What is the Baltimore School?

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The Baltimore School represents a school of thought with many variations, expressed in different forms--- from scholarly publications to curatorial and art projects, to institution-building or -reshaping. At its center is a desire to radically redistribute capital, social capital, agenda setting and decision making resources in Baltimore and similar spaces by ideationally recentering the role of political economy in producing economic, social, and civic inequalities. It also represents a subtly different approach to organizing and activism in as much as it emphasizes and prioritizes anonymity, privacy, or other means that disrupt market-centered dynamics. It highlights the importance of ideas within any form of advocacy, organizing, or activism. And, importantly, the way that ideas transmit and are used is, itself, an important part of the Baltimore School of thought.

Rather than the school being driven by a single, specific group of people (thus with an in-group and out-group) the Baltimore School would be driven by a mode of thinking and acting. It can be seen not just in a group but an ecosystem of individuals, and networks of individuals. And because it’s an ethic, not an ideology, it allows ideas to travel across more and different types of groups.

 

What is the central work a school can perform?

Although in normal circumstances ideas may play a secondary role to either interests (what we want determines what we think), or institutions (institutions create routines and norms that then determine how we think), in moments of crisis ideas come to the fore, as often actors in crises do not necessarily know what they want and the institutions they would normally turn to to give them ideas are themselves revealed to be bankrupt. 

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A school of thought can help generate new ideas which can then in turn help determine new interests, can help destabilize institutions (or institutional cultures) and create blueprints for new ones, and can foment new identities. Its existence can point to the ways that other, dominant ideas are invisibly magnetizing spaces. And a school of thought can perform these tasks with far more depth and breadth than individuals can. 

 

What should be the intellectual approach?

The Baltimore School approach should be simple---it should root discussions about inequality (whether focused on race, sexuality, gender identity, socioeconomic or immigration status) in political economy, with careful attention to those discussions’ own social economies. Such an approach would not only more accurately describe the circumstances the city and region finds itself in, such an approach would generate better political, economic, and social solutions to them.

Police functions for example are not simply “anti-black,” as there are a number of black middle and upper income denizens who either have not had negative encounters with police in Baltimore or who’ve only had minor negative encounters compared to working class black citizens. This example bears further commentary—when we focus on race (or gender, or sexuality, or gender identity, or immigration status) we have to engage in two simultaneous comparisons. We have to compare across racial categories, but then we have to compare within racial categories. By doing so we can begin to reveal the role class plays in most of these dynamics. And then when making cross category comparisons, when comparing the experiences of black men to that of black women for instance, we have to be attentive to the different ways the state interacts with them. The victims of police homicide—the direct victims—tend to be black men. While cases like those of Korryn Gaines and Sandra Bland are unfortunately not unique their numbers pale in comparison to the numbers represented by those of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tyrone West, etc. 

 

However if we focus solely on this form of spectacular violence, we then miss the array of unique ways police subjugate black women. For instance, cities like Baltimore and Detroit contain tens of thousands of untested rape kits. The Baltimore Justice Department report suggests police routinely try to talk women out of prosecuting rape cases and then do nothing on the rape cases they have. This form of violence is less spectacular and as a result has engendered volunteerism rather than protest, but it is violence nonetheless. Taking this approach as opposed to an approach that focuses solely on racism will generate better research, as it comes closer to getting the story right, and will generate more appropriate political solutions.

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Along these lines taking such an approach will steer the solution set (that is, the universe of potential solutions) away from ones that focus either broadly or even minutely on entrepreneurial action. One of the signal defining elements of this particular moment is the rise of the entrepreneur. Cities bend over backwards to give tax resources to corporations like UnderArmour, they create neighborhood development policies that prioritize small business development on the one hand and young entrepreneurial minded college graduates (“the creative class”) on the other. In the nonprofit sector we see this with the increased focus on “social entrepreneurship”. 

