Deprived Areas of Baltimore. I chose to attend the Coppin State University versus Towson University basketball game for my spaces of sport paper. I decided to use this event because Coppin State has a very high minority percentage. I am a Caucasian male

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Baltimore is one of the worst cities in America with crime and murder totals at the highest I have ever seen or heard of and since I have been at school here they have only risen even more.

“Bolstered by a host of unwanted rankings—first among large cities in the United States for murder, violent, and property crime, and drug-related emergency room visits; consistently in the top-ten most dangerous cities in the United States; a poverty level of 24% (34% for children under 18); life expectancies 14 years under national averages; ten pregnancy the highest among the nation’s 50 largest cities; blocks of vacant and abandoned row houses; having some of the highest violent crime and juvenile homicide figures; drug-addiction, syphilis, gonorrhea, and HIV infection rates in the country; and a per capita income level 57% below Maryland’s average” (Silk, 2010). 

So you could see when we were proposed of the idea that we had to go to an area normally run by people that are considered minorities and Baltimore only 15 minutes away you realize how someone could get a bad impression of this project. We decided to go into Baltimore to do this project. In this paper I am going to write how I felt while I was there, how I was treated, and how uncomfortable I felt being there. I am also going to tell of different promotional ideas that I have of getting more white college students to attend events like this.

I chose to attend the Coppin State University versus Towson University basketball game for my spaces of sport paper. I decided to use this event because Coppin State has a very high minority percentage. I am a Caucasian male from a middle class background so I have never been exposed to an environment where I was the minority before. The area of where I am from consists of only white middle to upper class people and I have never had many interactions with minorities before. In my high school we had only 5% minority so all of my friends and people I know from back home consist of only people like me.

        I thought coming down to Towson University was bad enough for me in reference to interacting with minorities. Towson only has a 7% African-American rate and coming here made me feel somewhat insecure and uncomfortable. I had never been around so many people of different races and sexualities before coming down here and it was a culture shock for me. That was until I took the trip down into Baltimore to Coppin State University. I went down to the game with Meghan Ashman, John Tamburo, Sheree Ledbetter, and Corbin Mayo. We chose to go down together so that we had a small comfort zone and since Sheree is African-American and had been there before it gave us an extra level of comfort. Sheree knew how to get there and where she was going so it made us feel slightly comfortable but once we got there she left us to go sit with her friends who were African-American as well.

I felt like the ride down there was a lot more uncomfortable that being at the game. We drove down in the car and on the way we passed an area of Baltimore that did not seem safe and had boarded up apartments. 

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“At the southern tip of Martin Luther King Parkway sits the Washington village/Pigtown neighborhood. For a number of years, this area stood in stark contrast to that which is physically separated  from, namely, the historic Ridgley’s delight community on the edge of ‘Westside’ Pigtown may well be heralded by a sanguine, if not delusional, chamber of commerce as a ‘diverse’ and ‘mixed’ neighborhood; however, the poverty and marginalization of class location are write large on the bodies of a large number of residents whose dress styles and mannerisms echo portrayals of African-American youth, namely in the Baltimore peripheries, at least, ...

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