Looking forward to listening to the Z Man tomorrow on my drive to work and see what he in his ghetto posting part of his podcast.

When Z Man was on the Grace & Steel Podcast (Episode 78 around the 19 minute mark) he talks about Baltimore. States one block can be rich and gangbangers with pit bulls two blocks over and that the gangbangers "seem to know where the invisible lines are" such as you mentioned. [1]

What surprised me was a statement that a middle age white guy could go into the hardest of hard neighborhoods and be left alone as he was viewed as a civilian and not worth the trouble. [2] In fact, it was more dangerous to be in "safer" areas where there were young thugs from good circumstances trying to make a name for themselves. [3] You also mentioned the middle class racist assholes hassling whitey to make a name. It's just I was surprised when he mentioned there was relative safety in the ghetto which doesn't give with the predation and purge reporting. Interested in your take of what Z Man said when you have the time to post it.

-SC

SC, I will address this in amplification notes, as everything the Zman said was correct if taken in its right context. He had five minutes to sketch something that took me an hour in my own interview with Kevin Michael Grace.

1. This was largely true if you were an upper-class white civilian like the Zman, living in a gentrification enclave such as, Camden Yards, South Baltimore, Bolton Hill, Mount Vernon, Mount Washington, Fells Point, Hampden, and Canton which I am not. Gentrification was mildly underway in Hamilton when the riots and urge reversed it. The invisible lines no longer hold. Five-star eateries in three of these locations have recently closed due to crime. I am interviewing people who are from solid gentrification zones and have fled to Pennsylvania and Harford County, Maryland. The deeper safe zones, such as South Baltimore and the North #83 corridor have seen an uptick in muggings of about 4 to 1 since the riots and even some deaths in the north. An off duty cop was robbed in South Baltimore last year. Fells Point is currently being overrun with numerous stories appearing here on this site over the past months.

That said, most areas of Caucasian habitation in Baltimore have not been targeted for gentrification, which includes better police response time and, most importantly, no subsidized housing integration. In most paleface neighborhoods, such as Cedonia, Gardenville, Rosedale, Overlea, Parkville, Hamilton, Eastwood, Berkshire, Baltimore Highlands, Curtis Bay [All city neighborhoods, mostly on the east side], which I am familiar with, working class whites have been put in the criminal gun sights by the local, state and federal agencies moving subsidized criminals in, either because they have been displaced by gentrification efforts elsewhere or are being used to clear working class people from paid off housing, so the gentrification process can follow on the ghettoization process. This form of people farming is analogous to slash and burn agriculture. So, if you can afford gentry enclave housing prices, like the Zman, you have nominal government protection and things will not be let get out of hand on your block, until 20 years on when your house is paid off and they move the hoodrats in to make sure you sell, renewing the sacred financial "cycle of life" in the City.

2. This has long been true, but only in stable neighborhoods, meaning an area where older men have the respect of the youth and police have their fear, areas which no longer exist in Baltimore. My father used to sell encyclopedias to ghetto mammas for their boys in the early 1970s, entering high rise housing projects by himself. There is a scene early in The Wire of a squad of cops being pinned down beneath a housing project. This happened more than once. These places were gang fortresses that could only be penetrated by SWAT teams—and Ted LaFond, who had negotiated safe conduct access through older black men he had befriended through his work with Alcoholic Anonymous.

Today, though, I dare the Zman to try it. He said he no longer takes visitors on the ghetto tour. He didn't say why, but he stopped after the riots, because his protection was based on supposed police action, which is no longer feared since their defeat in the riots. There are now many neighborhoods where the police can't go without a tactical squad! There is still some protection to be had—especially if you wear a suit and walk with confidence and they think you are a Federal agent—but it is not the guarantee it once was. However, one group is making out better due to the fall off in police dread: white trash guys like me and Columbine Joe, who now lives in the middle of the West Baltimore Ghettto in the Greenmount Avenue Corridor. Joe no longer has to fear the cops are going to bust him for being a white guy in a black area, so he has been able to rent a lower rate apartment down in the city and gets hassled a lot less by the cops for being a poor white guy on a bike.

3. These middle class racist assholes are the ones hunting me, who raped and tortured and immolated my neighbor; they are the martyrs the White Guilt Media worships. The funny thing is, these guys are part of three groups out hunting for victims—most of whom are black, as whitey is hiding in his rabbit hole. You have hard core ghetto bangers using stolen cars to conduct raids in the outlying county, while middle class punks and transplanted ghetto youth patrol via bike and foot. So, in Essex, you will have ghetto thugs driving East from Monument in Deep East Baltimore, local hoodrats in subsidized housing who have been moved to Essex to make way for housing for Doctors and staff at Johns Hopkins, and middle class wannabes from Timonium, Perry Hall, White Marsh, Parkville and Towson descending from the North and West, scouring the streets for pedestrian targets, and finding mostly young black men working at menial jobs in retail and the food industry, trying to get home to play their video game.

I work in Essex and am the target of all three of these groups when I get off the bus at night. This is so bad that young black men working the afternoon shift at Towson Town Mall have been reduced from 20-30 to 1-5 on that same bus line, electing to take Cabs and sedans instead. The whites all quit their jobs or got cars or take cabs and sedans. The only people out there to get got anymore are young black dudes who have moved out of the city to get safe, only to discover that they scrambled up out of the fire just to end up in the frying pan!

Overall, this is a situation too nuanced and complex to be understood by 95% of Americans or 100% of public officials and media and will remain a mystery to all until this shit civilization finally implodes.

The situation goes far beyond economics and law enforcement, so the Left has no ability to perceive the reality of black criminal aggression, let alone understand it.

The situation goes far beyond race, and since law enforcement now receives intelligence on less than 25% of violent crime, reports less than half of that and jukes the numbers on everything but homicide, the Right is only able to perceive the violence and aggression in a vague, cartoonish fashion. Thinkers on the Right side of the spectrum are unable to comprehend cause, means and countermeasures and only attain the broadest sense of effect.

The fact is, most people I know busy themselves not thinking about the reality of aggression in Baltimore City and Baltimore County, because facing the truth would threaten their sanity and they are already working long hours simply trying to pay their bills, lucky to have a job and a roof over their heads, in no position to change jobs and/or sell the house they do not yet own.

SC, I hold zero hope that anymore than a handful of folks will ever understand urban aggression and have no desire to broaden that pool of delusion-free minds. I am content to watch my decadent race lapse into an opiate-enhanced oblivion, under the hypnotic media petals of whispering guilt as they recline on the watery bed of the lotus eating multitudes whom wilted on the eves of empires past. I am simply writing as a form of causal time capsule for some curious soul in some, better, necessarily distant, future.