Around the City

Urban affairs, neighborhoods, subways and the people who are affected by them all.

Key topics in this category:

RECENT POSTS

May 19, 2011 | 3:09 PM | By

‘Will Work for $44 Million’

Some guerrilla marketing hit D.C.’s streets this morning with young, suited men promoting HBO’s film “Too Big To Fail,” as tweeted by @PeoplesDistrict.

Courtesy of Danny Harris/People's District

A promoter for HBO's "Too Big To Fail" holds this sign up at 14th and I streets NW Thursday morning.

The signs may seem more appropriate on Wall Street, where financial executives are more likely to pull in multimillion dollar salaries, than in downtown D.C. But there are definitely people living or working in the District who aren’t doing so bad for themselves. Contrast that with the city’s poverty rates: D.C. has one of the highest percentages of children living in poverty (29.4 percent) and seniors living in poverty (14.6 percent).

FILED UNDER: Media, The People, Wealth
May 19, 2011 | 9:58 AM | By

Program Serving At-Risk Vietnamese Youth May Have to Shutter its Doors

Elahe Izadi

Youth participants and volunteers help each other with homework after school at the Vietnamese American Community Service Center.

A group of 15 mostly Vietnamese youth trickle into the dimly-lit basement of the Josephine Butler Parks Center on a recent Thursday afternoon. After snacking on cookies and chips, they take their places at a long table. Some pull out school books and they casually partner up, speaking a mix of Vietnamese and English.

Some are new arrivals to the United States, others are veterans of the Vietnamese American Community Service Center, where they perfected their English and learned more about Vietnamese culture during after-school and summer sessions.

The basement, rented by VACSC, once hosted a group of 50 kids. But due to recent budget cuts, VACSC had to let go of four of its staffers and the after-school program had to reduce in size, which is now geared toward serving older kids. President Hien Vu is the only full time staff member left, and she’s taken on everything from counseling Vietnamese adults on how to apply for Medicare to translating for students and parents.

Angela Lam is a volunteer who comes by VACSC often to help tutor students in subjects such as English. She said the group of youth in the program represent “the epitome of the Asian-American experience,” in that most are low-income and have parents with limited English proficiency or no English proficiency.

“There’s kind of a myth that all of the Asians left D.C. But these kids are still here,” she said. “These kids attend all these D.C. public schools that are mostly Latino and black… A lot of these kids are the only Asian faces in their schools.”

That’s been Tony Nguyen’s experience. The 16-year-old Woodrow Wilson High School junior said that being Vietnamese in D.C., “it’s pretty much a struggle. You’re a minority in school.”

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: The People, VACSC, Vietnamese Americans
May 18, 2011 | 2:12 PM | By

D.C. Youth On Mixed-Race Ancestry: It’s Complicated

Students of School Without Walls in D.C. speak about their personal and cultural identities in “Finding Self: Asian America’s Youth.” The short film, produced by  Dana Tai Soon Burgess & Co.’s Asian American Youth Program, profiles multiracial and mixed-Asian ancestry students. We’ve written before about how multiracial residents fit into D.C.’s landscape, but as these youth point out, mixed identities often go unacknowledged by others. One student states:

“There’s genetic identity, there’s cultural identity, there’s who you are compared to everyone around you. People expect everyone to be a single thing, like you can only be Asian, or someone can only be white, or only black or whatever. And I think everyone in that sense is a hybrid. No one is like a pure Asian, or a pure American.”


And sometimes other people’s perceptions trump your own reality. One student talks about her Chinese ancestry, but then mentions:

“People who are full Chinese never think I’m Chinese. Like they just straight up don’t believe me when I say I’m a quarter Chinese. They just say, ‘No, you’re white.’ It doesn’t really bother me because I know I’m Chinese and I have a relationship with my Chinese relatives.”

