My PowerPoint presentation on a chapter of Baltimore Revisited

I read, summarized, and analyzed Joshua Clark Davis's chapter, "More Than a Store: Activist Businesses in Baltimore," from Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City, eds. P. Nicole King, Kate Drabinski, and Davis, Rutgers UP, 2019, pp. 118-127. Here, as promised, is my slide show from class yesterday, with links below each slide image:

https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/2/resources/769

https://everyonesplacestore.com/

https://redemmas.org/

https://www.taharkabrothers.com/

Reflection on Community & Neighborhoods in Baltimore

 Here's a photo of

 my younger son DJ 

taking riding lessons

at The City Ranch.

Before this course, the only Baltimore horse folks I knew of worked at The City Ranch, a nonprofit horseback riding stable in Windsor Mill my family used early in the pandemic. I have learned, however, that Baltimore City has "arabbers," street vendors that sell produce from horse-drawn wagons. I love horses but had never seen nor heard of this tradition continuing here before this month! I am especially interested because both my mom's and my dad's families sold produce from roadside stands while they were growing up, and I don't know much about what that entailed either. I hope to get to learn more about this feature of Baltimore.

I did find a photo essay online at the Smithsonian featuring the arabbers, but I have mixed feelings about it. The artist chose to use only black-and-white photos, which emphasizes the pastness of the traditional practice. Today, I would choose to use color to emphasize the presence of the arabbers, to recognize the character and charm of Baltimore City now.

However, I currently feel more concerned with helping the Poppleton families who are at immediate risk of losing their homes.

I intentionally opted not to use the word "community" for the arabbers above because that feels presumptuous since I know so little about them yet. So far, the course has made me more conscious of the word and its possible implications.

In the past 8+ years of living and working in and around Baltimore, I feel that I have gotten snapshots of the city without knowing much context or even the names of the neighborhoods I was in. I played coed flag football in a park near the industrial area by the waterfront. I taught test preparation at an all-boys Catholic high school, at the charter school on the grounds of Coppin State, at Notre Dame, and, frequently, at the Inn at the Colonnade just off N Charles St. Many of my LSAT students in the ND course were deeply involved in social justice work -- much more so than the students I encountered in LSAT courses I taught elsewhere. Just last month, I collected signatures at the bus stop by the nearby Mondawmin Mall to try to get a measure for a Baltimore Area Transit Authority on the ballot in Baltimore City this fall.

The students in that ND LSAT course became a community in ways I didn't see in any of the courses I taught in College Park, which often felt fraught with racial tensions. They quickly formed a study group and met regularly in addition to the class sessions. They celebrated together after they took the test. They became friends. One of them began sending me lengthy messages in the wee hours of the morning on LinkedIn as she tried to adjust to a new place and into her internship with The Innocence Project.

So in that sense, I now feel that a community must entail more than a place and an interest in common. It must include a sense of belonging, some fellow-feeling, as Tahira Chloe Mahdi defines in her introduction to her dissertation (Membership vs. Being of the Community: A Qualitative Study of the Go-Go Music-Cultural Community, UMBC, 2018). In particular, her discussion of community as filling a need (5) resonated with me, both in terms of my own example of a community, in my remembrance of this example, and in other communities I have encountered. I look forward to enhancing my personal understanding further as we continue to progress in the course.

Leading the Discussion

In "Introduction to Racial Equity," the first chapter of his book The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Lawrence T. Brown offers a credible proposal as to how to achieve residential racial equity in the U.S. He uses Baltimore as an exemplar of extreme racial hypersegregation and posits that what works here would work everywhere. His main points are that equity cannot come to pass without historical understanding and full, intentional redress nor without "collective self-determination" (4) and "community ownership" in all local interventions (5). Most of the rest of this chapter consists of fruitful definitions of the terms he will use throughout the book as he outlines each aspect of his 5-step proposal.

I liked that Brown named the recent period of antiracist activism ("The Great Rebellion," 2014-2020, the first wave consisting of "urban uprisings from 2014-2017," and the second wave consisting of the protests after George Floyd's murder in 2020, p.10), although I think that it is premature to give an ending date to that right now. Nonetheless, I agree that it feels as though there has been increased activism in this moment, and it is consistent with my own observations in my dissertation research so far (in which I saw an uptick in news coverage of Native American activism in 2013 start to effect changes in cultural norms about racist language and imagery). His term will be useful for me in that work.

