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In Which I Complain About This City
Or: An Urbanite's Lament
So a few days ago I mentioned that I was going to get around to typing up some stories about my time living, studying, and working in an urban area you have heard of because of its crime rate. This was reasonably well received, and clearly there is an appetite for this sort of post here. So, here we go. I have spent the last several years of my life living and working in an American city with a very high rate of both property and violent crime. Our police force is largely useless, and spends no time enforcing laws against "quality of life" crimes. Litter is everywhere, and red lights are regarded by many of our drivers as suggestions. Urban blight is everywhere. I spent about a year working part-time at a local courthouse, across the street from which was a block of rowhouses which had clearly suffered more than one fire in the past several years, and through every single one's top floor windows you could clearly see the sky. Until this year our murder clearance rate hovered around 45%, and I'm sure that the recent boost is the result of some creative accounting with regards to cold cases. The police operate under a federal consent decree, imposed in 2017, which they are pleased to inform everyone they achieved 25% compliance with just this year!
Yes my friends, I lived and worked in Charm City. You know it from The Wire, and from the 7-o'clock news.
Baltimore.
Baltimore is a shithole. There's no two ways about it. The subreddit is full of yuppies who live in Mount Vernon or Fed Hill or one of the 5 other safe clean neighborhoods in the city, who will insist up down and sideways that they actually like the city. The food is great! There's so much to do! It's vibrant! There's an art scene! Bullshit. All of it. Utter crap. This city is a shithole. Not a diamond in the rough, not an up-and-comer, not a "if you just tried it" grungy but fun place to live. It's not New York in the 90s, where it's a little rough but if you just give it a chance you'll fall in love. It's a hive of scum and villainy.
I won't bore you with reciting those facts you can find out from a simple google search. How the Gun Trace Task Force was a case study in corruption. How a mayor was arrested and sentenced for various corruption charges. How in the last week alone there have been 84 aggravated assaults, 62 robberies, 17 carjackings, 6 shootings, and 3 homicides. Instead I'll just tell you some of my personal experiences. Things I have seen, or heard, or which were related to me by a friend or coworker.
It is my first week of living in Baltimore. I am tentatively optimistic about this city. After all, if it bleeds it leads. Things can't possibly be as bad as it's portrayed on the news. There's no reason to judge the city before I've had a chance to really experience it. I am talking about this with some of my fellow students. Most of us agree that things are probably exaggerated, and we should form our own opinions. One of my classmates pipes up. She heard gunfire outside her apartment last night. When she got up this morning to come to classes, she found a bullet hole in her car.
It is my first month of living in Baltimore. I am beginning to think that perhaps things are not being exaggerated. One of my friends is having a party. "Just don't use the main entrance to the building" he says in his invitation. "Junkies like to hang out around there. Use the garage." I go to the party. A fellow partygoer mentions he didn't like that the host used the word "junkies" because he feels it is dismissive of people who just need help. A few hours later the group-chat gets a text. Then another. Then another. Then another. Five in all, each more frantic than the last. One of the girls stepped out for a smoke and can't get back in. Some of the aforementioned junkies are harassing her. Three of us leave to get her. One stays by the door, two more go to where she is, and escort her back inside the building. She is crying. The party ends shortly after.
It is my second month of living in Baltimore. I am awoken at midnight by the sound of revving engines. I peek through the blinds. There is a horde of young men riding dirt bikes driving down the street. At least thirty of them, possibly as many as fifty. I do not know at this time that this is a regular occurrence, so I shrug it off and go back to sleep. This will continue to happen sporadically throughout the rest of my time in the city.
It is my third month of living in Baltimore. I am awoken at 2am by the sound of gunfire. I am nervous. I've never heard gunfire outside of a range before. Eventually I go back to sleep. It is not the last time this will happen.
