen ugly…It’s a city that’s hurting, a city that needs its heads of the city to stand up, step up and help the ones that are hurting. It’s not an easy time right now for anybody. It doesn’t matter what race you are. It’s a tough time for the city of Baltimore. My prayers have been out for all the families, all the kids out there.

They’re hurting. The big message is: Stay strong, Baltimore. Stay safe. Continue to be the great city that I’ve come to know and love over the eight years I’ve been here. Continue to be who you are. I know there’s been a lot of damage in the city. There’s also been a lot of good protesting, there’s been a lot of people standing up for the rights that they have in the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, and I’m just trying to make sure everybody’s on the same page.

…

It’s not easy. This whole process is not easy. We need this game to be played, but we need this city to be healed first. That’s important to me, that the city is healed. Because this is an ongoing issue. I just hope that the community of Baltimore stays strong, the children of Baltimore stay strong and gets some guidance and heed the message of the city leaders.

Like team exec John Angelos, Showalter, Jones and the rest of the Orioles organization get it.

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White People Could Learn a Thing or Two About Talking About Race From the Orioles’ Manager

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The Time Baltimore’s Police Commissioner Put a Gun to a Suspect’s Head

by FranzisIXZ Posted on April 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Baltimore police chief Anthony Batts was riding along with a patrol last May when his officers spotted an object in the shape of a handgun bulging out of the pocket of a man they’d stopped. As recounted later by Baltimore’s CBS affiliate, the man struggled with the officers, and pulled his gun. In response, Batts drew his service weapon and put it to the suspect’s head. When the suspect attempted to move Batts’ firearm out of the way, the city’s highest-ranking law enforcement officer punched him in the face—and secured the illegal firearm in the process. A triumphant police department quickly took to Twitter to boast of its boss’ exploits:

The move was typical of Batts, a hands-on chief with a history of leading troubled police departments who now finds himself at the center of the unrest ignited by the death of Freddie Gray in his department’s custody. Batts took over the Baltimore Police Department in 2012 shortly after the death of Anthony Anderson at the hands of arresting officers, and set about attempting to rehab his department’s image while establishing his own cred as an outsider in a new city. He came up through the ranks of the Long Beach, California, police department, and arrived in Maryland fresh off a tumultuous four-year stint as Oakland’s police chief, where he took over a department that had been subjected to federal monitoring as part of a 2003 court settlement over rampant abuses. Batts was tasked with curbing the Oakland Police Department’s excesses. The results were mixed.

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The Time Baltimore’s Police Commissioner Put a Gun to a Suspect’s Head

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Genetically Engineered Happiness Probably Doesn’t Mean Fewer Geniuses

by AmosBuiezwtwn Posted on April 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Matt Yglesias says that becoming a new father has changed his mind about genetic engineering:

The main thing is that I now have an instinctive, gut-level understanding of what it is I want for my kid as a parent. And the main thing is that my parental aspirations are very asymmetrical. You want the kid to grow up to be basically happy and healthy. Anything beyond that in terms of genuinely noteworthy achievements would be nice, but honestly not that much nicer than “basically happy and healthy.” By contrast, falling significantly short of “basically happy and healthy” would be really bad.

….Long story short, while I used to think of genetic engineering as primarily about making future generations “better” on average, with my dad-glasses on I think it would be largely about making them more mediocre. You would curtail the left end of the distribution curve, but also the right end. Fewer tortured geniuses and alienated, awkward loners who push the boundaries of society and technology.

The image of the tortured genius is rife in Western literature, but in real life it’s basically a myth. Are there tortured geniuses among us? Sure. Vincent van Gogh was famously tortured. Kurt Cobain. Georg Cantor.

But the boring truth is that geniuses, on average, are about the same as everyone else aside from being geniuses. Einstein was perfectly well adjusted. Ditto for Shakespeare, Edison, Picasso, Maxwell, Newton, etc. They all had their own quirks and foibles, and were maybe a bit more driven than average, but fell well within the usual norms for healthy and happy. Historical studies of geniuses have all confirmed this. Being unhappy just doesn’t have any effect on being a genius.

