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.

It’s easy to be a critic, when English is your first language.

Santa Fe Nachos, Dos Coyotes, Davis, California

One of the things I miss most about Northern California is the Southwestern restaurant, Dos Coyotes. Please note: I did not say “Mexican” food. I fully admit I want some sort of “inauthentic” dish which contains spicy salsa, black beans and an obscene amount of cheese. That’s a pretty basic want, but it’s difficult to fulfill here in D.C. When I worked near K Street, I’d go to Pedro and Vinnie’s burrito cart and 80% of the time, I’d be satisfied; unfortunately, it’s not open for dinner or on the weekends. So I often end up at…Chipotle. I know. It’s not real, ethnic food. I know.

But it’s spicy and across from my house, so I go. When I do, the staff switches to Spanish while asking for my order. Years ago, I was fluent in it, so my accent is decent and I can bust out these impressive sentences every so often…but I’m much more likely to be left staring at the ceiling, agonizing over a verb I can’t remember. The 14th Street crew doesn’t mind this, in fact they exhort me to keep practicing. I do, because it’s kind of them to help me, but also because it is a potent reminder of how privileged I am.

I speak English.

It’s not my first language, but I speak it as if it were and I don’t take that for granted. When some dolt on the street compliments me by telling me something like, “You’re Indian? You speak good English for an immigrant!”,  I smile a wan smile and reply that I was born to immigrant parents in California, where English is often spoken.
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Metro’s “Grab-bag of Good Ideas”

laffy4k

Metro Center

After the escalators at L’Enfant Plaza malfunctioned ten days ago, injuring several people, I worried about how safe they were. The Greater Greater Washington blog has obtained a copy of the report that WMATA commissioned on elevator and escalator maintenance. Their verdict? It’s not good:

Quite simply, the escalator report is not well done. It doesn’t specify the specific goal of the audit, and ends up being a grab-bag of several findings, many positive and many negative…If the brake issues were a real concern to the consultant, the report certainly doesn’t reflect that. They are buried between recommendations for better housekeeping and for better training in the Maintenance Management System.

This gets to the heart of the real problems facing Metro. As we have repeated on several occasions, Metro’s fundamental flaw in both maintenance and safety is its inability to proactively prioritize action items based on how much an issue contributes to downtime or risk of injury.

Instead, Metro creates grab-bags of good ideas, pursues them in no particular order, and then when a major incident occurs reactively spends mountains of money addressing the immediate causes of that incident. Metro is doing the same here, by now testing the brakes on every escalator in the system.

Not everyone can afford to keep a car or live somewhere where they can walk to everything they need; people depend on Metro. It’s disheartening that WMATA is unable to prioritize access to safe transportation over housekeeping. I love a clean station, too. But when I spent the better part of a year with my mobility impaired, limping in a brace, a sparkly floor meant nothing to me if I had to pass a broken elevator and then stumble down a broken escalator to enjoy it.

Tasty Morning Bytes – Sidwell Trolls, Our Banana Republic and Marketing to Minority Kids

Good morning, DCentric readers! Here are your breakfast links:

Black Caucus mum on Tea Party Republican who wants to join “I plan on joining, I’m not gonna ask for permission or whatever, I’m gonna find out when they meet and I will be a member of the Congressional Black Caucus,” West, one of two black Republicans elected to Congress last Tuesday, told WOR radio. “I meet all of the criteria, and it’s so important that we break down this monolithic voice that continues to talk about victimization and dependency in the black communit (thehill.com)

Rich Private High School Football Team Puts Uppity Reporter in His Place “These are the children of presidents, Mr. McKenna, sir. Are we clear? In case we’re not, Sidwell students (or, to be fair, people claiming to be Sidwell students) flocked to the story online to point out that while McKenna is a mere salaryman writing squibs for a common newspaper, they will inherit the earth because their parents paid $32,000 a year to keep them away from all the black kids in D.C. public schools…” (gawker.com)

