DCentric

Julie Lyn

View of the Capitol from Barry Farm, in Southeast.

Last week, I pointed you towards the City Paper’s extensive profile of Courtland Milloy by Rend Smith. Over at The Root, Natalie Hopkinson continues to unpack why Milloy’s voice is important to some and offensive to others. I think she nails it. It’s not about Milloy, it’s about the disconnect, the disparity:

This is the color-coded reality of life in the District. White median income is $92,000; black median income is $34,000. The boom in cafés and farmers markets has done nothing to stem a stunning slide into poverty in recent years. In 2007 the black child poverty rate was 31 percent; in 2008 it was 36 percent, and the latest figures show that the figure has shot up to an appalling 43 percent. Forty-three percent. The poverty rate for white children is 3 percent. Unemployment doubled, and black people disproportionately lost their jobs and homes.

This is what they mean when they talk about class warfare: two trains — one privileged, one not — running in opposite directions at a dizzying speed, each with divergent needs and expectations from government. No need to invent it or “inject race” into it; this is the objective reality of life in the District. Yet somehow the narrative about change becomes “Courtland Milloy doesn’t care about white people!”

The following point Hopkinson makes cannot be understated; certain black views are constantly invalidated. It’s sickening to read DCist or WaPo comments which refer to the residents of Ward 8 as if they are mindless, crime-craving savages who are too simple to grasp what their virtuous, wiser counterparts immediately grok (tellingly, occasionally when I’m mired in such threads, the words to “White Man’s Burden” appear, unbidden, to my mind’s eye):

Even in places like D.C. that are decreasingly but still majority black, the sense of white entitlement grows, while black views are increasingly de-legitimized. Those people don’t know what’s good for them!

And this may be the most important point of all:

In the fanfare over the “new D.C.” and drooling over retail, it’s almost as if poor people and their grievances have been put on mute. That was the problem with Fenty and some of his more strident “creative class” supporters; many of them went about their business as though the poor were invisible or, worse, already gone. In a city like D.C., these tensions cannot be waved away as mostly socioeconomic. The city’s sizable black middle class could have rescued Fenty’s campaign, but it didn’t. I don’t like it either, but racial polarization is just a fact.
That doesn’t mean this is the way it will always be. But getting past the polarization does require some brutally honest people to bridge the worlds.

I encourage you to read the whole essay.