So no worries on that score, though there are plenty of other things to worry about in the brave new world of human genetic engineering—including the fact that not all parents share Matt’s value system in the first place.

Besides, my guess is that trying to engineer geniuses is a dead end anyway. Artificial intelligence will get there first. By the the time we’ve finally figured out how to reliably produce the next baby Einstein, the machines will just be tittering at us behind our backs.

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Genetically Engineered Happiness Probably Doesn’t Mean Fewer Geniuses

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Video: Protestors Clash With Police as Baltimore Demonstrations Turn Violent

by UJCMargart Posted on April 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Update, Monday, April 27, 7:35 pm ET: Maryland Governor Larry Hogan has declared a “state of emergency” in Baltimore.

Clashes between Baltimore Police and protesters turned violent Monday afternoon following the funeral of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black Baltimore resident who died in police custody earlier this month. Baltimore Police say that at least seven officers were wounded when groups of people, mostly young men, began throwing bricks and other objects at officers. Officers have responded with tear gas and pepper balls. Drug stores and other businesses, primarily in Northwest Baltimore, have been looted, and several cars have been set on fire.

Here is a live stream from CBS Baltimore:

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Video: Protestors Clash With Police as Baltimore Demonstrations Turn Violent

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40,000 Maryland Ex-Cons May Soon Get Their Voting Rights Back

by EloiseQ42rlu Posted on April 14, 2015

Mother Jones

A national, bipartisan effort to roll back restrictions on felon voting rights could soon take a big step forward in Maryland. Earlier this month, the Maryland legislature passed a bill that would restore the right to vote to felons immediately after release from prison. Currently, Maryland is one of 20 states that bars felons from voting until they have completed prison time, parole, and probation.

The bill currently sits on the desk of Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican who has backed criminal justice reform. If enacted, the law would make it easier for 40,000 Maryland residents with past convictions to exercise their voting rights, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Myrna Pérez, the center’s deputy director, says that “We’re at a unique moment in time. The country recognizes that the criminal justice system needs reform.”

Felon voting rights, Pérez says, should be a natural area of focus for improving the justice system. “There’s no law enforcement or deterrent justification for disenfranchising people after their release,” she explains. “Research and evidence shows that you’re less likely to recidivate if you can vote… In entire communities, when adults can’t vote, they raise children that can’t vote.” The law was introduced by first-term Delegate Cory V. McCray, a Baltimore Democrat who served ten months in a juvenile correctional facility after being arrested for drug dealing as a teenager.

The conventional wisdom on the subject has held that Republicans are hurt by reforms like Maryland’s; many of the people who will have an easier path to the ballot box come from working-class and minority constituencies that skew Democratic. That likely will not stop Hogan from signing the bill, and it has not deterred other Republicans: GOP presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has pushed for voting rights restoration in Kentucky, and he introduced a bill that would ease voting restrictions on the federal level.

Pérez is skeptical that expansion of voting rights would hand either party an advantage. She points out that in Florida, where reform was implemented under former Gov. Charlie Crist, the GOP has done just fine. “It’s very hard to say that a policy like Maryland’s would hand the state to Democrats,” she says. There is a “real openness among people of both parties to consider the issue.”

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40,000 Maryland Ex-Cons May Soon Get Their Voting Rights Back

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The Government Is Finally Doing Something to End the Rape-Kit Backlog

by AudreaMoralez Posted on March 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Across the country, an estimated 400,000 rape kits—the DNA swabs, hair, photographs, and detailed information gathered from victims of sexual assault and used as evidence for the prosecution to convict rapists—have never been tested. Testing kits can be expensive, and in many jurisdictions, a lack of funds has resulted in kits being consigned to dusty shelves, stored in abandoned police warehouses, or stowed away in forensic labs—sometimes for years. As a result, survivors may never see their rapists prosecuted, and repeat offenders continue to commit crimes.

