I've lived in and around Baltimore all of my life, and I can confidently say the city will NEVER be a "post-racial" city. I live in a truly integrated working class community in Baltimore County where most people own their homes, people for the most part watch out for each other's property, and you can walk around as an adult without much hassle. Baltimore of the 40's and 50's was segregated, but in the city it could be block to block not necessarily neighborhood to neighborhood. Whites AND Blacks knew their boundaries, problems arose when one group was in a place they should not have been (and most likely KNEW they should not have been). After the 68 riots, white and black working class flight opened an artery in the city and all measures since to control crime, drugs, and racial problems have been little more than a tourniquet seeping and dripping from the original cut. Those tough blue collar row house neighborhoods were the backbone of EVERY rust belt city. Now they are literally war zones. Sure there are "nice" communities in Baltimore, but the racial, class, and income divides that separates "urban renewal" from "ghetto" has NEVER been more pronounced. A community like Bolton Hill anchored by the Maryland Institute and Symphony Hall, full of fabulous uptown brownstone style city mansions is safe for about 4 square blocks during broad daylight and EASY pickings for the surrounding neighborhoods after dark. The Ritz Carlton Residence and Tidewater Point on the south side of the harbor are even more blatant and aborrhent examples of parasitic gentrification. In this area property value run from 3,000,000 dollar penthouses to crackhouses within a mile. Since Baltimore city took the wrecking ball to high rise projects in the city the last being Murphy Homes, families with section 8 support have moved out of the city into places like Edgewood in Harford county where the murder rate has spiked 300% in less than 5 years.

My stepfather and father grew up in the city before, during and after 68, and I often dream of what living in a mostly peaceful city of parks and quiet streets must have been like then. During the riots he worked as a security guard stationed at a shoe store in Highlandtown. For 2 weeks he sat in a chair in front of the store at night with a shotgun across his lap and a German Shepard on a 15 ft leash at his feet, from their for he watched the whole city burn. My own father was in the National Guard which was ineffectually deployed (with guns but most of the time without bullets) to stop the riots.

The racial, and class divides in this run too deep and too bloody to ever be "beyond" race. The most we can hope for is that people stop killing people.

Excellent post Blur.

I'm sure this would generally fit quite a few other cities as well. America has certainly taken positive steps in changing some racist attitudes but I'm afraid we were mostly successful at hiding it.

Wow. It is so hard to imagine such things still go on in my own country after living such a sheltered life, but I suppose difficult things are always hard to accept.

Having wide diversity of appearance in pop-culture does not, in any fashion, signal anything close to post-racism. It is virtually nothing.

The author is right. I live in Memphis. Very little difference. The ratio of violent crime culprits that are non-white outpaces the racial population ratio.

This is not an issue of race, not entirely. It is a result of two related forces.

The first is poverty. Plain and simple. Violent crimes are committed most often by people in poverty, regardless of race. This problem is exacerbated by the economic policies and attitudes of the ruling class. This is also signaled by the lack of attention given to the sort of crime committed by the class that withholds financial security from most of the population. This is itself a violent crime, but is never lumped in with it.

The second force is cultural. People generally have dignity and pride. Where those have been denied or where they are being challenged, many will respond. Much of the violent crime committed by those in poverty is as much a vehicle of power reclamation and assertion as anything else. The majority of the roads to security are blocked (or appear that way) for many people in this nation and its cities. Many of these people, then, reclaim and reconstruct the geography of their environment and and attempt to reconfigure the power realtionships that affect them. This dynamic also has a strong possibility of glorification, which we find in a lot of popular music and manifests itself in hyper-masculine behavior.

And there lies the biggest issue...hypermasculinity.