On the morning of April 12, 2015, three police officers on bike patrol near a housing project in West Baltimore made eye contact with a 25-year-old black man named Freddie Gray. When Freddie fled the police on sight, he was chased down, arrested for carrying a spring-assisted knife, and dragged into a police van.

The van made four stops before returning to the police station. At the first stop, Freddie was unloaded and shackled in leg irons and returned to the van without a seatbelt. He requested medical assistance, a request that the police ignored. When the van arrived at the police station, Freddie had lapsed into a coma, with three fractured vertebrae and his spine 80% severed at the neck. 

In the following days, the BPD released contradictory and inadequate accounts of Freddie’s arrest. On April 18th, hundreds of Baltimore citizens protested outside the Western District police station.

The next day, April 19th, Freddie died of his spinal injury, exactly one week after his arrest. Protests continued and escalated. Police began wearing riot gear, but the first week of protests was almost entirely peaceful.

On April 25th, thousands of protesters marched from the Western District to City Hall, demanding prosecution of the officers involved in Freddie’s death. When crowds dispersed after protest leaders finished speaking, a large group marched to Camden Yards, where a kind of trash battle broke out at Pickles Pub.

Some storefronts and car windows were smashed.

And hundreds of riot police arrived to disperse the protesters.

Two days later, on April 27th, Freddie Gray’s funeral was attended by hundreds of people, including several politicians and civil rights leaders. Meanwhile, police took preemptive action in response to plans spread by black high-school students on social media to enact a “Purge” situation beginning at Mondawmin Mall. Police shut down the Mondawmin Metro station and cordoned off the area, de-bussing all students from Fredrick Douglass High School across the street. The students were essentially quarantined by the police, with no way to get home. When the teenagers became unruly, a phalanx of riot police closed in on the area, firing plastic bullets into the crowd.

Police arrested hundreds of people, and constitutional rights were suspended as prisoners were detained for up to 50 hours without a charge.

Confrontations between protestors and police turned violent as the conflict spread through West Baltimore, where rioters began throwing rocks at the police. Then, some fucking idiot set fire to the Pennsylvania Ave CVS. An even bigger fucking idiot set fire to the construction site of a senior center on the other side of the city.

The mayor and governor declared a state of emergency, and a city-wide curfew was ordered for the next four nights.

Residents from all over the city assembled in the following days to assist with the cleanup effort. Sifting through the footage of the riots and their aftermath, you find images of political uprising and resilient humanity, as well as aimless looting and violence. Unfortunately, the impression given by the international media was essentially that the entire city went up in flames, which is simply not true. But to this day when I tell people I live in Baltimore they react like I said I’m from South Sudan.

At the time of the unrest I still lived in Chicago, where I watched all this unfold online. One thing that made an impression on me was a certain tendency of online commenters responding to videos of the rioting. And seeing as we’ve just elected our first comments-section President, I think it’s worth taking a look at this, not just to gawk, but to face head on the ugly fact that some of the worst damage done by ghetto riots is the terrible reaction they often provoke from white people with more opinions than thoughts.

Now, I’ll warn you, this is about to get about as racist as words on the screen can be, so brace yourself captain, a raging storm of hate approaches.

[hate comments]

Anyone still wanna argue that racism is over? You can pause the video now to leave a comment arguing that there’s no such thing as racism.

And look, I know this is not an appropriate costume for this video, but it seemed like a good idea when I was writing it, and I got the costume, and I’m wearing it, I mean I’m not gonna not wear it now that I have it. I’m wearing the costume.

Part ???: Why So Racist?

So how do we stop this? Well, one way might be to try to spread awareness of the circumstances that lead this to happen. And that’s worth doing anyway, since if we know what leads to this, we can start thinking about how to prevent it.

Overt racial hate was obviously a big part of white America’s response to the Baltimore riots, and to any number of other uprisings before and after, and it will likely be no different with similar events in the future. But perhaps even more common and damaging is simple ignorance and misinformation about the causes of these things, and also therefore about the right ways to prevent them. The solution proposed by our—dear God—President elect (and also by racists, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence) is that black communities need more law and order, which I take to be shorthand for more policing, more stop-and-frisk and more incarceration.

Now, from my angle it looks like overly aggressive policing is what triggered the Baltimore uprising in the first place. But even if we were to concede that broken-windows policing works—and it probably doesn’t—we’d still have to explain why neighborhoods like the one where Freddie Gray grew up need so much policing in the first place.

Now, if I say the explanation is systemic racism, you might say that I’m just making excuses for rioters. But I promise that’s not what I’m doing. In my opinion, every individual who decided to throw a brick at police or set a pharmacy on fire made the wrong decision, and I’m not trying to excuse them. I think they’re assholes who did a lot of damage to their community for no gain. And I know some people defend riots on the ground that they bring attention to an issue, and it’s true that CNN doesn’t generally cover the persistent effects of housing discrimination, but when a black teenager sets a car on fire, every national news network has a team on site within the hour. But is this really the right kind of a attention?