But now a new, $41 million Department of Justice program could finally help localities end this backlog. The money from Congress “goes a long way towards solving the problem,” says Linda Fairstein, a former sex crimes prosecutor who serves on the board of the Joyful Heart Foundation, a nonprofit established by Law and Order:SVU actress Mariska Harigtay that does research and advocacy work on the rape-kit backlog.

Last week, the Department of Justice began accepting applications from states, counties, and municipalities that want to use the federal dollars to tackle their rape kit backlogs. Officials in Baltimore, Milwaukee, Detroit, Memphis, Cleveland, and Houston tell Mother Jones that they’re planning on applying for some of the funds. “The grant shows an investment on all levels, national to local,” says Doug McGowen, a coordinator in the sexual assault response unit in Memphis, Tennessee.

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The Government Is Finally Doing Something to End the Rape-Kit Backlog

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The NFL Has a Domestic-Violence Problem, But All We Got Was This PSA

by ScottSelffum Posted on January 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ever since the NFL embarrassingly mishandled the Ray Rice domestic-assault incident this summer, the league has tried to prove it has become enlightened about violence against women. Its latest attempt? A 30-second Super Bowl ad.

The new public service announcement, which will air during the first quarter of Sunday’s game, pans through a house in disarray, presumably because of a domestic dispute, while audio of a woman talking to a 911 dispatcher plays over it. At the end, a message flashes on: “Help End Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault; Pledge to Say ‘No More.'” The PSA was made, free of charge, by advertising giant Grey for the sexual- and domestic-violence-awareness group NO MORE; the league donated the prime advertising spot, worth about $4.5 million.

These broadcasts are part of an NFL offensive to save face after the Baltimore Ravens and the league created an uproar by barely punishing Rice after he was first charged with assaulting his then-fiancée (and current wife). It wasn’t until TMZ leaked security footage showing Ray Rice punching Janay Rice in an Atlantic City elevator (which Goodell dubiously claimed he hadn’t seen before) that the NFL indefinitely suspended the Ravens running back and began to make an effort to change how it handles players accused of domestic violence and sexual assault.

The NFL has since reformed its punishments for players involved in domestic or sexual violence, created rather confusing new disciplinary bodies to determine and hand out those punishments, required the league to attend education sessions about sexual assault and domestic violence, and hired female advisers to improve how the league deals with domestic violence.

The NFL had its first test leading up to the AFC Championship game, when it put the Indianapolis Colts’ Josh McNary on paid leave after he was charged with rape. But in order for the NFL to prove that it’s committed to lasting reform of an entrenched culture that has long ignored and even enabled violence against women, it will to need to continue to address these issues—long after its Super Bowl ad has aired and the dust of this horrible season has settled.

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The NFL Has a Domestic-Violence Problem, But All We Got Was This PSA

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Nope, the Tax Revolt Isn’t Dead Yet

by Celia34Vuvukbw Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Alec MacGillis writes that there was a very specific reason for the surprising Republican win on Tuesday in the Maryland governor’s race:

I knew Democrat Anthony Brown was in trouble in the race for Maryland governor when every single voter I spoke with Tuesday—including several who voted for Barack Obama—at a polling station in a swing district in Baltimore County, just outside the Baltimore city line in the Overlea neighborhood, brought up the rain tax.

The rain tax is a “stormwater management fee” signed into law by Governor Martin O’Malley in 2012 that requires the state’s nine largest counties, plus Baltimore city, to help fund the reduction of pollution in Chesapeake Bay caused by stormwater runoff. The tax is hardly draconian—in Baltimore County, homeowners pay a flat fee that can range from $21 to $39, while commercial property owners are assessed based on the proportion of impervious surfaces (parking lots, roofs, etc.) on their land.