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One of the signal aspects of our contemporary condition is the general tendency to use the principles of the market, indeed its imaginary, its language and metaphors, to shape and determine the behavior of an array of institutions, populations, persons. In many ways, the “entrepreneur” replaces the “citizen” as the driving political actor in society. According to this logic, “public” begins to mean potential consumers, followers, or funders, which one must court, or within which one must belong. And not a constituency of people to which any idea or project is accountable. This approach cannot reduce the deep inequalities that beset a city like Baltimore. 

 

What process would constitute the Baltimore School?

One route would be to take a single institution, and then use it as a housing, so to speak. But this model is problematic if for no other reason than the fact that individual institutions have idiosyncratic relationships with the city and other institutions that would skew the approach. Johns Hopkins for example is the state’s premier elite university and has the largest footprint economically, socially, and politically, in the city. Situating such a project solely within Hopkins would skew the Baltimore School’s priorities towards the entrepreneurial priorities of scholars who tend to be trained and employed at such universities. And in this it can reproduce and deepen the public-private intellectual hierarchy referred to above. The Baltimore School aims to disrupt and replace the idea of the scholar entrepreneur specifically and the social entrepreneur in general (in both its charismatic and non-charismatic forms), which tends to exacerbate rather than reduce economic, civic, and social inequality. 

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This disruption has several levels to its work, small pivots that aim at deep changes.

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The academy has its own economy, as does the nonprofit sector, and such a project would need to not further reproduce the type of capital that already places Johns Hopkins (or any university “community partners”) in a unique and advantageous position. Even a multi-university project while perhaps reducing the footprint that an institution like Hopkins would have, and being more democratic by one measure, would itself still reproduce a distinction between knowledge generated by individuals connected to and employed by universities, and individuals not so connected. 

This last point is not a minor one. Higher education institutions increasingly seek market-based support for research and infrastructure, and the shape of their work from curriculum to mission to labor practices is increasingly driven by this ideation and values. Simultaneously, they seek to be more embedded in community development, whether by investment in surrounding organizations and properties or by seeking policy influence more broadly (to increase “brand value”). Demographic shifts as well as the rising costs of degrees have meanwhile forced more competition between institutions for what they perceive as a shrinking potential market. Changes in public perception, including a resurgence in conservative critiques of “identity politics” on college campuses, as well as market-based thinking about “professionalism,” in which students and faculty are encouraged to work on their “brand,” all curtail the work of ideas. While there are a number of potentially transformative possibilities in this scenario, including cross-community partnerships that would potentially share resources, for all these above reasons they are likely to only double down on existing power dynamics. Ideas matter. Scholarship matters. The future of those two things is to some degree at stake, if their support or protection can only come via being “useful” to the market, or to changing vicissitudes of public opinion. 

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In the specific case of Baltimore an approach that centered an institution of higher education would then also decenter the significant contributions made, and protections offered, by institutions like 2640, Artpartheid, Baltimore Algebra Project, Black Workers Center, BMORE Caucus, BRACE, FORCE, Invisible Majority, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, the Living Well, Not Without Black Women, Real News, Red Emma’s, and Restorative Response Baltimore (among many others), as well as by individuals like Avis Ransom, Betty Robinson, Dorcas Gilmore, Eddie Conway, Eric Jackson, Marc Steiner, Marisela Gomez, and Parag Khandhar (among many others). Or, the other side of the same coin, would “recognize” their work publically (or “partner” with them) in certain ways that just reiterate the political economy which centers not only certain institutions but certain ideas. 

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We envision a school of thought that is not just ideas but a set of shared questions and ways to answer those questions as commitments.

 

Such a school would best be envisioned as a cooperative ecosystem, involving scholars, artists, teachers, lawyers, skilled tradespeople, organizers, inside and outside the major institutions in the region. We’ve reached a point in Baltimore’s development where a significant portion of Baltimore denizens are broadly committed to extending the rights of the city to include the people who live in it as opposed to the people who own it. 