It is my fourth month of living in Baltimore. I have walked to a nearby McDonalds because I'm tired and don't feel like cooking. Before heading in I smoke a cigarette. A local junkie asks for one. I hand him one, and the lighter. He lights the cigarette and begins to walk off. I ask for my lighter back. He begins screaming, pleading, begging me to keep the lighter. He is wailing like a child. Sickened, I wave him off and tell him to keep the damn thing. Like a switch was flipped he immediately stops, and walks away. I know I've been hustled, but for the life of me I can't bring myself to give a shit. I take my burger and fries to go.
It is my sixth month of living in Baltimore. I have yet to find a decent pizza place. This irritates me more than it should. My phone buzzes. I scan the email briefly. It's from the campus police. There was a shooting on school property. No students were involved, so I don't bother reading the whole email. I've gotten a similar email before. I will receive two more before my first year in this city is over.
It is my eighth month of living in Baltimore. One of my professors kindly informs us that it is a matter of when, not if, we are mugged. He suggests all the things he is allowed to suggest. Keep your head on a swivel. Don't wear earbuds in both ears. Don't walk alone at night. Don't go out at all after midnight. Comforted by the knowledge that the only place in the city I go without a gun is the school, I mostly tune this litany of advice out. I've heard it all before, from more than one source.
It is my twelfth month of living in Baltimore. I have accepted a part time position. Every Monday, I go down to the courthouse, arriving before 8:30am. I begin to recognize some of the
junkies and crackheadsindigent citizens along my morning commute. One of them regularly masturbates himself in full view of traffic. I have rather unimaginatively nicknamed him "jack-off" in my head.It is my thirteenth month of living in Baltimore. Every day on my drive home I pass a large banner advertising temp tags from Virginia. This is an illegal service, intended to circumvent the costs of registering a car and getting insurance in Maryland, or at least getting around having a suspended license, or no license. The banner is at least four feet high, and ten feet across.
It is my fifteenth month of living in Baltimore. I am cut off on the freeway coming back from grocery shopping, and honk my horn. The driver swerves out of traffic, and begins driving along next to me, matching my speed. I slow down, he slows down. I speed up, he speeds up. I look over, and he is screaming at me from the driver's seat of his car. I unholster my gun and hold it in my lap. He gets off at my exit, I don't. As he takes the exit, he forms a finger gun and points it at me. I file a police report. I am told to avoid that stretch of highway if possible. I do my grocery shopping at different stores for the next few months.
It is my eighteenth month of living in Baltimore. I still have not found a good pizza place. This has gone from annoying, to infuriating, to depressing. I have tried every recommendation on the subreddit, and half a dozen others besides. This city seems to thrive on pizzas that consist of doughy crust, no sauce, and plastic-y cheese. The best slice I have had in this city so far came from Costco. I joke about this with my friends.
It is my twentieth month of living in Baltimore. I have started working at a different courthouse. This one seems like it's in a slightly better neighborhood. At the very least, there are no obviously deserted and collapsing houses near it. When I tell my supervisor this he laughs, and tells me to make sure I leave before dark.
It is still my twentieth month of living in Baltimore. There has been a shooting near my workplace. I am unaware of this until I try to drive home, and have to detour around police tape cordoning off an intersection. I check the news when I get home. A one paragraph blurb informs me that one man was killed, and another wounded. The dead man appears to have been an innocent bystander. I realize I am more annoyed by the detour than the loss of life, and I am revolted by my own callousness.
It is my twenty-first month of living in Baltimore. It has rained all day, and when it's time for me to leave from work, the road home is flooded out. This road has flooded every time it rains heavily for at least the last ten years, according to my coworkers. No effort has been made to solve the issue. I detour to the next road. This detour takes half an hour. It too is flooded out. My twenty minute drive home takes two hours.
It is my twenty-second month of living in Baltimore. There has been an accident blocking the road on my drive home from work. A driver in a sedan ran a red light, and slammed into an SUV. The SUV has flipped onto its roof. The rear doors are open, and I can see an infant's car seat in the back. The intersection is clear enough for me to drive past. I take a look at the tags on the sedan, already knowing what I'm going to see. Sure enough, temp tags. I'm sure they're fake. For a moment I wonder about the fate of the SUV's occupants. I don't look it up when I get home. I don't want to know.