As a native Californian, this naturally brings back memories of the infamous “car tax,” which Arnold Schwarzenegger cynically rode to victory in a special election in 2003. And this wasn’t even a new tax. A few years earlier the vehicle license fee had been lowered under Governor Gray Davis, but with a proviso that it would go back up if state finances deteriorated. Sure enough, when the dotcom boom turned into the dotcom bust, the state budget tanked and eventually Davis signed an order restoring the old VLF rates. But the VLF never actually increased; it merely returned to the same level it was at before it had been cut.

It didn’t matter. Schwarzenegger ran endless TV commercials starring ordinary citizens who simply couldn’t believe that anyone expected them to survive if they had to pay the outrageous Democrat car tax. It was just more than a body could bear. (Yes, that really was the tone of the ads. I’m not making it up.) All this caterwauling was over an average of about $70 in taxes that everyone had been paying with no noticeable distress just four years earlier.

And Arnold won. Cutting the VLF made California’s finances even worse, of course, as did Arnold’s cynical-beyond-all-imagining bond measure a couple of years later to make up for the revenue shortfall. As usual, Californians were somehow suckered into thinking that this was free money of some kind, not something that would cost more in the long run than just paying the VLF in the first place.

Anyway, this is just a long-winded way of saying that lots of liberals have spent the past few years predicting the end of the tax revolt. I plead guilty to this once or twice myself. It generally seems to happen whenever some state or another successfully passes a tax for something, but as California showed a decade ago and as Maryland showed yesterday, it ain’t so. I think it’s fair to say that raising taxes is no longer an automatic kiss of death, but it’s still pretty damn dangerous. For the most part, we still live in Grover Norquist’s world.

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Nope, the Tax Revolt Isn’t Dead Yet

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Texas Official Is Freaking Out About School "Meatless Monday"

by AngelikWakelin Posted on September 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A top Texas official denounced school districts that have scaled back on serving meat one day a week, accusing them of succumbing to a “carefully orchestrated campaign” to force Americans to become vegetarians.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples last week criticized districts that have adopted “meatless Monday” policies in an op-ed in the Austin American-Statesman. He specifically attacked Dripping Springs Independent School District, near Austin.

“Restricting children’s meal choice to not include meat is irresponsible and has no place in our schools,” Staples wrote. “This activist movement called ‘Meatless Monday’ is a carefully orchestrated campaign that seeks to eliminate meat from Americans’ diets seven days a week—starting with Mondays.”

The Dripping Springs district adopted meatless Monday to encourage healthy eating that is environmentally conscious, a local CBS affiliate reported. Industrial meat production is resource-intensive and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.

“Are we having a war on meat in Dripping Springs? Definitely not,” John Crowley, head of nutrition services for the school district, told the CBS affiliate. “We’re trying to think outside the box, and we serve a lot of Texas beef on our menus. We’ve had requests for more vegetarian options, and I thought, ‘Why don’t I give it a try and see how it’s received by kids?'”

Dripping Springs students are still allowed to bring meat lunches on Mondays. Last week, a district elementary school served options that included cheese pizza, black bean burritos, and vegetarian chili, reported KVUE-TV.

“In no way are kids going deficient in protein by not having actual meat, fish or poultry products served today,” Crowley told the station. “We hope that we’re meeting the parents’ and the kids’ needs and serving things that they like and things that are healthy.”

Staples, however, wrote that he sees meatless Mondays as a way for activists “to mandate their lifestyles on others.”

Staples, who has received more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from beef producers and ranchers over the past few years, has lashed out against meatless Mondays in the past, according to the Austin-American Statesman. Staples branded as “treasonous” a U.S. Department of Agriculture suggestion in 2012 that its employees go green by participating in meatless Monday.

Bryan Black, director of communications for the Texas Department of Agriculture, said campaign contributions are unrelated to Staples’ position on meat-eating.