 

How would it operate?

We focus on two aspects of this question. The first aspect concerns ethics. How would such a school operate ethically? Above we refer to one of the challenges involved—the challenge of entrepreneurialism. The focus on entrepreneurialism generates what could be called a public-private intellectual class that has its own hierarchy. And hierarchies, while sometimes necessary, structure social spaces in such a way as to press us into their service. 

 

One of the ways this appears within the university is through a set of practices and norms designed to get individual scholars to consistently market themselves and their work. One of the ways this appears within the philanthropic sector is through a set of practices and norms designed to get individual grantees and program officers to consistently brand and market their solutions—indeed the social entrepreneur is defined as the individual tasked with using market means to solve pressing social problems. Another way this appears more broadly is through a set of practices and norms that create a “gatekeeper/broker” dynamic whereas a few people are given the ability to intercede between status-quo maintaining institutions on the one hand and relatively powerless baltimore denizens on the other. These brokers often work in ways that enable them to accumulate personal resources while keeping the larger structure intact, in other words, extractively. Importantly, and because of this unacknowledged power dynamic, two notions that would seem to support transformative change---transparency and accountability---often become more levers for this gatekeeper economy to use. 

 

Ethically we take a radically different stance. We believe that the Baltimore School should operate translucently—a word choice borrowed from colleague Jessica Shiller ---- that is to say in order to be non-extractive we believe in simultaneously making our work available (fully “transparent” informationally) while at the same time making the individual actors within the school opaque (selectively “transparent” relationally), providing only enough information (“light”) as necessary. We claim that, if capital is not only material but a social relation, then inventiveness around right social relations is a fundamental tool for transformative and distributive worldmaking. Solidarity is not a feeling; it is an act of putting something at stake.

 

This refusal is not an endpoint, a permanent fugitivity, but an aim to not reproduce the aspect of the knowledge economy that has an individual claim certain types of output for the purpose of personal/institutional promotion. 

 

In practice, this translucency is guided also by the understanding that there is a spectrum possible: from work that is anonymous, work that is private, and work that is public, or public but selectively so. For us, “there is no outside” is less a statement about neoliberalism’s wish to totalize than it is about a reality in which we are all interdependent. The way we participate in social economies should reflect and express that.  

 

We also believe that the Baltimore School should operate democratically. While we do recognize the powerful role hierarchy can (and in some rare instances should) play, in institutions and in society as a whole, we believe that institutions and societies tend to operate better if governed by democratic and inclusive principles, and that individuals tend to develop personally to the degree they exert the capacity to govern. 

 

This means that while the central ideational mission of the Baltimore school is and should be to place political economy at the center of work designed to problem solve the city, the content of that mission should be determined as democratically as is feasible. 

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What content would such a school create?

Architectural designs, articles, books, blogs, buildings, conferences, cooperatives, databases, films, film series, games, homes, installations, journals, klatches, lectures, manifestos, maps, meditative spaces, paintings, performances, photovoice projects, podcasts, sculptures, syllabi, trainings, workshops….etc.

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Where do the resources come from?

At the outset an undertaking like this does not require resources, other than the commitment of individuals involved to the translucent principles we outline above, to principles of democracy, and then to the general ideational components of the school itself. Along these lines, all an individual would need to do is garner the resources he/she/they would need to create the work, and the commitment to promoting it anonymously. But if something like this is to take, then at some point it has to be institutionalized, whether in a single institution, or via linkages between people in the school who cross institutional boundaries. At the very least individuals involved have to have the resources in order to sustain it to the point that it can exist on its own. And here we suggest the resources come from the individuals involved, from the institutions individuals are attached to (but in such a way as to honor the principle of translucency), and then from institutions committed to the project (again in such a way as to honor the principle of translucency).

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Ailish Hopper and Lester Spence

October 2018 - March 2019