September 16, 2010 | 11:39 AM | By

Tommy Wells calls Milloy’s column “a window on DC”

FILED UNDER: Media, Gentrification, Politics, Race and Class

twitter.com/TommyWells

Wells' reaction to Milloy.

I stumbled on to Tommy Wells’ (Council member for Ward 6) Twitter account because he is live-tweeting the “Unity Breakfast” which is going on right now, featuring local politicians, including Vince Gray and Adrian Fenty. Wells is sharing sentiments like this one, from Gray to Fenty, “I know you will help make me the best Mayor possible” while he simultaneously uploads pictures he is taking of everyone from soon-to-be Council Chair Kwame Brown to current Mayor Adrian Fenty.

That’s swell enough on its own, but I was more intrigued by the tweet I captured, which you see to the right.

In my morning roundup post, I included a link to Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy’s latest work– a scorching repudiation of the Fenty administration which attacked Michelle Rhee, social media and “friendly fascism” among other things, while it railed on behalf of those left behind. It was stark and shocking, a cri de coeur penned about the messy issues of race and class:

And lordy don’t complain about Rhee.

She’s creating a “world-class school system,” they text. As for you blacks: Don’t you, like, even know what’s good for you? So what if Fenty reneged on his promise to strengthen the city from the inside by helping the working poor move into the middle class. Nobody cares that he has opted to import a middle class, mostly young whites who can afford to pay high rent for condos that replaced affordable apartments.

Don’t ask Fenty or Rhee whom this world-class school system will serve if low-income black residents are being evicted from his world-class city in droves.

There’s a lot of push-back against this column– many, many tweets like this, for example:

twitter.com/isitdinneryet/status/24670952995

That’s what surprised me about Wells’ message– he acknowledged that there’s something to such rawness– and that merely rejecting Milloy’s incendiary words without contemplating how they resonate with certain residents of this city is a lost opportunity for understanding a world-view (city view?) that a non-trivial number of us “myopic twits” aren’t willing to explore.

About the author

DCentric was created to examine the ways race and class interact in Washington, D.C., a city with a vibrant mix of cultures and neighborhoods. Your guides to the changing district are reporters Anna John and Elahe Izadi. View all posts by Anna →

  • ibc

    You know, the ironic thing here is that most “newcomers” understand DC's history only too well. It's a history of incredible dysfunction for lack of any middle-class to act as a counter-weight to the electoral power of the extremely poor and uneducated. The absolutely most ironic part of this is that Milloy fled the city and it's poor residents and the dysfunction of the city, just like the rest of the black and white middle class. Now he's got the–pardon my language–but, *fucking* *incredible* gall to complain that the ghetto–that he and countless others like him have actively worked to defund by taking their tax dollars and bodies across the border to Maryland and Virginia–he left to rot and fester is slowly changing.

    Yes, God forbid there should be some uptick in the number of middle-class residents in DC. Don't these twittering newcomers know that the entire purpose of DC is as a walled-off ghetto for poor folks? That's where they're supposed to live! PG County is for the black middle-class, and Montgomery and Northern Virginia is for whites. What a disgusting hack.

    I'll admit, I've never like Milloy, and think he's an intellectually lazy dirtball, but reading this makes me realize he has an almost sociopathic lack of self-awareness.

  • SuperS

    Isitdinneryet, you can do me a favor and STFU, the article was the truth and people always want to shut the truth up.