"Urban Visions" Panel Discussion

The panelists who took part in the “Urban Visions” panel discussion last Wednesday explained their experiences with the city of Baltimore. Two of the panelists described their time spent with two homeless teenagers while working on a series called “On Their Own.” These two panelists, Andre Chung and Liz Bowie, told the audience how all of their stereotypes about the poor and homeless had been shattered by this first-hand experience. Another panelist, Ellis Maralis, who published Tha Bloc, discussed myths associated with “the ghetto” after having lived in a city his entire life. These stereotypes and myths that the panelists described brought up the importance of looking beyond the assumptions associated with the city and truly seeing it for what it really is.

Liz Bowie and Andre Chung spent nine months following Iven and Gary, two homeless teenagers in East Baltimore. After spending this time with them, Liz Bowie said that she looks at children on the street completely differently. Even though these teenagers had rough childhoods and one lives from house to house while the other stays in a deserted, un-heated townhouse, Iven and Gary amazed Liz and Andre with their spirits. While following the boys, Liz Bowie could not believe that she felt comfortable in a place where there were three shootings over a ten month period. In the boys’ neighborhood, there was still an amazing sense of community, and no one walked down the street that the boys did not know.

Ellis Maralis wanted to portray his Baltimore neighborhood in Tha Bloc because he wanted to address the “mythology” surrounding city neighborhoods. He felt that we are saturated with the “myth of the ghetto,” and most of it is complete “nonsense.” The neighborhood in which he lives is not as bad as it seems on the news; we are convinced this so-called “ghetto” is worse than it actually is. Maralis’s perception of where he lives is very positive because he sees the advantages of living close to people. The city reminds him of when he first had kids and of how much human contact they needed. His neighborhood provides this human contact for him. Maralis also mentioned how surprised he is about how much people who have next to nothing are so quick to lend each other money if one of them is in need. These selfless gestures he observed further reminded him that the stereotypes about the ghetto were, for the most part, unfounded and completely untrue.

These false assumptions and stereotypes that the panelists described reminded me about the theme of assumptions that was brought up in many of the works that we read for class. “The Gilded Six-Bits” by Zora Neale Hurston starts by saying, “It was a Negro yard around a Negro house…” yet it continues by saying, “But there was something happy about the place.” Hurston includes this line about it being a happy place to destroy the readers’ stereotypes, just as Liz and Andre’s preconceived stereotypes were destroyed.

“My Papa’s Waltz” also deals with shattered assumptions because it describes an alcoholic father, yet the reader should not assume that the father does not love his son. The father loves his son in the only way he knows how, and readers should not form assumptions based only on the first line, which starts, “The whiskey on your breath.”

The reader has to look deeper into the work of literature to discover the true message, just as we should look beyond what we see on the news to discover the true city of Baltimore. The panelists spent extensive periods of time in the city to realize how wrong the stereotypes and the myths were, yet if we open our minds and stop making unfounded assumptions, we too can experience a similar revelation.