What’s Baltimore’s Real Problem?

“The truth shall set you free,” but lies keep you in chains. President Trump and many Republicans see Baltimore’s problems but can’t explain them. They claim “Democrats are the real racists” and think that the problem is that Democrats control the city. Do they really believe that a Republican mayor could change anything?

The President claims that “Baltimore can be brought back” to “new heights of success and glory” with different leaders, but the problem isn’t just the city’s leaders; it’s the city’s population. This is something no Republican, not even the “racist” President Trump, dares admit.

Mary Bubala, a white Baltimore journalist, was fired after she timidly suggested that after three failed black women mayors in row, it was maybe time to try someone else. Somehow, she became the problem, rather than Baltimore. Blacks are never the problem.

• Baltimore institutions such as Johns Hopkins are trying to solve the problem of “food deserts,” or the lack of grocery stores in black neighborhoods. They don’t seem to realize that grocery chains avoid places where crime and theft are so bad they can’t make a profit.
• Reporters write stories about “white flight” and “segregation” but don’t ask why whites are leaving.
• The heavily black Baltimore City School System produces students that fail at math and reading. It can’t even heat the schools — despite some of the highest per pupil spending in the nation.

It’s not just mismanagement. There has been massive racial change. One hundred years ago, Baltimore was 85 percent white. Whites have been a minority since 1980.

The real collapse was after the Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that restrictive covenants were unconstitutional. Whites could no longer maintain the racial integrity of their neighborhoods, so they left. The city now has more than 17,000 vacant homes — mostly rowhouses — collapsing. The city is spending tens of millions of dollars a year tearing them down. It will sell you one for a dollar.

Baltimore is the Great Replacement in action.

In 2014, a white woman, Tracey Halvorsen, wrote a viral story called, “Baltimore City You’re Breaking My Heart.” “I’m tired of being looked at like prey,” she wrote. “I’m tired of being surrounded by drug addicts. I’m tired of looking at 11 year olds as potential thieves, muggers and murderers on my walk home from the office.” Like President Trump in his tweets, she never mentioned race, but one reporter accused her of ignoring “inequality” and not talking about “white privilege.” Another scorned her for worrying more about the “death of a white woman [a neighbor]” than the “bleak lives of 2 young black men.”

Miss Halvorsen called for more police, but that would have meant gentrification. Blacks would call that “colonization,” as they have in Washington, D.C. If the white population grew to the point it could challenge black political power, blacks would call for racial unity to keep control, as they did in Atlanta. They would complain about increased property taxes even if the value of their property increased. Baltimore won’t gentrify soon.

In the early 2000s, a white man, Martin O’Malley, became Baltimore’s mayor. He started “stop and frisk” to fight crime. Today, most Democrat leaders call that racist. After the Freddie Gray riots in 2015, the Baltimore Police Department could not keep Baltimore Orioles fans safe. So, for the first time in Major League Baseball history, there was a game in an empty stadium. The national anthem (written by a local boy, Francis Scott Key) playing in the almost deserted Camden Yards was a metaphor for national decline.

That decline will continue unless we break America’s racial taboos. We need to talk about why Baltimore is collapsing, who is responsible, and what can be done. The city’s problems can’t be fixed by replacing a mayor, a congressman, or even a whole political party. The problem is blacks, and we will never solve a problem we refuse to understand. We need understanding before we end up with a continent filled with Baltimores.