FILED UNDER: Culture, The People, Multiracial, School Without Walls, Youth
May 18, 2011 | 1:04 PM | By

Reducing Racial Infant Mortality Rate Disparities– On Wheels

Courtesy of Jessica Gould

D.C's maternal mobile unit parked in Anacostia.

This post comes courtesy of WAMU Web producer Dana Farrington.

For many women of color in D.C., having a health baby is a challenge unto itself.

The city’s infant mortality rates show marked disparities that cut across racial and class lines. One way the city is looking to address the racial gap is through the D.C. Health Department’s maternal mobile unit, a clinic-on-wheels that drives to the poorest parts of the city — its funded to serve Wards 5 through 8 — to offer pregnancy tests and connect expectant moms with adequate prenatal care.

The unit, which receives funding from the federal Healthy Start program, had to be taken off of the streets for six months for maintenance. It’s been back in commission since February, and 67 residents have received service on the unit since.

WAMU reporter Jessica Gould spoke to Tamika, a 17-year-old Anacosita resident who received a pregnancy and HIV test once it came back in service. She told her that more women should follow her lead:

“So we can know… ‘Cause a lot of people don’t take time out and go to the doctor. For us to have this on the street you could just walk up and take 20 minutes to get tested and you’ll know.”

In D.C. the infant mortality rate was 10.9 deaths per every 1,000 live births in 2008, compared to the national rate of 6.9. The District’s rate is comparable to other large U.S. cities, but it’s the worst when up against the 50 states [PDF]. D.C. also ranks poorly when it comes to infants born with low birth weight.

But the outlook is worse for black women. In D.C., black women had an infant mortality rate of 17.2 deaths per every 1,000 live birth in 2007 — more than 4.5 times the rate for white women. The rate for Hispanic women in the District was 9.4

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: The People, D.C. Department of Health, Infant Mortality Rate
May 17, 2011 | 1:53 PM | By

Tweet of the Day, 05.17

@DCntrc for all the bias against renters they are more tight knit than single family homeowners, i think.
May 17, 2011 11:34 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@anc7c04
Sylvia C. Brown

This tweet was sent in response to our post on tightly-knit communities in Anacostia.

FILED UNDER: Media, The People, Renters
May 16, 2011 | 3:40 PM | By

In Your Words– Psychology Today on Black Women and Beauty

Psychology Today blogger and evolutionary scientist Satoshi Kanazawa set off a firestorm of tweets today with his post, “Why are black women less physically attractive than other women?”:

science also proved the earth was flat... so i can't be that mad that they "proved" black women less attractive...
May 16, 2011 12:21 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@dscribefreeman
David Meares

A collection of local reactions, below the jump.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: The People, Racial Divide, Social Media, Twitter, Women
May 16, 2011 | 3:26 PM | By

On Asking ‘Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive?’

Talk about a problematic question: in a blog post on Psychology Today’s website, Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, wonders why black women are less physically attractive.

If you try to look at the post, you’re out of luck. It was published on Sunday, but in an email to DCentric, a Psychology Today editor confirms that the post was permanently removed from the website for editorial reasons. The publication had no official comment on the post, but the move came on Monday afternoon after Kanazawa’s writing had already caused a firestorm on Twitter.

Screenshot: Psychology Today

Satoshi Kanazawa's blog post on black women and beauty was taken down permanently.

Kanazawa developed his question using data from the Add Health study, in which a representative sample set of adolescent Americans have been interviewed three times in the past seven years. At the end of each interview, the interviewer rated the physical attractiveness of the participant on a five-point scale. This total was then averaged out, and based on that, black women were found to be less attractive than their white, Asian and Native American counterparts. Kanazawa calls this an “objective” rating.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Media, The People, Psychology Today, Race
May 13, 2011 | 12:00 PM | By

‘Ghetto:’ Five Reasons to Rethink the Word

Kyra Deblaker-Gebhard over on The Hill is Home recounted a run-in she had last weekend near her Capitol Hill home. She exchanged words with a woman who was upset that another car was parked so close to her BMW. Deblaker-Gebhard writes:

