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.