“He’s focused on this issue because children need the freedom to eat meat,” Black told The Huffington Post. “I think it would be important to go back and look at all his contributions. He’s received millions of dollars from Texans across our state. In this last election he received more than $3 million, so to try to pinpoint that he’s doing this simply for farmers and ranchers who gave him money is untrue.”

School districts around the country have embraced meatless Monday in recent years. In 2009, a Baltimore district became the first in the country to adopt the initiative, according to Education Week. A district in Houston also participates.

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Texas Official Is Freaking Out About School "Meatless Monday"

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If You’re Born Poor, You’ll Probably Stay That Way

by MaritzaEVN Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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In 1997, before The Wire made him a household name, then-Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon published The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, a book about an open-air drug market at West Fayette and Monroe Streets in Baltimore. The book painted a grim portrait of the urban ghetto and the people trapped there. It was hailed as a landmark work of immersion journalism.

But Simon can’t hold a candle to Karl Alexander, a Johns Hopkins sociologist who followed nearly 800 people from the neighborhoods surrounding Simon’s corner since they started first grade in 1982. Alexander and his Hopkins colleagues are now publishing the final results of that 30-year study, their own version of The Corner, called The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth And the Transition to Adulthood. What they’ve found isn’t quite as grim as what Simon described, but it’s not much more encouraging.

Alexander set out to look at how family influences the trajectory of a low-income child’s life. Thirty years later, he’s decided that family determines almost everything, and that a child’s fate is essentially fixed by how well off her parents were when she was born.

Alexander’s findings conflict with the sort of Horatio Alger stories of American mythology, but not with other social science research on upward mobility. His are especially dispiriting. Of the nearly 800 school kids he’s been following for 30 years, those who got a better start—because their parents were working or married—tended to stay better off, while the more disadvantaged stayed poor.

Out of the original 800 public school children he started with, 33 moved from low-income birth family to a high-income bracket by the time they neared 30. Alexander found that education, rather than giving kids a fighting chance at a better life, simply preserved privilege across generations. Only 4 percent of the low-income kids he met in 1982 had college degrees when he interviewed them at age 28, whereas 45 percent of the kids from higher-income backgrounds did.

Perhaps more striking in his findings was the role of race in upward mobility. Alexander found that among men who drop out of high school, the employment differences between white and black men was truly staggering. At age 22, 89 percent of the white subjects who’d dropped of high school were working, compared with 40 percent of the black dropouts.

These differences came despite the fact that it was the better-off white men who reported the highest rates of drug abuse and binge drinking. White men from disadvantaged families came in second in that department. White men also had high rates of encounters with the criminal justice system. At age 28, 41 percent of the white men born into low-income families had criminal convictions, compared with 49 percent of the black men from similar backgrounds, an indication that it is indeed race, not a criminal record, that’s keeping a lot of black men out of the workforce.

Alexander doesn’t call it white privilege, but it’s basically what he describes. His data suggests that the difference in employment rates between white and black men with similar drug problems and arrest records stems from better social networks among white men, who have more friends and family members who can help them overcome many of their obvious impediments to employment.

He does find some silver linings in the data and in the interviews with people he’s been talking to since they were six years old. Included in one random sample from a single, very poor public school close to Simon’s corner were 22 African-American men. Alexander was able to stay in touch with 18 of them through 2005, when they were adults. Of that 18, 17 had been arrested and convicted of a crime at some time in their lives. (Seven of the interviews in 2005 were done in prisons.) But a fair number of that group had also gone on to get post-secondary education of some sort, and nine were also working full time—two making more than $50,000 a year, indications that not everyone from the ‘hood was doomed to a life of poverty and crime. “These are young black men from The Corner working steadily and drawing a decent paycheck,” Alexander writes.

Even so, he admits that his substantial data trove proves pretty conclusively that social status in the inner city is relatively immobile.

“The implication is where you start in life is where you end up in life,” Alexander said in a press release. “It’s very sobering to see how this all unfolds.”

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If You’re Born Poor, You’ll Probably Stay That Way

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