Donald Trump said it again Wednesday night in his final debate with Hillary Clinton: “Our inner cities are a disaster.”

Promising to do more than his opponent for African American and Hispanic people, while declaring that they are “living in hell,” has been a staple of the Republican candidate’s remarks on the campaign trail.

Yesterday, Baltimore writer and radio producer Stacia L. Brown fired off a tart reply.

“Baltimore’s inner city is no hellhole, and the black residents living there don’t need help from a faux-benevolent outsider,” Brown wrote on Vox.

To national politicians for whom America’s inner cities might as well be flyover country, such stereotypes endure. But they are a distortion, according to Brown, to people who live in and love their communities, knowing full well their challenges.

“I can assure you that for every crime reported in the city of Baltimore, there is a parent, a shop owner, an educator, a lender, an activist, or a student engaged in the work of crime prevention,” Brown told The Donald.

“There is a conversation in a barber or beauty shop, at a park picnic table, inside a church, at a table in an anarchist bookstore, at the counter in a black-owned cafe or on the marble stoop of a rowhome about how to further the work of anti-violence and black liberation.”

“In these areas of the city, where current residents are valiantly trying to attract new neighbors with stable income and an eye toward a more promising future, there is always something of the city’s former glory left to see, always potential left to imagine.”