Author Archives: Anna

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.

December 17, 2010 | 4:20 PM | By

On Today’s Metro Connection…

Rebecca Sheir/Metro Connection

While WAMU is nationally-known for The Diane Rehm Show, and locally-beloved for The Kojo Nnamdi Show, as of last week, I’ve found myself falling for WAMU’s other exclusive program: Metro Connection. I mention last week because last Friday, I listened to one of the stories from MC twice– and that was before I blogged about it. This week, I’m having driveway moments all over again, and just in case you missed it, I thought I’d spotlight two stories that DCentric readers may find interesting. First up:

A Legacy Of Education

Rebecca Sheir introduces us to Lynn C. French, whose African-American family has deep roots in the D.C. area… and a rich history/legacy of education. Her forebears include Emma Brown, who founded one of the first schools for African-Americans in D.C., and several of the early trustees of Howard University.

Plus:
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FILED UNDER: The People, History, Metro Connection, WAMU
December 17, 2010 | 2:13 PM | By

A Debate about Food Deserts

DCentric

Fast food: unhealthy, but delicious when you're too exhausted to travel for nutrition.

Postbourgie’s Nicole takes on “The Myth of the Food Desert“, by The Root’s John McWhorter. McWhorter wrote:

The no-supermarket paradigm discourages us from considering that human beings acquire — through childhood experience, cultural preferences and economics — a palate…

Culture, too, creates a palate — and to point that out is not to find “fault.” Example: Slavery and sharecropping didn’t make healthy eating easy for black people back in the day. Salt and grease were what they had, and Southern blacks brought their culinary tastes North (Zora Neale Hurston used to bless her friend Langston Hughes with fried-chicken dinners)…All of which is to say that our take on the obesity issue at hand cannot be that sugary and high-fat food is always the only food that is available to poor people within walking distance. It simply isn’t true.

Nicole responds:

I’ll lay it out for him. Obesity (along with hunger) is dramatically higher among poor communities. And guess what? If you are poor, your access to affordable, nutritious food is more likely to be limited…

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FILED UNDER: Around the City, Food, Poverty, Race and Class
December 17, 2010 | 11:32 AM | By

Sorry, Ron Brown Middle School. Wrong Number.

alangutierrez

I think this is the robot who keeps me hanging on the telephone.

I have a problem. Relative to everything else in my life, it’s minor, but it’s still frustrating.

Every day, at least once, but often twice, I get a phone call from a local phone number. It’s a recorded message with no information on how to respond, which is what compounds my frustration.

“Hello, Brown family. There is no aftercare today. Please ensure that your children are picked up promptly after school.”

Except…I don’t have children, unless we count my puppy. And she is home-schooled. I’m also so clueless that until this week, I thought they were trying to reach a D.C. public school parent named Brown– until I realized that DCPS probably doesn’t have the resources to record every parents’ name, for precious, individualized robo-calls. “A-ha!”, I thought. The SCHOOL is named “Brown”!

I’ve had the same phone number for 12 years, ever since I moved to this city. I’m aware that because of this and a few other factors, the proclivity for me to get random phone calls is high, so I try to be patient. At the same time, I’m concerned that there’s a parent out there who isn’t getting critically important information, that will affect their kid’s future; two weeks ago, one of the messages was about attendance and needing to speak to a teacher or administrator, immediately. Was my mistakenly-attributed child cutting school? And more depressing than that– why hadn’t this parent realized that they had provided an incorrect phone number? Didn’t they realize that they weren’t getting updates? Did they…not care?

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FILED UNDER: Education, Schools
December 17, 2010 | 8:26 AM | By

Tasty Morning Bytes – Jack Evans, District Dogs and Zoo Pride

Smithsonian

Squee! Lion Cub news, after the jump!

Good morning, DCentric readers! Here are your extra-fun Friday links:

Debating the District’s Deficit: Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans “Ultimately, it comes down to spending, and it comes down to being more efficient with the money the District has. “I challenge Tommy and the rest of my colleagues to spend less time pontificating on why we should tax rich people and spend all their time on analyzing the programs that are currently in place — how long have they been there and what are they producing for the city other than rhetoric…It’s a cynical view, and I don’t mean to say that that’s everything, because there are programs that are taking care of people and there are many people in need and they do need assistance from the government,” he says.” (DCist)

DC-3, ChiDogO’s Bring Hot Dogs to D.C. “There’s not much history with hot dogs here. So far, Ben’s Chili Bowl and the Vienna Inn are the only notable brick-and-mortar restaurants in the area able to turn a sustainable long-term profit on a hot dog–heavy menu. And both of those establishments leverage their history and neighborhood tradition more than the quality of their food…It may just be the nitrates talking, but some of the chefs behind the hot dog boom say the District might yet turn into a sausage town, no matter how dim the history is. “This city wasn’t a hamburger town years ago, and Five Guys changed that,” Bruner-Yang says. “Two years ago it wasn’t a food truck town, either.” (Washington City Paper)

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December 16, 2010 | 4:49 PM | By

“Start with friends and neighbors…”

Muffet/Flickr

While in the process of learning more about local charities and non-profits this week, I spoke to Terri Freeman, President of The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region as part of my research; I wanted to share part of her interview with you, because I think it illuminates a strategy for addressing one of the larger issues this blog was designed to explore– gentrification and the neighborhood tensions that come with it. I was merely asking Ms. Freeman for her take on “How to Help” this holiday season, but as she was speaking, I thought about how her words were just as relevant with regards to the changes that are remaking this city, block by block:

In addition to the five organizations you can give to or volunteer with, I would also suggest that people consider doing something nice for people in their own neighborhood. Be neighborly. If there are elderly people in your neighborhood, bring them something to eat (or help them with shoveling snow).

