While Baltimore and the rest of the country demand answers about Freddie Gray’s death from massive injuries apparently inflicted by police officers, conservatives demand a different kind of reckoning. The Wall Street Journal wrote this week that liberal policies are at the root of West Baltimore’s problems. “The men and women in charge have been Democrats, and their governing ideas are ‘progressive.’ This model, with its reliance on government and public unions, has dominated urban America as once-vibrant cities such as Baltimore became shells of their former selves,” read a Tuesday editorial. Conservatives S.E. Cupp and Rush Limbaugh have repeated the accusation: Because Democrats run Baltimore, the city’s unrest must be the fault of liberal policies.

The solution WSJ envisions is inner cities “built on the ideas of private economic development, personal responsibility, ‘broken windows’ policing, and education choice.”

Conservatives base this logic—that the city somehow proves government investment and social programs are bad policy—on a selective history of Baltimore, noting for instance that its residents have elected only one non-Democratic mayor since the 1940s. But Baltimore’s problems stretch further back, to institutionalized racial discrimination in the early 20th century. Federal and local policymakers of the time redlined areas with "undesirable racial concentrations" to omit them from mortgage insurance programs.

And over the century, the same neighborhoods faced one destructive policy after another, from mass incarceration to the rise of predatory banks.

“If the goal of early segregationist policies was to concentrate black Baltimoreans in a single location, separated from opportunity, then it worked,” Jamelle Bouie writes at Slate. “More importantly, it’s never been unraveled; there’s never been a full effort to undo and compensate for the policies of the past. Indeed, the two decades of drugs and crime that marred Baltimore in the 1980s and 1990s helped entrench the harm and worsen the scars of the city’s history.”