Priceless Baltimore- An Autobiography
A man can dream, they say. I believe a woman- a black woman- can dream, and dreaming has always been the propeller that has been and still pushes me to be what I am today. My name is (full name) daughter of (parents’ names). Well, I like to call myself the daughter of Baltimore. Baltimore, Maryland, has always been the little cocoon into which my mind has always folded and retracted back to whenever I need the motivation to push the dreams that drive my life. I was born and grew up in a black neighborhood. That is what I later understood was how such places were referred to Baltimore- Sociological Imagination essay.
I understood that going to school was the norm- just like all parts of the United States. However, going to the types of schools I saw on television was not what I experienced. The rest of America was in a better place, or so I thought. In Baltimore City School, I nurtured my education to what I would call ‘primary education. Not once in my school life had I envisaged that there was essence and importance of shooting my grades out of the scope within my horizon. Baltimore taught me that life demanded one to live- never mattered how. I grew up an average learner, and my dream and aspiration, just like any Baltimorean young school-going kid, was to clear high school and get a job. Crime and drugs were prevalent, and I knew that I had to avoid them, which was more complicated than getting hooked to them (Sweet et al., 2020). Baltimore- Sociological Imagination essay Vivid horrific experiences of some friends I grew up with still pierce through my heart, irredeemable. I later attended the Howard County Community College. This was a significant step, coming from a family that no one had set foot in college.
The past year has been a hectic one. The Covid-19 Situation made my responsibilities shift from basically hard to almost impossible. Another blow struck after my mother got a stroke. This meant I had to juggle between being more than just a daughter to her. All my life, she had taught me to always be there for family, and I can count the number of times I could feel her absence in my life. As a mother and an employee at the University of Maryland Medical Centre, I need to do all y duties diligently, and the last thing I would want is for my children to feel left out.
A spark in me has always been ignited every time I think about the horrible things I saw while growing up. The murder of Freddie Gray- one wonders if a human with a brain could do such horrendous acts to a fellow human (Sweet et al., 2020).Baltimore- Sociological Imagination essay I was pushed by an inner desire to understand how people think towards others and shift their views and perceptions. As one grows in aspirations of wanting to become somebody in society, they learn that the nature of people is more personal than is it generally human (Mills, 1959). Police brutality has been a thing in Baltimore, and Freddie’s death was not any different. It is the way of death that puzzled me- I had to be a medical practitioner. I had to save the lives of future Freddies, and not by dealing with them after battering, but by dealing with the people’s minds at a young age- people of all races. I am inclined to think that race is more of a perception than color. As a psychiatrist, I understand better, but with very little to affect the whole sea with a seemingly fixated mindset.
It is not just the history of my home city that burns me from inside, but as well the realization that the life of an average black person is bound to be thrice as hard as that of a white person. I am a middle-class citizen earning a medium wage, just enough to sustain and make ends meet for my children and my mother. It is unlike me to work out of impulse- I am driven by the surrounding social, economic, and political states. I have grown not to see the essence of investing much. A study in 2015 about the disinvestment rates in Baltimore gives me a vivid picture and makes sense after all. After reading this study, I was revolutionized, typically me, and this cemented another layer of the factors for the status quo in the black neighborhood. Black populations are neglected from all spheres, and as such, one must understand why it is hard to find blacks investing when they earn too little (Theodos et al., 2020). Baltimore- Sociological Imagination essay A younger me would believe that Baltimore is a replica of entire America, then an older me watched something different on television. Right now, it is not a matter of thinking, imagining, and monitoring- I am experiencing this. I, however, cannot say that my life has faced racial discrimination at specific points. Still, I can say that the color of my skin and the identity of my cultural background have made inevitable the endless
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