It is my twenty-fourth month of living in Baltimore. It is my last day working at the courthouse before classes begin again. There was a shooting at the same intersection as before. This time it took place early enough in the day that the police tape is down by the time I drive home, and I am grateful for the fact I won't have to take a detour getting home.
It is my twenty-fifth month of living in Baltimore. Disgusted with this city, the banality of its corruption, the constant grind of low-level crimes that the police just don't seem to give a fuck about, the seemingly monthly shooting close enough for me to hear it, the roving gangs of dirt bike youths who will occasionally smash the mirrors of cars they pass, the need to constantly wave off "squeegee kids" (ten to eighteen year olds who skip school to make a buck washing windshields at intersections throughout the city), the constant pervasive odor of weed, the open air drug deals I see every day, the crackheads and junkies I see every time I step outside my building asking for a dollar or a cigarette, the chicken bones that litter every sidewalk, I begin to write up this post.
When I first began to write I thought I would include anecdotes from other people I knew, if I felt myself running low on stories. I did not. Everything I wrote about in this thread, is something I experienced personally.
There's nothing new about what I've written here. Nothing you haven't heard of before. I'm not even completely sure this belongs in the culture war thread. I just hate this city. I hate what it does to people. I hate the callousness it has successfully infected me with. I hate the fact that I still have not found a decent fucking pizza place. I have received a job offer in a republican-run city in a blood-red state, and while I don't know if I'll be moving there, I will certainly be moving away from here.
Demographics alone are insufficient to explain the status of Baltimore and St Louis. The black populations of these inner cities have by far the highest violent crime rates (outside of actual war zones) of any black population on earth (Cape Town is still lower when controlled for demographics). Higher than any major African city (and yes, there are plenty of Bantu-majority African cities where it’s likely that the majority of violent homicides are captured by publicly recorded data). Higher even than Haiti, which is in many ways literally lawless.
The complete explanation for Baltimore’s poor status includes inertia and options. The US is the wealthiest major country on earth. Anyone in Baltimore who is unhappy with the state of affairs can leave without expending any great effort. There are plentiful jobs almost everywhere else. The city is entirely selected for people who are satisfied with the state of affairs and do not care to change it. There are a lot of people (including rich and powerful people) who have to live in New York. Nobody has to live in Baltimore.
I often wonder if we're seeing some sort of terrible example the Founder Effect. Because African American slave descendants aren't just a random sampling of Africans that got plucked up by UFOs and dropped here. They were the losers of inter tribal civilizational fitness tests, captured and sold off. That has to have some sort of selection bias on what subset of Africans ended up in the slave trade in the first place.
Through generations of sexual assault and limited-opportunity marriage, that sub-population was also forced to incorporate substantial genetic contributions from the most brutal and impulse-driven individuals among the white Borderers in their vicinity, a group that had overall been actively pre-selected for violence and low conscientiousness. Given the way white Appalachia mirrors Baltimore, I haven't heard anyone rule out the possibility that the whole thing is just those Borderer genes, full stop.
Most white genetics in the African American community come from slave owners and their sons- upper class- and not from borderers(who tended to live far away from the main slave holding areas).
I think it's more complicated than that. A lot of ex-indentured servants mingled with black servants and slaves in the early colonial period, and a supermajority of slave owners (~70%) owned less than 40 slaves, most significantly less than that. Plus, slaves near urban areas or major transportation routes were frequently rented out as industrial (for men) or domestic (for women) labor, remitting most of their wages to their owner. Those slaves obviously were much freer to develop relationships in the general population than agricultural workers bound to a single plantation or homestead.
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I thought at least some of the minor Southern aristocracy was descended from transported and otherwise indigent emigres, and that there were overall more situations of modest households owning 1-2 slaves than of big aristocratic plantations? In any case, whatever their strengths in bravado or disease resistance or whatever it took to succeed economically in the Old South, by definition the failsons who will rape the most servant girls are not the ones carrying the best genes for impulse control and orderly prosociality.
