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Paying attention to mainstream media’s take on police killings and the protests that followed over the past year has been a sobering affair. It has reinforced to me that the effort spent manufacturing our perfectly contrived American worldview has paid off for those who’ve been carving it. Here we were being sold anew on the idea that the recent public outcries, triggered by severe police brutality, are in fact a byproduct of the tainted moral core of black people ("Whyyy are they destroying their own neighborhoods, I just can’t understand it"). During the Baltimore riots, the black representatives of the city were marched out before us to recite respectability talking points. Any attempts to give the incidents surrounding the murder of Freddie Gray a context within America’s long history of race division were dismissed in lieu of victim blaming. America’s ego insisted that we are now, magically, "better than that". We’ve climbed that hill already; we solved this old-world ill when Obama was sworn in as chancellor of white people’s America. Cool? Cool.

The fight against racism has many fronts. What that means for me, personally, is hard to say—I am embroiled in my own network of poverty traps that I barely understand. But with public opinion on matters of race being so heavily curated by the media, it can be empowering to resist the dominant political theatre and seek an informed overview. It is the first step in converting ideology into practice. From that vantage point, a thought experiment emerges: What if black people could acknowledge this sustained crisis with a new kind of unified action against white supremacy? Seeing as that we have been locked into this permanent labor class, imagine if we responded like a labor force, and answered it with a strike. Imagine a strike within the fields where we are most visible, where we generate a shit load of money and where we assert the most influence—music, dance, film, design—colored people could refuse to be complicit in a multilayered, denial/exploitation machine that serves pockets of wealth both founded and sustained by the ownership and oppression of blacks. With that cultural H-bomb of a hypothetical in mind, let’s take a brief jaunt down History Lane to explore my reasoning.

-=-=-=-The truth is that race hierarchies designed centuries ago still define all of our sharply segregated U.S. cities. Baltimore’s history with upending black lives along with the citizenry’s record for responding with unrest shouldn’t surprise anyone—and the story is hardly limited to Baltimore. The city’s character has been defined by neglect. Rather than using 2015 as a better-late-than-never moment to start unpacking the causes for the state-sponsored abuse at play in black ghetto realities, our media and our leaders instead offer empty promises and oversimplifications at best, judgement, condescension and dismissal at worst. But residents know this uprising is consistent with Baltimore’s history.

The city’s economic peril is firmly rooted in its history of segregated housing policy during all of the 1900s. Policies that allowed the working class to build equity through the The New Deal established the just labor laws through The Fair Labor Standard act, and gave shape to an American democracy in the 1930s that only pertained to white citizens and their wealth building, leaving blacks explicitly out of the flow of resources and uniquely vulnerable. With no chances of building equity in the '30s, low-income month-to-month housing in the form of "contract sales" became commonplace for black families and central in cementing the ghettos that still remain. The Housing Authority of Baltimore City specifically designed substandard separate housing programs to stop black encroachment, reinforcing The New Deal's exclusionary zoning provisions. 'Slum clearance' and Urban Renewal laws would go further to designate a tight network of black slums in the form of high-rise projects around the downtown area through the '50s. The ghettos that arose from the multilayered segregation shaped harsh economic realities for blacks in Baltimore coming into the '60s.