Believe it or not, in every neighborhood, there is probably somebody who can definitely use your help. You never know who might be watching what you say to somebody and the impact it can have on them.

I’m thinking back to several years ago when it was Christmas eve, and it was snowing. We were hit with Christmas spirit and decided to go caroling in the neighborhood…boy oh boy, did people look at us like we were aliens! And I think that’s because we have gotten away from doing those kind of community activities.

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FILED UNDER: The People, Non-profits
December 16, 2010 | 3:15 PM | By

Rhee: “Lack of Experience” isn’t so bad

Kaplan101

Cathie Black. Three lawsuits regarding the legality of her state-issued waiver for a lack of education credentials are pending, in New York.

This little article caught my eye when I read my New York Post, this morning:

Former Washington, DC schools chief Michelle Rhee said her appointment to the post three years ago was met with nearly identical opposition to that being faced by incoming New York City Schools Chancellor Cathie Black.

“People were [effectively] rioting in the street, saying, ‘How can somebody who’s never run a school, who’s never run a school district, do this job?” Rhee told The Post at a Manhattan Institute event in Midtown yesterday.

“And I think what I showed is that you don’t necessarily have to have been a superintendent before,” added Rhee, who launched the Students First advocacy group earlier this month.

“She’s shown in her experience in business that she can run a multibillion-dollar organization, that she can turn something around, so I don’t think her lack of experience in education disqualifies her.”

FILED UNDER: Education, Michelle Rhee
December 16, 2010 | 12:41 PM | By

3 out of 10 D.C. Kids Lived in Poverty Last Year

sendusout

I saw a link to this essay in my Twitter timeline; it’s not D.C.-specific, but the issue it addresses is one this city struggles with…and I can’t stop thinking about it, though I finished reading it an hour ago. It’s powerful.

I remember my brother whining. He was hungry. I felt it too.

I climbed up onto the counter to get a good look inside the kitchen cupboards. I found only jars of dried lentils, spices, and boxes of tea. A bag of cereal hidden away in the back of the cabinet caught my eye. I poured the contents into two bowls, only to find worms crawling inside. I screamed, and then quickly pretended there was nothing wrong. I didn’t want to frighten my baby brother. It was important to be responsible and be a good older sister. I shouldn’t scare him with details…

I did the only thing I could think of. I grabbed my green winter coat, put on my boots, and headed for the door.  I didn’t have a specific plan. All I knew was that we needed a snack. I told my brother I’d be right back.

What happened to that child next is going to haunt me for the rest of the day:
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FILED UNDER: Media, Hunger, Poverty
December 16, 2010 | 10:35 AM | By

D.C. by race, by block

The New York Times has a fascinating interactive feature up where you can browse local data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey by entering a zipcode or city. This allows you to see the racial breakdown of a place, census tract by census tract. Here’s what D.C. looks like– the green dots each represent 100 white people, the blue dots represent 100 Black:

http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer

A city divided by green and blue...

You can also choose to “View More Maps” and then select for “Foreign-born population”, “Asian Population”, and more. Were you surprised by the numbers for your block?

FILED UNDER: Around the City, Gentrification, Immigrants, Race and Ethnicity
December 16, 2010 | 8:30 AM | By

Tasty Morning Bytes – Dismissed in Anacostia, Stolen Jaguars and Washington is Wealthiest

Good morning, DCentric readers! Cold enough for you? I haven’t gone outside since Saturday, so I’ll take your word for it. On to some tasty, toasty links!

Nervous Anacostia residents ask for help after crime spree “Our greatest concern right now is that the burglars are getting more aggressive and that someone will get hurt,” said Catherine V. Buell, 31, a lawyer who has been a chief organizer in pushing D.C. police to increase their presence in the neighborhood…Burglaries are up 11 percent across the city, D.C. police records show. But an undercurrent of the protest was that police have been slow to respond. “We’ve been very frustrated,” said Shareema Houston, 35, an engineer who owns a home on Pleasant Street. “It’s almost a feeling from the police like, ‘What do you expect? You live in Anacostia.’ It’s very dismissive.” (The Washington Post)

Region’s drop in home value among worst in nation “Wial noted, however, that his prediction doesn’t mean that every home in the region will decline in value as housing here is diverse. In the District alone, the median home value across the Anacostia River in Southeast is $240,000. In Northwest, the median value is $783,000…Wial said he couldn’t say whether only the more expensive homes were likely to fall in value over the next year. And good jobs aren’t necessarily a cure-all — Wial differs from some economists who say D.C.’s employment opportunities will keep the housing market from falling further.” (Washington Examiner )

Jaguar belonging to former D.C. Mayor, Marion Barry, stolen “A 2002 Jaguar belonging to D.C. Councilman Marion Barry was reported stolen Saturday, and police are looking for the suspect. Officer Hugh Carew, a D.C. police spokesman, confirms that police took a report Saturday from the former mayor who said he left his keys in the ignition of his silver 4-door 2002 Jaguar Type X.” (Examiner.com)
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