It also seems plausible that even the enslaved women on big estates would be highly vulnerable to opportunistic sexual assault from random employees and other poor whites in the vicinity.
The way it worked was geographical: in the lowland Tidewater and Piedmont of the Eastern Seaboard, large scale plantation owners were the descendents of early settlers groups -- Barbadians in South Carolina, the famous Second Sons Cavaliers in Virginia --, while the large scale plantation owners in the more recently settled Trans Appalachian West was a mix. There were a lot of people who were descendents of settlers from the old frontier in the uplands of the Appalachians, which would include the Scotch-Irish and Scots Borderers everyone is talking about, but also just a mixture of the lower classes from up and down the coast who left the old, more settled areas to seek their fortune out West.
This group is where the planters in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi come from. While Tidewater/Piedmont planters did up sticks and move West, they had to deal with a lot of cracker neighbors who would be beneath their notice back East.
They also were the group that pushed into the Trans-Mississippi West below the Mason Dixon line (and Missouri), including Louisiana and Texas. Sam Houston's family originated from the Shenandoah valley, for example. The exceptions there are the old French planters of Louisiana and the Spanish Royal land grantees in Texas.
So, the answer is 'Old Wealth on the coast, New Money everywhere else, mostly'.
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While there were some descendants of involuntary transportees who owned plantations, they were by definition upwardsly mobile and successful- eg not with typical borderer genetics. And it’s my understanding that while the average slave-owning household had a single digit number of slaves, slaves were more likely to live on big plantations because those households didn’t own very many people- and that the slaves on smaller farms skewed maler than the slave population as a whole.
No doubt there was some forcible rape going on, and male promiscuity seems to be correlated mostly with bad things, it seems a lot more plausible that most slave women having babies with members of their owner’s family were essentially mistresses/concubines- the documented examples, like plaçage in southern Louisiana, or Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemings, certainly seem to have been that, and most historical examples of slave systems that were less embarrassed about such things seem to have worked that way.
I am not saying that these relationships meet modern- or other reasonable- standards of consent. But I doubt that would occur to men OK with owning people.
While this doesn’t sound implausible, plantation owners themselves didn’t seem to think it was happening- they thought half-white children born on plantations were all the descendants of the owners.
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It's also plausible that slave owners would take a dim view of randos raping their slaves, and respond with violence and/or prosecution. (this kind of activity was technically illegal on a number of levels after all)
Do you have any evidence one way or the other, or are you just speculating? (and/or operating under the assumption that White Man Bad?)
I think I was arguing that rapists and predators are by definition Bad. Also that even rich elite clans usually have a couple of members and hangers-on whose individual genetics would not be a valuable addition to anyone's family tree.
I'm not aware of any helpful published surveys supporting this, but to my mind the counter-narrative where Southern patriarchs eagerly guard the honor of their random enslaved field hands is making the more extraordinary claim. Who would even dare to come forward with a rape accusation in that context? Given the overall attitude to women of that class, why would they be believed and avenged rather than punished for causing trouble and/or assumed to have themselves been the seducers?
Slave owners ran breeding programs to produce a more docile slave population. Sexual access to female slaves probably wasn't guarded 100%, but it assuredly wasn't available to randos on the basis of nobody caring.
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You know who was in even closer proximity to a lot of female slaves than white guys?
Male slaves -- if the slaveholders didn't care about their slaves being raped, I would think inter-slave rape would be a much bigger problem than 'other poor whites in the vicinity' wandering onto the plantation for some raping.
I think that neither probably happened very much, for reasons along the lines of those elucidated by thrownaway.
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They presumably wouldn't have been guarding the honor of their "random enslaved field hands" so much as their productivity. A slave was an investment. Part of that investment particularly for female slaves was breeding potential. An unexpected pregnancy with unknown paternity eats into that investment.
Slaves were property and damaging the property of the elite is generally not tolerated regardless of whether or not they actually cared about the women.