Homeless seeking shelter in D.C. might need to prove District ties “As the economy has floundered and the unemployment rate has soared, a growing number of homeless families from outside the District have migrated into the city in search of shelter, burdening an already-strained social services network. Over the summer, D.C. officials say, 10 percent of the families most in need of shelter came from outside the city. Since 2008, officials say, the number of homeless families migrating into the District has tripled.” (The Washington Post)

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Supporters of Ali Ahmed Mohammed March, Rally at City Hall

@mjb

City Hall

After charges were dropped against the five DC9 employees who may have been involved with Ali Ahmed Mohammed’s death, TBD is reporting that over 100 of his family and friends marched to City Hall today, demanding justice:

The amount of anger and frustration among the protesters was at times overwhelming. After addressing the vocal crowd in Amharic, his native language, Mohammed’s father, Ahmed Goltchu Mohammed, became too emotional and had to be escorted away by the family’s attorney. The protest then continued for at least another hour. “We have to work with the system,” the elder Mohammed urged the crowd to remember…

At issue for those gathered was a deep concern that the case might have been dismissed for good. In a statement released Friday accompanying the court filing explaining why the charges had been dropped, however, U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen made plain that the investigation is ongoing, and that charges could be re-filed after an autopsy report and any additional evidence becomes available…

While the crowd didn’t hear from any of the three politicians they had hoped to engage (Mayor Adrian Fenty, Mayor-elect Vince Gray or Council member Jim Graham), Mayor-for-life Marion Barry and Council Chairman-elect Kwame Brown addressed Mohammed’s supporters:
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Gentrifying a Small Town like D.C.

NCinDC

Blagden Alley - Naylor Court Historic District

One of you pointed me towards an interesting post on BaancBlog: Blagden Alley and Naylor Court Jesting. In it, blogger Alley Denizen discusses the controversial piece Megan McArdle wrote for The Atlantic last month (“The Gentrifier’s Lament“):

What bothered me was the “here’s how gentrification works” attitude of it when I had the feeling that the author hadn’t been to many community meetings in DC and hadn’t spent that much time here. It seemed rather an attempt to put an abstraction of the New York model, with reference to the West Village onto DC. It didn’t seem DC concrete.

DC isn’t New York for various reasons, which is obvious. One of them is that DC is in many ways a small town.

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Tasty Morning Bytes – Disconnected Utilities, Denying the Homeless, Longer School Days

Good morning, DCentric readers! Welcome back from the weekend.

Beyond Bread: A Wild Goose Chase for Utility Assistance “The Social Services Department here at Bread for the City is consistently returning phone calls and meeting with clients that are on the verge of being disconnected, with very few resources to protect them and their family from living without utilities this winter. We see this as a most pressing issue. In our Northwest Center, my colleagues and I fielded 126 phone calls this September and October, before the most high-cost winter months. This is an increase of 34% since last year.” (breadforthecity.blogspot.com)

Some Advocates For Homeless Say Residency Requirements Could Backfire “Some advocates for the homeless, however, say they’re concerned the plan will backfire. Nassim Moshiree, an attorney with the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, doesn’t mince words. “My main concern is that people will die of hypothermia on the streets when they can’t get any services,” says Moshiree.” (wamu.org)

DC Teacher Arrest Sheds Light On School Problems “I understand they both were wrong,” said Rayshad Anderson. “At the same time, Mr. Coleman is not the type of man to do something like that. So I think something needs to be done at the school to prevent these types of things. Tthis school is out of control. It has no structure whatsoever.” Volunteers Byron Ezell and Taria Nelson agree. They run a non-profit called Come Back to Give Back. This past year, they’ve spent Tuesdays and Thursdays working with Rock Creek students, who have a variety of disabilities. They said they believe an assault was “bound to happen.” (WUSA Washington, DC)

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Love Bites Food Truck: A Sweet Idea from Native Washingtonians

http://twitter.com/DCLoveBites

Remember when I mentioned the Love Bites food truck on Monday? Unlike the majority of trucks I’ve wandered up to, Love Bites is run by an African-American, Mother-Daughter duo and powered by local recipes. I had serendipitously discovered them on U Street, on Saturday, while taking my puppy for a walk; shortly thereafter, I tried my first Sweet Potato cupcake, ever– and I’m a believer. I spoke to Tima of Love Bites, today; she’s the younger half of the team behind the truck. Love Bites will be at Planet Pet’s “Grand Opening Party” in Adams Morgan tomorrow, November 6th.

