The Day I Gave Up on My Hometown
I love Baltimore, but it breaks my heart.
I was born and raised in Baltimore. My family there goes back to the mid-1800s. I was always proud of the quirky, gritty, no-nonsense “big small town,” dubbed now as Bulletmore, Murdaland. No longer is it “The City that Reads,” as a former mayor’s aspirational slogan had it. It’s now the City that Bleeds.
No-nonsense once, however, it now seems full of nonsense on one of its most fundamental dimensions. Gender relations are a mess. The problems that inevitably result are melting the city at its social core.
I’m not saying gender relations are the only problem. God knows the town has been ravaged by racism (particularly its shameful history of “redlining” to keep Baltimore’s once-thriving and growing Black middle and upper classes confined to less desirable areas, making it difficult for the Black community as an interconnected whole to build wealth), by the loss of the blue-collar jobs that had given it such a solid economic base, by the crack epidemic of the 1980s.
But of all the scourges that wreaked havoc in Baltimore, the most devastating, IMHO, was the institutional, federally funded War on Poverty, which in practical effect was a War on Men, particularly as fathers.
Presented with the choice between keeping an unemployed man or receiving government cash and government-funded family support services, many women quite understandably opted for the latter.
Meanwhile, exhibiting its belief in the worst stereotypes of urban fathers, the government tried for forty years to squeeze money from men who had none. And, voilá, we were off to the mass incarceration races.
We locked up men we took to be Deadbeat Dads. Other men, seeking to avoid being discarded as totally without value, undertook various enterprises to make money, suddenly the sole currency of male value, “by any means necessary.”
I thought I could help. I produced and hosted a radio show on male gender issues on a station just outside Baltimore from 1983 to 1989. One of my guests was a man from the Baltimore Urban League who was organizing a conference at a Baltimore HBCU on “Black Men: An Endangered Species,” a novel idea at the time.
On the air, we quickly came to see that one of the greatest risk factors, indeed the very most unrecognized risk factor, for endangered Black men was not only racism, as was typically supposed, but the devastating, negatively synergistic one-two, double-whammy punch of being both Black and male.
My Urban League friend and I went to the Maryland General Assembly in 1985 and 1986 and worked with then-State Delegate, later Congressman Elijah Cummings, to seek the establishment of a state panel to address problems facing men and boys on the basis of their gender.
Publicly, several legislators derided the idea as “The Wimp Bill”; privately, they told us they understood and agreed with what we were trying to do but could not lend their support because “it would make the women mad.”
My radio show was doing fairly well, and I tried to move it from the public station, where it was costing me money, to a commercial station where I could make some money. I met with the station owner, and he liked the idea a lot. But the proposal died when the sales manager opined that his people would never be able to find sponsors for it because advertisers would be “afraid of making women mad.”
I left my job and returned to school full-time for a master's degree in Social Work. In class, I learned that my empathy and advocacy for marginalized men made lots of female classmates mad. I also saw how social services were largely based on anti-male prejudices and over-zealous mother-centered groupthink.
As a parole and probation agent in central Baltimore, I learned that false allegations of domestic violence were a significant problem that put my clients at risk of being returned immediately and summarily to jail “in the interests of public safety.” A police captain told me that sexual assault and domestic violence activists would become angry when she refused to pursue cases that were clearly bogus.
I submitted an entry titled “Asking the Right Questions about Baltimore’s Marginalized African-American Men and Boys” for an Award in Urban Policy sponsored by a major Baltimore foundation. One of the judges told me I didn’t win because the judging panel was afraid women might be angry if they thought the paper was blaming them.
In February of this year, I contracted for a month-long ad campaign on The Baltimore Banner news site to seek subscribers for a blog that eventually morphed into this effort, A Seat at the Table for Men and Boys, on Medium.
Here are the ads I ran:
On the first day of the campaign, this is what I showed on my malefriendlymedia.com website page that was linked to my Banner ads:
On the second day, for a bit of an A/B test, I displayed this on my page linked from the Banner ads:
On the third day, I left the link as it was the day before, but I didn’t see my ads anywhere on the Banner. I called my ad rep. She said she was going to call me, but the ads had been pulled, and my contract was canceled because “some women” had complained on social media that my ads were “against women.”
That was the day I gave up.
There can be no discussion of gender issues and the social problems that result when we have the image on the left below as the only permissible operational view of men and the image on the right as the only speakable concept of women.
I have despaired that anyone in a position of influence in Baltimore can alter the male-female power status quo, propose gender fairness and balance for men and boys, and thus risk angering women.
I am glad that I found Medium. I think of it now as my hometown, where my thoughts and I are welcome.
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I am serializing my 1994 book Good Will Toward Men for paid members on Medium. It’s a collection of interviews with twenty-two women about making gender equality a two-way street. Check out the chapter list.