In any case the outright violent rioters were a small minority, but I think it’s worth explaining how such a chaotic situation arose in the first place.

Now, I could jump right in and quote you a bunch of statistics about how poor West Baltimore is, and how bad the schools are, and how many of its residents are incarcerated, and, more importantly, the political and historical reasons why. But the human mind doesn’t process statistical information very well. It don’t math good.

So instead I’m going to zero in on the life of one person, Freddie Gray, and how the racist legacy of Baltimore’s history basically led him from birth into that police van.

Part… C: The Evidence

Your Honor, exhibit number ??? is lead paint. Lead was used as a cheap additive in house paint until Congress banned it in 1978, because it causes serious cognitive damage in children. Freddie Gray grew up in an old, dilapidated row house in Sandtown-Winchester, with peeling lead =paint, which you can see in this picture of Freddie as a child. 

Lead has a sweet taste, and, despite its toxicity, it was used as a sweetener by the ancient Romans, which actually explains a lot. []

So when there are lots of lead paint chips lying around, kids like to eat them. When Freddie Gray’s blood was tested when he was 22-months-old, in 1991, his blood carried 37 micrograms of lead per decilitre.

“Jesus,” Professor Levy gasped, “The fact that Mr. Gray had these high levels of lead in all likelihood affected his ability to think and to self-regulate and profoundly affected his cognitive ability to process information.”

“And the real tragedy of lead is that the damage it does is irreparable.”

The effects of lead on childhood development include diminished cognitive function and attention, and increased aggression, which may explain why children poisoned with lead are seven times more likely to drop out of school and six times more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system.

This, along with the poverty and the lack of opportunity, may help explain why Freddie Gray was, as conservative commentators were so fond of pointing out after the riots, “no angel.” Because only angels deserve not to mysteriously die in police custody.

Freddie had a long rap sheet of drug and other minor offences. He was also awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in a 2008 lead paint settlement, structured to be paid out monthly. And you may be wondering, what happened to all that money? Why would someone who was getting monthly lead checks resort to selling drugs? Well, that is a fantastic question. Let’s take a look.

Over the past two decades, 93,000 children with lead poisoning have been added to Maryland’s lead registry, and in Baltimore the vast majority of these children are black. Many of these kids are later awarded structured settlements as compensation for permanent brain damage. The settlements are structured to prevent mentally disabled and impulsive people from spending the money all at once. However, a sub industry has emerged of shark lawyers, who swoop in on these people—some of whom can’t even read their contracts—and offer to buy their structured settlements in exchange for a lump sum that’s a fraction of the total worth of the settlement.

This is exactly what happened to Freddie Gray. In 2013, a company called Access Funding bought the $146,000 remainder of his settlement for $18,300. They also bought his sisters’ settlements, acquiring the $435,000 Gray siblings’ settlement for $54,000.

Now maybe you’re thinking, “well that’s shitty, but what does it have to do with racism?”

Well, take a look at this map, which shows Baltimore neighborhoods with children with elevated lead levels between 2010 and 2013, and compare it with this map of Baltimore’s racial composition, where yellow dots stand for black residents and blue dots stand for white. Lead, race. Lead, race.

You may also notice how sharp the divisions are between black and white neighborhoods. You may be asking, why is Baltimore’s racial segregation so pronounced? And why does lead poisoning correspond to race?

Well, you are asking all the questions I want you to ask. Socrates would be proud.

Part… 4: Not in My Neighborhood

In 1910, a Yale-educated black lawyer named W. Ashbie Hawkins bought a house in a prestigious white Baltimore neighborhood. The uproar this produced among white residents was so severe that the city passed an ordinance mandating the segregation of every residential block. The ordinance, which the New York Times called “the most pronounced Jim Crow measure on record,” forbade blacks to take up residence on majority white blocks and vice versa, as well as requiring builders and contractors to specify which race new houses were intended for.

When the supreme court overturned this type of ordinance in 1917, the Federal Housing Administration, the city and white homeowners adopted subtler methods of enforcing segregation. For instance:

1. Restrictive covenants

After the 1910 ordinance was overturned, Baltimore’s mayor created an official Committee on Segregation, which cooperated with neighborhood associations to pressure property owners in white neighborhoods to sign covenants committing them never to sell or rent to black residents. These covenants were enforced through strategic building and health code citations against owners and by evictions of black renters who violated the covenant.