How did Love Bites get started?

We actually formed the business in April but had to go get the truck, paint it and everything. So we were established in April, but were on the road four weeks ago.

What inspired you to start?

My mom has been in catering and event planning for over ten years, and we always wanted to start a Mother-Daughter business together. First we were going to do cookies, but I said I loved cupcakes. I was going to different cupcake places in D.C., all the time.

What happened to the cookies?

Last May, I went on a business trip and saw a mobile cookie truck in Columbia, South Carolina. It was called Insomnia. They basically go to the nearby colleges and deliver late night cookies to students who are studying. They make the cookies on their truck, so when they give them to you, they are still warm. So we thought of franchising, but we wanted to do something of our own.

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Charter Schools: Like Seeing a Dentist for a Heart Condition?

Bread for the World

Latin American Montessori Bilingual Public Charter School, D.C.

While I was reading anything and everything last night, to curate our morning link roundup, I stumbled across this:

If doctors were treated like teachers:

1. “Charter hospitals” could certify “smart people” as qualified to begin practicing medicine without any prior experience in the field if they had had “some business background.”

2. Since a “doctor” can “doctor” anything, a cardiologist would be on staff at a hospital in place of a urologist when there was a shortage of urologists. The cardiologist could “learn on the job.”…

3. Whenever a doctor gave a patient a prescription, the patient’s parents could come to the doctor’s office demanding he or she change the prescription since the parents “knew better.”

4. Because of a shortage of doctors, Mayor Bloomberg would institute a summer “crash course” in medicine for people who had no background in the field but “liked playing doctor” when they were little. Those who got through the six-week course would then be considered qualified to care for the most severely ill patients since no other doctors would want to do the job.

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The people who voted for them are guilty, too.

A Canadian man in a confederate flag and Klan hood leads a former police officer in blackface with a noose around his neck. Their "costumes" took first place.

You know how people threaten to move to Canada if someone whom they dislike is elected, because America would then be intolerable and Canada is more civilized? Or how some of us assume that our neighbor to the North handles concepts like “diversity” and “tolerance” better than we do? Well, I was just sent a reminder that no nation is perfect:

A former police officer who donned blackface for Halloween as was led around on a rope by a friend dressed as a Klansman says it was a stupid mistake.

Terry Nunn says he is in “no way, shape or form” a racist and neither is his friend Blair Crowley.

The two won first prize at the Royal Canadian Legion Halloween party in Campbellford, Ont., Saturday night for their outfits.

Mr. Nunn tells Toronto radio station AM640 that he doesn’t believe in the Ku Klux Klan and he’s surprised someone complained to police.

Will John Wall teach Ted Leonsis how to Dougie?

Yesterday, D.C. sports magnate Ted Leonsis made a bold promise to shore up ticket sales for his less popular team, The Wizards:

Remember when I preached that the Washington Capitals were like a growth stock?…Now we are totally sold out with a waiting list. Bad times became good times. The people that believed were rewarded.

I am here to tell you that about the Washington Wizards. Buy your tickets now, please. Sign up for season tickets…Get in early. See our own home grown and developed stars grow up before your very eyes.

Sorry, I had to get up on a soap box. We need your help. We play this Saturday night. We need and want you to be in attendance. The team plays better in front of a sold out building. Come support the team…

When we have a total paid sellout this season, I will do the “Dougie” – I promise.

Leonsis was inspired to embarrass himself in such a unique way because his franchise player, John Wall, infamously did the Dougie during his introduction at the Wizards’ home opener.

Leonsis challenge to the fans spread quickly over Twitter last night (as it should!) but there’s a catch– popular teams don’t count:

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