… Admittedly, this wasn’t my most shining moment: I immediately jumped to the defense of the parked car’s owner, and not that of the driver irritated with the parking job.  I yelled from my window a suggestion: that they not drive into the city if they were worried about their precious import.  In return, the driver was quick with the insults, first claiming that she lives in the city (then she should be used to the bumps and bruises a bumper receives, right?); then calling me names; and finally, saying that she would never come back to my ghetto neighborhood again.  That’s when I got really angry—she called my neighborhood “ghetto.” After I told her never to come back to the ghetto, she sped off in her BMW and I closed my window and continued to stew in my anger.

Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images

One of the first ghettos dates back to 1555 in Rome, Italy. Pope Paul IV decreed all Jews must live in this confined area.

The term “ghetto” dates back to describing the neighborhoods to which Jewish Europeans were confined. More recently, it’s been used in the U.S. to describe urban neighborhoods where minority groups live out of economic pressures. But “ghetto” now means a much more than that. Here are five reasons to reconsider using the term: Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Around the City
May 12, 2011 | 3:30 PM | By

Eating Healthy is not Always an Option

Flickr: mswine

In “If You Haven’t Been On Food Stamps, Stop Trying to Influence Government Policy,” Latoya Peterson leads with a request to bloggers and journalists to “stop the madness” with regards to how we write about government assistance. Further down in her essay, she shares this haunting anecdote:

I have a memory, from long ago, where I am sitting in the parking lot of a McDonalds, with my mom, trying to count out 63 pennies from the floor around the car, the change jar, and the pavement around the car in order to purchase two hamburgers from McDonalds for our evening meal. Cheap food exists for a reason. 63 cents doesn’t go far in the grocery store if you want a hot meal, and have no where for food prep. (Something that people also conveniently forget about – a lot of eating well on a budget requires prep with at least a hot plate, running water, and basic utensils. If you don’t have these things, you have to eat ready made food. Needless to say, living out of a car doesn’t provide you with consistent access to these things.) But a whole hamburger meant a lot to a seven-year-old stomach that was going to go hungry…These are broke people choices.

I’m sure that if I shared this story on the NYT Health blog, there would be people berating my mother for buying me a hamburger and not, say, an apple or something. Or maybe some dried lentils we could have soaked overnight on the carburetor using a car fluid funnel and woken up to a wonderfully healthy and cheap pinch of beans.

Peterson also discusses food deserts, race and class and how unrealistic it is to expect “farmer’s markets to magically replace a missing food infrastructure.” Read the rest, here.

FILED UNDER: The People, Food, Privilege, Race and Class
May 12, 2011 | 2:42 PM | By

U.S. Population Growth Minority-Driven, But Not in D.C.

Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images

Official U.S. Census form.

DCentric sister blog Multi-American directs our attention to the Pew Center’s Daily Number feature for today that shows the country’s population growth between 2000 and 2010 was almost exclusively driven by minorities:

Overall, racial and ethnic minorities accounted for 91.7% of the nation’s population growth over the past 10 years.

The non-Hispanic white population has accounted for only the remaining 8.3% of the nation’s growth. Hispanics were responsible for 56% of the nation’s population growth over the past decade. There are now 50.5 million Latinos living in the U.S. according to the 2010 Census, up from 35.3 million in 2000, making Latinos the nation’s largest minority group and 16.3% of the total population. There are 196.8 million whites in the U.S. (accounting for 63.7% of the total population), 37.7 million blacks (12.2%) and 14.5 million Asians (4.7%). Six million non-Hispanics, or 1.9% of the U.S. population, checked more than one race.

That certainly isn’t the case here in D.C., where population growth was driven by non-Hispanic whites. Between 2000 and 2010, the black population declined and the Hispanic population rose from just 7.9 percent of the city’s population 9 percent.  But we can look to the surrounding suburban counties to see a more representative picture of what’s happening across the country.

FILED UNDER: The People, Census, Pew Center