2. Redlining

“Redlining” refers to the FHA’s policy of refusing to insure mortgages in black neighborhoods, which were colored in red on official maps, marking them as ineligible for government mortgage backing. The FHA was created in 1934 to promote homeownership—the American Dream—by establishing a reliable credit system backed by the government. Since black families were excluded from this, they were left vulnerable to—

3. Predatory lending

Baltimore laws allowed unscrupulous sellers to design unfairly priced installment plans with abusive terms allowing homes to be repossessed and resold after one missed payment. Many black residents who couldn’t get government-backed mortgages had no choice but to buy into these outrageous contracts, and often resorted to subdividing houses or neglecting repairs in order to make payments, further contributing to the overcrowding and decay of black neighborhoods. And if that wasn’t bad enough, there was also:

4. Blockbusting

“Blockbusting” describes the practice of horrible goddamn vulture real estate agents who’d promote fear of an impending minority takeover of a white neighborhood, in order to basically trick white homeowners into selling their houses at below-market prices. Then, the villainous bastards would sell those same houses at extortionate prices to black families desperate to escape the ghetto.

The total effects of restrictive covenants, redlining, predatory lending and blockbusting were catastrophic for black communities. Black families were largely denied the benefits of the 1930s to 60s suburban boom that enabled so many white families to enjoy a middle-class life. Instead, black families were often trapped in neighborhoods that succumbed to ghettoization, urban decay, bad schools, cyclical poverty and crime, and discriminatory policing that persists to this day.

To get a sense for of how all of this goes together, let’s compare the original 1937 redlining map of Baltimore, to the 2013 population by race map, to this map of Baltimore police stops between 2010 and 2015 (that’s black neighborhoods in red and green dots representing recorded police stops of black pedestrians), and finally let’s bring back the map of childhood lead poisoning between 2010 and 2013.

Hopefully the lead poisoning makes more sense now, since redlining and restrictive covenants historically forced blacks into ghettos, where predatory contracts made home ownership unaffordable, leading to residential decay, including the persistence of old lead paint, which poisons children, making them more likely to drop out of school and commit crimes, and therefore wind up in the back of police vans like the one where Freddie Gray’s spine was severed, leading to his death and the consequent uprising and unrest.

So when you say, “there’s no more legal discrimination against black people, so why don’t they just stop complaining about racism already” you’re being a fucking idiot. The effects of government-backed discrimination don’t go away just because the laws change. The discrimination is now built into the very structure of American cities, and that’s a problem it’s going to take a long time and a lot of work to undo. But it begins with rejecting racism and simplistic, surface-level non-solutions like broken windows policing.

The flip-side of this is that activism needs to a lot more nuanced than “Fuck the police.” Yeah, there are bad, violent, bigoted cops. And yeah, there are official policies that enable brutality, including those that contributed to the dismissal of all charges against the six cops involved in the Freddie Gray homicide case. All of this should be strenuously opposed, but we also have to acknowledge that the problems of racial injustice go way deeper than anything the police can be expected to fix.

Part Next: What Do?

When I think about Freddie Gray’s life, from the childhood lead poisoning, to the exploitative purchase of his settlement, to his quite possibly groundless arrest, to the fatal injury he sustained in police custody, what I see is a whole system of institutions that basically treat black lives as if they don’t matter.

If only there were some kind of activist organization dedicated to opposing that situation... hmm… I’m coming up blank.

Now I’m not an expert on this stuff, so feel free to correct or add to my suggestions in the comments, but it seems to me that what’s needed most are political solutions.

For instance: education reform in cities with bad schools; non-discriminatory access to non-predatory home loans; and, of course, police reform. Black Lives Matter affiliate Campaign Zero’s website lists ten policy suggestions to address the police issue that I think look pretty good.

Unfortunately, because of the results of the 2016 election, things are probably going to get worse before they get better. It’s clear that this country’s attitudes about race are still pretty fucking benighted. People who get their information from cable news, or, God help us, YouTube, are generally pretty ignorant about this stuff.

So one thing we can all do, is try to engage people a little bit. If you see someone saying some racist or ignorant shit, I mean, it’s not that you’re going to convince them, but you can try to make them a little less confident in their ignorance, and maybe over time, those sorts of conversations will add up.

And of course, you’ve got to be real gentle about it, because, well, white people can be pretty sensitive about this, and they will spring on you like a bear trap if they think you’re calling them racist, so, tread lightly, try not to act like too much of a self-righteous college student, and, uh, cultivate the patience of a monk or, drink a lot.

I mean it’s really the least you can do, especially if you’re white. And I know a lot of white people think, “well slavery and Jim Crow are over and I wasn’t even born yet so it’s not my fault. Why is everyone blaming me when it’s not my responsibility.”

Man, fuck that shit. As a white person, I personally feel a basic minimum duty to try to get informed about this kind of thing, at the very least. Because the world is bad. And it’s bad in ways that benefit me. So if you feel entitled to stay in your bubble and not think about anyone else’s problems… well… that just kinda sucks.