DCentric

A number of longtime black churches in D.C. are smack-dab in the middle of rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, such as John Wesley AME Zion on 14th Street NW. Many parishioners are older or no longer live in D.C., while many new neighbors are young and white.

But rather than fight the changes in their neighborhoods, some church leaders are exploring ways to remain relevant, The Washington Post reports. Wesley wants to rent its facilities for banquets and wedding rentals, and maybe even host jazz nights to attract new, mostly white, neighbors.

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• Source: The Washington Post

Terry Lynch, head of the Downtown Cluster of Congregations, said strong pastoral leadership is also crucial for “reaching out and embracing’’ new residents and new realities.

It often isn’t easy. Wesley says its new neighbors are welcome, but some recent arrivals complain about how church members double-park outside the church on Sunday mornings, or about how tough it is to get alcohol licenses for new restaurants. [Church member Clennie] Murphy said the church’s relationship with its new neighbors is improving. But so far, the recruits haven’t really materialized.

Read more at: www.washingtonpost.com

The lack of racial and gender diversity at Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority has come under scrutiny, particularly given that the semi-public agency is one of the region’s largest employers. All but 3 percent of Metro’s more than 3,000 bus and train drivers are black. Six of the drivers are white women.

The Washington Times interviewed dozens of current and former employees, some of whom have sued the agency for discrimination. The paper found a trend of black employees being paid more and promoted more quickly than white employees.

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• Source: Washingtontimes

Union President Jackie L. Jeter noted that the union isn’t in charge of hiring and said that whites, women and Hispanics must not be applying for jobs.

“If Caucasians or Hispanics want to put in for jobs, they have ample opportunity to apply — and once they become bus operators, they can go work in Southeast,” she said.

White women say those words are uttered repeatedly to those who apply for jobs and those in their first years, but that it is more of an attempt at intimidation than a reality.

Read more at: www.washingtontimes.com

The United States is becoming an increasingly diverse nation, and its surnames reflect that diversity, as shown in this National Geographic map. It documents the proliferation of certain last names.

The D.C.-area’s surnames mostly originate from England, Scotland and Wales. Travel westward, and surnames from Spanish, China and other regions become more common. Do you see your surname on the map? Click the link below to see more.

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• Source: Nationalgeographic
• Via: @AnnieLowrey

Unemployment in some D.C. neighborhoods is as high as 25 percent. At the same time, cranes fill the skies in pockets of the city, signaling economic activity. So why not encourage hiring unemployed D.C. residents for those projects?

That was the intent behind tightening the District’s hiring rules for projects receiving city money. But now builders and contractors say that the new hiring standards are impossible to meet because the city simply lacks qualified workers.

Such sentiments can be frustrating to those D.C. residents who have completed training programs but still have trouble finding work. But at the same time, many people do face major barriers to getting hired: one in 10 D.C. residents has a criminal record, and in Ward 8, which has the highest unemployment rate, one in five adults hasn’t completed high school.

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• Source: The Washington Post

The D.C. Building Industry Association has not yet decided whether to fight the new law, according to the group’s president, Ernie Jarvis. Jarvis, senior vice president at First Potomac Realty Trust, said he wasn’t sure how many projects each year would be affected by the new rules but said he hoped that the council would reconsider the hiring requirements because he didn’t think there were a sufficient number of qualified D.C. residents to fill those positions.

“We want to employ D.C. residents,” Jarvis said. “You have to first improve K-12 education.”

Read more at: www.washingtonpost.com

With the national spotlight on the Trayvon Martin story raising questions of racial stereotyping in the name of maintaining public safety, New York lawmakers are debating a police practice opponents say sanctions racial profiling. Under New York City’s stop-and-frisk practice, officers can stop, question and frisk people on the street deemed suspicious.

By and large, lawmakers who oppose the stop-and-frisk tactic are racial minorities, some of whom say they have been stopped by police because of their race. Many white lawmakers, however, have been silent on the issue or support the practice.

Gov. David A. Paterson, the state’s first black governor, told The New York Times that he’s been stopped three times by police. “It’s a feeling of being degraded. I think that’s what people who it hasn’t happened to don’t understand.”

Supporters and police officials have said that the practice helps reduce violence that has disproportionately affected black and Latino communities.

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• Source: Nytimes

“There’s more police assigned to a place like East New York than, say, a precinct in Riverdale,” said the Police Department spokesman, Paul J. Browne, “so the police are going to be in a position to observe suspicious behavior more frequently.”

The Police Department has said that it conducted a record 684,330 stops last year, and that 87 percent of those stopped were black or Hispanic. About 10 percent of the stops led to arrests or summonses and 1 percent to the recovery of a weapon, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has examined police data.

But the Police Department frames the numbers in a different way: last year, it said, it recovered 8,000 weapons, 800 of them handguns, via stops. And over the last decade, the number of murders has dropped by 51 percent, “in part because of stop, question and frisk,” Mr. Browne said.

Read more at: www.nytimes.com