Oh, yeah. He was racist, all right.

As a proud Baltimorean, I take great offense at Donald Trump’s Baltimore-bashing tweet storm.  The 45^th president declared open season on Charm City, called it filthy, rat-infested, and unfit for human habitation, and laid responsibility for these conditions on Representative Elijah Cummings’s door.  I believe that Council President Brandon Scott correctly diagnosed the obvious:  such a vicious tweet aimed at an African-American representative of a majority-minority city, especially when seen in light of similar attacks aimed at four female representatives of color, can be called nothing but racist.

Like many other Baltimore residents, I immediately posted photos of the city of I love, re-posted the statements from Mayor Young and Council President Scott, applauded the Sun editorial board, and agreed wholeheartedly with John Waters that Trump would never have the guts to come to B’more and say these things to our collective face.  I’m guessing that Trump doesn’t want to find out why our other nickname is “Mobtown.”

But while I’m an enthusiastic city dweller, I’m not saying that Baltimore is perfect.  Far from it.  Our city, like many other cities, is plagued by deep-rooted problems:  along with our lovely tree-lined neighborhoods and fun-filled tourist centers, there are areas where life is much shorter, more violent, and more filled with despair than, say, Guilford or Federal Hill.  That observation is not racist.  What is racist is blaming these conditions on the people of color (or their Congressional representative, for that matter) who have to live in them, instead of taking a long, hard look at the racist policies that created those circumstances in the first place.

Now, let me stop you before you tell me that you don’t have a racist bone in your body.  Fine!  Great!  But your absent racist bone is irrelevant.  Your personal lack of a racist bone will not change the fact that a person born in Roland Park is likely to live twenty years longer than someone from Clifton-Berea.  Racism is more than the accumulation of individual acts of bigotry (although they sure go a long way towards supporting racism).  Instead, racism is an ideology that is based on the notion that one ethnic group is superior to another, along with the policies, laws, and practices that flow from that ideology.  As long as a society’s norms and practices are underpinned by racist ideology, then that society is racist.

Here’s a helpful analogy to explain what I mean.  Let’s say you’re a capitalist—the kind of gung-ho free-market fan of the invisible hand who would make Milton Friedman blush. You don’t have a communist bone in your body.  But if you happened to live in a communist society, your actions, thoughts, and opportunities would be inexorably linked to and limited by the policies, laws, and practices flowing from your society’s belief in a communist ideology.

So too with racism. American society has favored white people over black since the first African slave arrived in Virginia in 1619—and as a white, middle class woman living in a leafy neighborhood previously designated as white only, I can say that.  Racist ideologies gave rise to a plethora of discriminatory housing practices:  the City’s mandatory residential segregation legislation, blockbusting, the County’s segregationist housing policies, redlining, and the discriminatory policies embedded in the G.I. Bill, to name but a few.  These in turn weakened African American neighborhoods, thwarted the generation of wealth in African American families, diminished housing stock, and forced black families to pay high rent or high interest mortgages for substandard housing.  Similarly, race-based school segregation not only resulted in substandard schools and inequitable distribution of resources, but is also linked to a growing achievement gap between black and white students.  This loss of human potential is tragic on both a personal and community level, and has a doubtless impact on the health, happiness, and well-being of those neighborhoods.

It is obvious that Trump’s vicious, racist attacks on Cummings and Baltimore are only the worst dog whistles to his base. But we cannot afford to ignore our city’s problems. We must confront the vacant houses, neglected schools, infant mortality rates, high crime rates, open-air drug markets, and other ills that plague Baltimore.  What the answers are, I do not know.  But offering solutions to these problems without examining the racist ideology that created them would be like putting a band-aid on a hemorrhage. We must be honest about our history if we want to have any chance at healing our city.