November 15, 2010 | 2:21 PM | By Anna
tonbabydc
Tony Dungy and Donovan McNabb
I don’t know if “issues of race are often discussed head-on” in D.C. (unless the writer means “among people of the same color”) but I was glad that one of you sent me this story about our local NFL team: “Is Coach Shanahan Racist or Just Dumb?”
Here in D.C., in Obama’s so-called post-racial America, issues of race are often discussed head-on, and talk of the strained relationship between McNabb, who is black, and Shanahan, who is white, have dominated conversations in barber shops, offices and sports bars across the city – and across the country – for the past 14 days.
“Indications are now that the Shanahans, father and son, don’t much like the way McNabb prepares for games,” Michael Wilbon, a prominent sports columnist, wrote in The Washington Post. “Mike’s assertion makes it sound like McNabb is some dummy, an ominous characterization he’d better be careful about, lest he run into some cultural trouble in greater Washington, D.C.”…
This is not Denver, Shanahan’s last coaching job. This is the nation’s capitol, nicknamed “Chocolate City,” a place where scores of highly-educated African-Americans cheer for the Redskins – and the team’s black quarterback – every Sunday…
And so Shanahan’s humiliating insinuation that McNabb cannot intellectually absorb the complexities of the Redskins offense after 11 successful years as an NFL quarterback was taken as a collective insult to many black Americans in D.C. who viewed McNabb’s demotion – and the way it was handled – as discriminatory.
November 15, 2010 | 11:41 AM | By Anna
This video about the D.C. Central Kitchen deserves to be seen (and this program deserves to be emulated, widely):
If you’d like to get involved with the D.C. Central Kitchen, please go here.
November 15, 2010 | 8:52 AM | By Anna
Good morning, DCentric readers! Here are today’s links:
Another gay bashing recorded along D.C.’s gentrification corridors “Given the presence of “not in this neighborhood” threats in many of these crimes, I asked him for his thoughts on the relationship between gentrifying neighborhoods and hate crime reports in the District. “We don’t want to dismiss the role that race and class and gentrification can play, but it’s also a fact that crime in D.C. spikes during the summer months. People are out of school, temperatures are warmer, everyone is out on the street a lot later with not much going on,” Montoni told me. “We can’t tease out whether the source is mixed housing developments and gentrification, or if it’s just the seasonal spike we’ve typically seen.” (tbd.com)
Metro escalator brake, maintenance problems widespread “Metro may be the world’s largest owner of an outmoded and problematic type of escalator, one that has suffered brake failure accidents in other transit systems and is notorious among experts for requiring a high level of maintenance…The escalator involved is a Westinghouse Modular 100…making up 83 percent of Metro’s 588 escalators. “There is a ton of them out there, and no one is really happy with them,” said Ken Smith, an escalator consultant and a member of the escalator code committee of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. In fact, the model was discontinued 30 years ago.” (The Washington Post)
Number of millionaires in D.C. area gets bigger – wtop.com “A millionaire household is defined as one with $1 million or more of investable liquid assets, excluding retirement plans and real estate. Simply owning a million dollar home doesn’t make you a millionaire. Virginia dropped two places from 2009. The Commonwealth ranks seventh on this year’s list with 180,638 millionaire households. That’s 5.94 percent of the state’s 3,043,091 households. The District rounds out the top 10 for the second year in a row. Just under 15,000 households have liquid assets of a million dollars or more, which is 5.53 percent of the District’s 262,976 homes.” (wtop.com)
November 12, 2010 | 5:42 PM | By Anna
marrngtn (Manuel)
So, last week Metro Transit Police heard from a Metro-rider that two men were engaged in shady behavior at L’Enfant Plaza and on the Orange Line (via WTOP):
The rider told Metro he saw two men acting suspiciously and videotaping platforms, trains and riders.
“The men, according to the citizen report, were trying to be inconspicuous, holding the cameras at their sides,” Metro spokesman Steven Taubenkibel says.
The rider was able to photograph the men who were videotaping and sent the photo to Metro Transit Police.
Metro Transit Police issued an internal memo to officers telling them to “be on the lookout for” the men, a standard tactic used by police departments to share information with their officers.
However, that internal memo was leaked. Metro says the memo was meant for an internal audience only and was not intended to be a public notice.
Some photographers are alarmed at how this memo could be misinterpreted, and as a brown female who always has her camera with her (it’s part of my job!), I understand why. At the same time, I worry about how vulnerable Metro is to a terrorist attack. How vigilant is too vigilant? And how much liberty should we lose to be safe?
November 12, 2010 | 4:42 PM | By Anna
Below the jump, you’ll find a video from WAMU’s The Kojo Nnamdi Show, featuring a brief discussion on food trucks. It stars Council member Jack Evans, the Washington Post’s Mike DeBonis and KNS regular/NBC 4 reporter, Tom Sherwood.
As someone who has spoken to food truck owners for this blog, I’m dismayed that “official” D.C. is so inhospitable to them. They increase the diversity of food offerings in this town, trek out to feed under-served neighborhoods and create a much lower barrier to starting a business– which is helpful if you’re young, a person of color, etc. Thankfully, Kojo points out in the video below that if we want “to be considered a major city”, food trucks are a part of that. The Washington Post’s Mike DeBonis also thinks that trucks are an asset to D.C.
