The Baltimore riots need to be dissected to the root causes. The Media seems to be portraying the rioters in a strictly stereotypical negative cast which neglects any study into why it is that repressed anger and hostility existed in such volume that eruption was inevitable.
The environment in Baltimore didn't become environmentally toxic overnight. There is a deep history of the most polluting industries flowing into the lower income minority neighborhoods because the residents didn't have the power or resources to resist. The blight and pollution created a tinder box ready to explode with little provocation.
Some of the youth in the area that erupted have been conscious of the negativity of their physical environment and have become activists for peaceful change.
Listen to the leader of the youth group Free Your Voice Destiny Watford, 19, address the roots causes of the riots.
United Workers leader Destiny Watford reflects on the root causes of the events in Baltimore from Free Your Voice on Vimeo.
Brenden Mock at Grist is looking deeper into the causes of the Baltimore riots.
Watford said in her video that the enraged protesters’ “behavior is a result, or correlates with the environment that they live in.” To that end, she noted the volume of abandoned row homes dotting the city. Indeed, there are roughly 16,000 of these “vacants,” years after the HBO show The Wire brought to our attention how such blighted buildings cause economic and emotional stress to families. The city is a little less than two-thirds African American, but few of these vacants can be found in the northern slice of Baltimore where the majority of white residents live in segregation. In the West Baltimore neighborhood of Sandtown, Freddie Gray’s neighborhood, a third of residential properties are vacant or abandoned, according to Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance stats. It also leads Maryland among all the state’s neighborhoods in number of incarcerated residents.
In fact, the house that Gray himself was raised in was so laden with toxic lead paint that in 2008 he and his siblings were awarded a financial settlement because the lead may have impaired his learning abilities.
Lead does more than mar children’s health, though. It may also cause violent behavior. Tulane University professor Howard Mielke discovered this in the mid-’70s when he worked at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. By testing soil samples throughout Baltimore and the county, he found that people in the city’s inner-rings had much higher lead content, and that the heavy metal was coming not just from house paint, but from gasoline from vehicles. In 2013, Mother Jones‘ Kevin Drum wrote an extensive report on how high concentrations of lead in major cities like Baltimore may explain much about the peak urban violence faced in the 1990s. Wrote Drum:
We now have studies at the international level, the national level, the state level, the city level, and even the individual level. Groups of children have been followed from the womb to adulthood, and higher childhood blood lead levels are consistently associated with higher adult arrest rates for violent crimes. All of these studies tell the same story: Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.
There is a
systemic failure of socio and environmental blight that permeates the communities that are prone to riots. This is where we must turn our attention.