Thiru Vignarajah, former Deputy Attorney General of Maryland and Democratic candidate for Mayor of Baltimore, virtually joined the International Studies Leadership Council to discuss racial disparities in policing, housing, education, transportation and healthcare in the city of Baltimore.
Mr. Vignarajah closed his remarks with a powerful vision of what the city could look like with political leadership that recognizes and intentionally addresses historic institutions of discrimination and racism. He said, “Baltimore is broken in so many ways, but one of the silver linings of that is that we get to reinvent ourselves in a way that we can be proud of. The gentrification of D.C. and New York does not need to be the story of Baltimore. The inequitable prosperity that we see in the country, and in the world, does not have to be the tale of our city. We can grow our economy, we can rebuild our schools, we can guarantee free college, we can bring down crime without mass incarceration. We can do these things in a way that will allow us to be a model for cities across the nation, and write a chapter that we can all be proud of.”