This discussion was on the page we are missing from our PDF. If you'd like, read it yourself, along with a useful definition of gentrification, on Google Books at https://books.google.com/books?id=jLQTEAAAQBAJ&

Questions:

• Brown is, as he writes, intentional about effective language use (15). He offers a metaphor of war in the introduction to this chapter, choosing words such as "invasion" and "war" to refer to both the depiction of Black migration by White elites and their response to it (3). Also, on the page that we're missing, Brown writes: "Historian Douglas Egerton called post-Civil War violence the 'Wars of Reconstruction' roughly covering the period between 1866 and 1876" (10). How does that historical contextualization make the epigraph, the Frederick Douglass quote at the beginning, and the Abraham Lincoln quote at the end, applicable to the entire chapter and the issues therein? What could you understand those quotes to mean, in other words, if you took them out of the context of the Civil War and applied them instead to Brown's call for following the required steps toward residential and educational racial equity? What do you think of war as a metaphor for redressing injustice, and, if your response to it is negative, can you find cause to reconsider your own response?

• Likewise, Brown mentions that he "use[s] hurricane categories as an analogy to describe metropolitan areas" in accordance with their level of segregation. How is this metaphor apt but also inapt for the causes and consequences of residential segregation? Why does word choice matter in a book like this one?

Here is a paragraph I found explaining more clearly those five Massey-Tannen dimensions of segregation, for those who are interested:

"Conceptually, hypersegregation occurs when a group has high segregation scores on four or five different dimensions of segregation. The first dimension is evenness: the extent to which all the neighborhoods in a metropolitan area show the same distribution of groups as the total area. Thus, if an area is 20 percent black and 80 percent white, there would be no segregation if each neighborhood had that racial distribution as well. Evenness is measured by the Index of Dissimilarity . . . the most commonly used measure of segregation. The next dimension is isolation: the extent to which a group shares its neighborhoods with only members of its own group. While evenness looks at distributions across all neighborhoods in a city or metropolitan area, isolation provides the view from within neighborhoods. A group may live in only a subset of the neighborhoods in a city, but if those neighborhoods are relatively integrated, the group has contacts outside their group, and their segregation is not as severe as when their neighborhoods are occupied only by their own group. The third dimension, concentration, refers to the relative proportion of the total land area a group occupies relative to the group’s size. This dimension addresses the issues of crowding, population density, and the advantages associated with housing on spacious suburban lots. Centralization, the fourth dimension, measures how close to the central business district a group resides. In the past, the central business district was not a desirable place to live because of the presence of factories, and in more recent years it reflects the disadvantage associated with not living in the suburbs, where many jobs are now located. The last dimension of segregation, clustering, looks at whether the neighborhoods where a group lives are themselves clustered into one large area or are scattered throughout the metropolitan area. It addresses the aspect of whether a group member, regardless of the composition of their neighborhood of residence, interacts with nongroup members if they leave their neighborhood. In hypersegregated metropolitan areas, black neighborhoods tend to form large contiguous ghettos." ("Hypersegregation," Sociology, http://sociology.iresearchnet.com/sociology-of-race/hypersegregation, viewed 15 Feb 2022)

• Do you agree that what works in Baltimore, if also enacted locally elsewhere, would work to achieve spatial equity everywhere in the U.S.?

Introduction

My name is Jessica Burstrem, and I am a second-year PhD student in the UMBC Language, Literacy & Culture program. I am interested in successful social movements. My dissertation will discuss the history of the 50-year Native American movement to get the Washington football team (now the Commanders) to change their name, with particular focus on the activists' final tactic of activist investing and the context of that moment when the team finally agreed. I hope to gather oral histories from participants in that movement. In return, I plan to ask potential narrators what they would like me to do with those stories so that I can serve their interests in addition to my own as I seek my degree.

I expect that this definition will change this semester, but right now I would define a community as a group with something in common and a shared space of some kind in which to interact. (It is possible that the shared space could be all that members of a community have in common.)