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Slave-owners were the highest class of European Americans. Borderers (in Appalachia) were not the normative background of slave-owners who were pedigreed Anglo-Saxons. African Americans derive their white admixture pre-enfranchisement to the most high-performing European Americans, not to the poor borderers.
So there’s an interesting effect on African Americans: they were (as noted above) the most backwards of the most backwards part of the world; they received upper class pedigree white DNA; after emancipation until probably 1990, the white DNA they received would be significantly worse than normal white, because of the taboo.
Yeah, this isn't close to true. It was kind of true in the 18th century but, when Westward expansion hit the Appalachians and the Revolution happened, New Wealth became extremely common in the Old South West. Andrew Jackson was not from the 'highest class of European Americans'. Plenty of slaveowners in Alabama or Mississippi or Arkansas or whatever has borderer background.
Not to mention that not all plantations were vast affairs with hundreds of slaves. Plenty of slaveowners had just a few slaves and these people would be almost entirely of lower class background back East.
Slave-owners were the highest class of European Americans, not “every slave-owner descended from the previous highest-class Europeans”. Borderers were not the normative background, not “there was no borderer slaveowner in the South.” Reading carefully is important, yeah. Andrew Jackson amassed slaves after he had already ascended to the upper class of European Americans (his first slave purchased was after he came an attorney with high-status friends, the same year he came protege to founding father William Blount). He ascended to the upper class like, I don’t know, JD Vance. (As today, the highest class is not all descended from the previous highest class, but pass through a rigorous selection filter which requires a high IQ, which gets to the very point of what we are discussing (the genetic quality of the slave-owning class)).
If 70% of southern whites did not own slaves, and if slave ownership was in direct proportion to wealth, then it hardly matters whether (of the remaining, wealthier 30%) many had just 1-2 slaves, as the wealthier families with many slaves means that most slaves worked for the wealthy. Here, do the math: those who held 40+ slaves collectively held 31% of all slaves; 7-39 slaves held 53%; and those who owned less than 7 collectively held just 16% of all slaves. I imagine those who held 1-2, aka the poor (but not as poor as the remaining 70% of white families lol) is much lower, like 2%. So the median slave experience was actually working under a wealthy white who could employ 7+ slaves, and perhaps the median number is as high as 30+!
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They may have been upper-class, but the Tidewater gentry still subscribed to a violent honor culture and disdained manual labor, so I don't think it should be surprising that some of their descendants would display these negative qualities, particularly absent the kind of social hierarchy that maintained their whole neo-feudal enterprise.
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It is unclear that most African Americans’ white ancestry is from the Anglo owner class, though. They may have been victims of sexual predation by lower class and lower status local whites, too, and perhaps even predominantly.
The slave owning class told jokes about light skinned slaves being their owners bastards and the larger groups of poor whites didn’t live near the plantations anyways.
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I find that unlikely as plantation slaves would not be intermixing with poor whites, and a poor white harming a rich white’s property would be a crime.
My understanding is that a substantial portion of plantation labor in colonial and early post-Revolution America was white indentured servants, some of whom were Borderers and a great many of whom were Irish. Certainly there were white overseers and staff working on plantations, and they would generally have had more direct contact with field slaves than the owners would.
Anyone with more in-depth knowledge of the period is welcome to correct me, but it’s certainly far from clear to me that slave-owners would have been the whites with the most intimate access to, and proclivity toward, sexual predation upon black slave women.
The slave owning class wrote jokes about themselves raping slaves, and broadly tended to keep borderers as far away as possible IIRC. The poor whites working on plantations might have some borderer descent, but the majority weren’t that different, ethnically, from their betters.
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Can you offer support for your assertion that white Appalachia mirrors Baltimore? It has never been my impression that the rates of violent crime or property crime are at all comparable between those places. To provide one example, poor, mountainous West Virginia had the lowest crime rate in the nation from 1971 to 1998.
https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1680
I'd say the mirroring only applies with regard to rates of drug abuse and alcoholism.
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