Continue reading →
November 12, 2010 | 2:33 PM | By Anna
Robert Burdock
If you’re interested in literature, film or South Asian culture, you would probably enjoy the South Asian Literary and Theater Arts Festival (SALTAF), which is happening tomorrow — I love it because it’s an event which is unique to D.C. (and it’s FREE):
This year’s festival will feature panel discussions, readings, and film screenings by internationally acclaimed writers and artists. The literary panel will feature poet Pireeni Sundaralingam, editor of the first anthology of contemporary South Asian poetry, Indivisible; award-winning writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of One Amazing Thing; and writer and artist Naeem Mohaiemen, whose work has been featured in galleries around the world. The non-fiction/journalism panel includes Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of the acclaimed Imperial Life in the Emerald City and National Editor at the Washington Post, and writer and activist Canyon Sam, author of The Sky Train.
Date : Saturday, November 13, 10 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. |
Location : Baird Auditorium, National Museum of Natural History, 10th Street and Constitution Avenue, NW |
Metro : Smithsonian or Federal Triangle
November 12, 2010 | 11:38 AM | By Anna
After the jump, you’ll find the latest racism-related video to go viral. So far, two of you have sent it to me, even though it didn’t take place in D.C. I’ll warn you that it’s disturbing and filled with ugly language, including the “N-word”. Here’s what it’s about:
Things got ugly when a black mail carrier refused to take back a letter he’d delivered to a lady in Hingham, Mass. She went on a racist rant and slapped him. He secretly taped it all on his cell phone.
So many people assume that the South has a monopoly on racist behavior. I remember when I told my friends that I was starting this exciting new job at WAMU, and one of them, who was from Massachusetts, said, “It’s a shame that D.C. has so many racial issues.” Inwardly, I felt confused because I had heard the exact same thing about their home state. I didn’t say anything because I don’t know Massachusetts that well. I don’t know it any better after watching what’s below, but I do think it’s unhelpful to stereotype certain regions as “backwards” or prone to racism. The quote I excerpted above is from Gawker, where commenters are already chiming in about their lack of surprise that such a thing would happen in Hingham, MA.
I grew up in sunny Northern California, where I got called the N-word plenty of times. I have friends who grew up in Mississippi who never heard that word, once. Massachusetts doesn’t have a problem with racism; America does. Ignorance is everywhere– so is kindness and fairness. What’s interesting to me is how we live in a time when people can use the power of their mobile phones to record what they are seeing, upload it and allow it to go viral. Ten years ago, no one would’ve seen or heard what you are about to watch.
Continue reading →
November 12, 2010 | 8:59 AM | By Anna
Good morning, DCentric readers! Ready for some links?
D.C. Council wants city to hire ex-convicts “The bill’s backers believe that not asking about criminal history on government job applications will make it easier for ex-convicts to get city jobs. They say hiring ex-offenders will keep them from returning to prison. Critics say the legislation will worsen problems the city has with weeding out dangerous job applicants…The District is home to about 60,000 ex-felons, nearly 10 percent of the population, the ACLU estimates.” (Washington Examiner )
MeFites who know DC: Please talk to me about Bloomingdale. “I am considering a move to the Bloomingdale neighborhood in DC. You know, the little one east of LeDroit Park, west of Eckington, and just north of Shaw…? I’m a 29 year old woman. I love the apartments I’ve seen, and they fit my budget… I have some concerns about safety in that area, moreso than other places I’ve lived (Cole Valley in San Francisco, Mt. Pleasant and North Dupont in DC, if that helps for comparison). I consider myself pretty city-savvy, and I know there are generally no guarantees of safety anywhere, but I’m not sure what to expect.” (ask.metafilter.com)
Concrete Bungle: How Immigration Divided a D.C. Union: A campaign to organize D.C. concrete workers hit a wall To talk to people who worked on the UCW organizing effort is to learn that its near-collapse is not the usual sad labor story of valiant unionists against perfidious management. Rather, it’s the story of union advocates turning on one another—in large part over the polarizing politics of immigration. For generations, the labor movement has periodically warred with itself over how to view newcomers, from the Italian-speakers a century ago to Spanish-speakers like Lemos. Are they a wage-depressing threat to be kept out of the job market? Or should they be embraced, on the logic that a unified labor force is the only way to secure better working conditions? (Washington City Paper)
November 11, 2010 | 6:35 PM | By Anna
DCist looked at a map from The District of Columbia Crime Policy Institute and learned some interesting information (I sure didn’t know what a “Census block” was, before their post):
But there are also some surprising spots where high amounts of crime are reported, like a blip on upper Connecticut Avenue in Chevy Chase.
The figures represent reported Part I crimes (homicide, sexual assault, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and theft from a motor vehicle) and map by Census blocks, not typical city blocks. A Census block is the smallest unit measured by the U.S. Census Bureau — and occasionally they can be rather large, which helps explains why certain areas, like the larger blocks around American University and some of the blocks in the Seventh Police District, are designated as high-crime areas. DCPI researchers also confirmed with us that the presence of college campuses also plays a role in the designation of high-crime areas, like ones located around Georgetown University.
Sometimes, these reports about crime in the city leave me feeling paranoid and worried, but DCist helpfully notes that a majority of all census blocks have experienced only a few crimes per year (and almost a quarter had NO crime in the last ten years!).
November 11, 2010 | 3:14 PM | By Anna
NazarethCollege
Even if you go to college and “do the right thing” by getting a degree, you still may find yourself out of work…especially if you are black:
Education is not a guaranteed path to wealth for any race or demographic. Still, education should be at least a more secure path towards finding employment. It should be but it is not so for many African American college graduates. According to the latest release by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate among African American college graduates who are 25 and older is 7.3 percent…
As expected, since the year 2000 African American college graduates have always had the highest rates of unemployment. However, in 2006, during the nationwide housing boom, African American graduates narrowed the gap between their unemployment rate and the rates of the other races to less than one percentage point. However, as the economy worsened, that gap began to grow. Then between 2008 and 2009, the unemployment rate for African American college graduates jumped from an average of 4 percent to 7.3 percent.
Continue reading →