As I mentioned in class, I rely on some online communities for support. Two of those are social media groups: one formed for primarily the GenX women of American Mensa, and the other a group of fulltime stepmoms.

The photo here is of my family: my husband Eric, my older son Alex (age 20), my younger son DJ (age 10), and one of my cats, Georgie (age 4). Alex is my biological son, and Eric is his stepdad. DJ is officially my stepson, and Eric is his adoptive father; DJ lives with us over 85% of the time. Prior to August 2021, it was nearly 95% of the time, and DJ's legal mother had never had more of a presence in his life than that. Since Eric and I got married in 2018 and throughout the pandemic so far, I have been DJ's primary caregiver. I am his first permanent residential mother, and it has long been true that there is no woman he has spent more time with than me.

But most people don't even recognize me as a mother to him. Further, most people, in my experience, are unsympathetic to mothers in general. I can go to my women's group for a lot of things -- advice, encouragement, accountability, a sounding board, a listening ear -- but not for most issues related to parenting, and what parenting groups I did have were not sufficient once Eric and I got married.

Therefore, a couple of years ago, in desperate need for a supportive group that I wouldn't have to educate in order to get a little commiseration and understanding, I sought out a fulltime stepmoms group on social media. I have never met any of these moms in person, although I did interview a few of them for a research project this summer.

While I have yet to find a community that can sympathize with my particular situation -- as a fulltime stepmom to an internationally adopted child of a different race and ethnicity from my own -- and that can therefore understand the particularities of those aspects of our situation, this community of women often fulfills some previously unmet needs for me. That's what we all do for each other.

Creative jewelry for the book, tea, and sushi lovers

Cory is an Englishwoman who makes tiny detailed replicas of books, bookshelves, teapots, and the like to wear as jewelry. Some of my favorites:

Stack of books dangling earrings

Harry Potter bookshelf necklace


Incidentally, this particular item is featured in a contest right now. See the Coryographies blog entry about the contest.

There is also a graduation bookshelf necklace. See her Etsy page for the full selection.

On ENCHANTED: Don't get your hopes up: It's still a Disney movie

As Deborah Siegel nicely details in her review of the movie, it doesn't quite distance itself, in the end, from all - or maybe even any - of the problematic characteristics for which Disney movies are constantly - and rightfully - criticized in the academic world. I recognized that immediately when I saw the pivotal role that the Evil Stepmother was going to play. (And Jessica says to herself, "A-gain I think I'm watching a movie for fun, and it turns out to be homework.") A witchy mother - who, as Nick Schager astutely points out, is also literally a monster during the movie, "an evil dragon lady borrowed from Sleeping Beauty (Susan Sarandon) who likes to pose as the old hag from Snow White" - seeking to keep her son from falling in love with another woman in order to keep all of the power for herself. Let's see, does that sound familiar? Number One, portraying what you're seeking to mock does not usually effectively do so; in my experience, it actually enables you to more distinctly present the stereotypes that you have in mind - and thus, rather than really attacking them, actually makes those stereotypes more distinct for viewers. Number Two, I question why anyone thought that Disney was really seeking to mock any of those old ideas of theirs anyway. All that they do seem to be attempting, according to this New York Times article, is to find "new" ways to make money without hurting the rich old ways that they already have. As the caption there best describes, it's just another Disney movie with an added "modern touch" - but nothing is gone or has changed.

Clearing some smoke from the Britney/K-Fed wars

While looking for something else entirely tonight, I came upon this site asking viewers/readers to vote as to whether Brit or her new ex should get custody of their two kids (despite the fact that very few kids go 100% to one parent or the other, which fact is surprisingly obscure in this country: Even I, while pregnant, thought that I was deciding between parenting with my son's father's help or without it - but it never occurred to me that I might have to deal with something in between). While reading the comments, I found several remarks that merit comments of my own in response. They subtly demonstrate, I think, the depth and breadth of the absorption of mistaken ideas about parenting that have deep negative consequences in our lives. And actually, there were only really three of them:

1. "Britney is the mother and she carried the kids for nine months, so she deserves the kids!" Um, why? It's not as though there's any other way that things could have come to pass (unless she used a surrogate). We need to stop buying into the idea that women are somehow inherently/biologically better at parenting than men - which all of the demonization of mothers and celebration of involved fathers these days seems to belie anyway and which doesn't jive with the contemporary realities of ultra-effective formula and the like either. If there's any scientific basis for mothers being better parents than fathers, it's impossible to separate it from the fact that mothers and fathers are SOCIALIZED to think so - thus likely making it a self-fulfilling prophecy - and/or that our society (sometimes combined with biology) simply FORCES mothers to do more parenting than fathers, which ultimately would still make mothers generally better at it simply due to their getting more practice.

But of course, in order to do that, we would also have to get away from our similarly misplaced notion that biological "parenthood" a better parent figure somehow makes. In this world, having a role in the split-second creation of a child - which act we ought to know by now has nothing to do with one's ability to be an appropriate parent - nevertheless makes one woman and one man the only people entitled to any rights to and responsibilities for a child unless and until a ridiculous standard of proof to the contrary is met. For a country that stands behind preemption, we sure don't apply it to child abuse. As another commenter wrote, "Hell, neither one of those crazy bleep dip sticks need those kids."

2. "No real man runs out on his pregnant wife for another woman." This perspective is just as problematic as the "welfare-reform" notions that involve coercing women into marrying or not divorcing their kids' fathers, even if those fathers are abusive, because either 1) the women have reached the imposed-from-outside limit of their temporary assistance or are otherwise being denied aid and can't survive without a second below-the-cost-of-living wage earner in the household, or 2) the government is going to deny them assistance UNLESS they do so. (It's easy to find sources to back me up on this issue, by the way. Try a Google search on "welfare" and "coerced marriage," for starters.) Why do we still have this bizarre notion that keeping families together (even when those families defy all of our idealisms as to what constitutes families) is the solution to the world's problems? Back when few had the opportunity to do anything else, the murder rate was higher than it is now. Why do you think that is? (Here's a hint: "THE DECLINE in marriage is having another unexpected effect on Western society - a decline in the murder rate as fewer husbands have fewer opportunities to kill fewer wives.")

3. And then we have the good ol' Selfish Mother myth:

"Aren't the nannies going to raise them anyway?? In typical Britney fashion where was she on Easter?? Well,she was shopping and going to the basketball game of course (without her kids) maybe dad had them.... isn't this [what] any good mother would do on Easter?? (sarcasm)... How selfish can you be grow up Brit and put your kids 1st instead of yourself."

Maybe they WERE with K-Fed. That's common among separated parents: One gets most of the "regular" time, the other gets most of the holidays - or they split them. And then what parent wants to hang out at home while her kids are gone? I had to take pains to distract myself while Alex, as a baby, was with his biological dad - especially because I had concerns about what kind of dad he could be.

But what if they weren't? Must everyone see Easter the same way? Must a "good mother" be with her kids all the time - even if that means that such constant proximity makes her lose her mind and act like a "bad mother"? Why do we continue to criticize mothers for being away from their kids when, with incredible and yet unremarked-upon consistency, it's the stay-at-home moms (or the ones who "only" work part-time) who end up making the big headlines for killing their kids? Is getting away sometimes - or even regularly - really 100% NOT in kids' best interests?

The other irony in that remark is that being rich is supposed to be the goal and the ideal in this country - especially if you're considering having kids (hence another comment that "she's definitely the better choice if for no other reason but her financial stability") - and yet it simultaneously assumes that the rich never raise their own kids and thus are "bad parents." In fact, in Britney's case, much the opposite has been evident. While she has made mistakes with her kids that have made major headlines (which have not always corresponded in magnitude with the magnitude of those mistakes), she's made them because she's been trying to take care of her kids herself, without a nanny doing it all for her. (I'm not the first one to make that point, by the way.)

Bottom line, as far as I'm concerned: Ain't nothin' cut-and-dried here - as is pretty much always the case, I would argue - so the appropriate court decision wouldn't be either. As one family court judge said while my own kid's custody case was on the docket for the day: His goal is to make sure that no one goes home happy. And isn't that a good thing? At least the kids will always know that both parents were willing to fight for them when it came right down to it. And so will mine.