#HowardTaughtMe that just cuz we're all Black doesn't mean were all the same. Most diverse group of people here
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WHBC830am
Around the City
Urban affairs, neighborhoods, subways and the people who are affected by them all.
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Which D.C. Ward Has The ‘Ideal’ Racial Make-Up?
Lamenting over D.C.’s changing mix of residents (read: more white people, less black people) have raised some questions: isn’t this just increased diversity? And isn’t that supposed to be a good thing?
Courtland Milloy included this interesting point in a Tuesday column:
“Surveys show that when asked, blacks, on average, say the ‘ideal’ neighborhood racial composition would be about 30 to 35 percent black,” said Roderick J. Harrison, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Howard University.
Why? Because blacks derive significant benefits from living among middle-class white people, such as better city services, better schools and higher-quality stores.
Moreover, 30 percent is large enough for blacks to create a comfort zone that blunts the effects of white prejudice but small enough not to trigger white flight.
A 2009 study by researchers at New York University noted that “the strongest predictor of resistance to racial integration among whites is prejudice, whereas the strongest predictor of black avoidance of white neighborhoods is fear of discrimination.”
Flickr: Bill McNeal
Ward 1, which includes neighborhoods such as Columbia Heights, is D.C.'s most racially diverse area.
So which D.C. neighborhoods most reflect this “ideal mix?” It seems Ward 1 comes closest; although no one group maintains a majority there, 40.8 percent of residents are white, 31.5 percent are black and 20.8 percent are Hispanic or Latino. As for the socioeconomic makeup of the ward, 41 percent of households make $75,000 or more a year; 28 percent make $35,000 to $74,999 a year; and 31 percent make below $34,999.
But you still have to live in the neighborhood in order to derive the benefits that more whites and richer people bring. Nordlie1, a commenter on a DCentric post explaining why so many black residents have left D.C., writes:
“Losing a majority (of black folks) ” “More diverse (white folks)” = (politically correct:) gentrification. All the same. Bad thing when it displaces poor black people.
On Your Mind: A Shooting Near U Street
Flickr: IntangibleArts
14th and V Streets, NW.
Shots were fired at a busy intersection near U Street today. Two men were wounded in a drive-by shooting; neither had life-threatening injuries, according to Council member Jim Graham. A woman told NBC that a stray bullet hit the window of her apartment above Busboys and Poets while she was home having lunch. A conversation about whether the shooting would have gotten as much coverage had it been in a poor neighborhood ensued on Twitter.
Capital Bikeshare: 5 New Stations May Go East of the River
Captial Bikeshare is poised to expand by 25 stations and the District Department of Transportation released a map today showing potential sites for the expansion of the system.
The new stations will be picked out of a list of 55 possibilities, including five sites East of the River in Wards 7 and 8. Why so few proposed sites in such a large swath of the District?
Part of the reason seems to be the amount of density needed to support stations, as well as demand. It’s well documented that use is low East of the River and the demand in Downtown is quite high. We spoke with DDOT spokesman John Lisle a few weeks ago to get more thoughts on how the agency will pick where bike stations go, and he said there are definitely “competing interests” at hand.
DDOT
Few stations exist East of the Anacosita River (in red).
Are White Men this Recession’s Quiet Sufferers?
This week’s Newsweek coverage story “Can Manhood Survive the Recession?” paints a grim picture for educated, white men:
Through the first quarter of 2011, nearly 600,000 college-educated white men ages 35 to 64 were unemployed, according to previously unpublished Labor Department stats. That’s more than 5 percent jobless—double the group’s pre-recession rate. That might not sound bad compared with the plight of younger, less-educated workers and minorities, but it’s a historic change from the last recession, when about half as many lost their oxford shirts. The number of college-educated men unemployed for at least a year is five times higher today than after the dotcom bubble.
Flickr: Wirawat Lian-udom
White men are faring better than most in this recession.
If the idea is to have a competition over who has it the worst, the numbers make it quite clear: that’s one contest white men aren’t going to win. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the unemployment rate among whites was 8 percent in January — that’s almost half of what it was for blacks, 15.7 percent. Latinos didn’t fare well either with an unemployment rate of 11.9 percent.
Here in D.C., the unemployment rate citywide was 9.6 percent in January. In predominately black Wards 7 and 8, it ranged between 20 to 18 percent, and in predominately white Ward 3, it was 3.6 percent.
Raheem Jackson’s Death and Scary Walks Home
Flickr: Barjack
The tragic circumstances surrounding the April 7th shooting death of a popular H.D. Woodson High School student point to a challenge that many of D.C.’s kids face as they seek to have active, healthy lives.
Raheem Jackson, 16, was reportedly trying to buy a gun from someone who robbed and killed him instead. Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy wrote that
… If true, he would not have been the first otherwise law-abiding youngster who felt the need to carry a firearm for protection.
A star basketball player at Woodson, he’d leave practice long after sundown and have anxious walks home in the dark. Many students have refused to participate in extracurricular school activities because it just isn’t safe to be out at night.
As noted by Homicide Watch D.C., Jackson had even written a poem about his scary walks home, which was published by his school newspaper The Insider:
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The Loss of Communities and Cultural Memory
Flickr: Washington Area Bicyclist Association
Ken Archer published a thought-provoking post in Greater Greater Washington — “True urbanism must come with a big tent“– about how race intersects with smart growth:
Urbanism can and should command a broader constituency, including families, the elderly and the poor and working-class…Prominent amongst the benefits that flow from density plus proper planning and development are the freedom to participate in diverse communities of cultural depth and richness.
Kunstler, Duany and Jacobs bemoan the damage done to cultural institutions sustained by cities as a result of suburban sprawl. Yet urbanists in DC don’t bemoan the loss of communities and cultural memory when neighborhoods turnover their residents – it’s just the free market at work.
These same authors praise the generational and socioeconomic diversity that is possible in cities. Jacobs writes that “cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
There’s a robust discussion occurring in the comments, as well.
D.C. Needle Exchange: What a Budget Axe Could Have Done
Flickr: Staxnet
D.C. needle exchange providers are breathing a collective sigh of relief after news broke yesterday that the impending temporary budget bill wouldn’t cut their funding after all.
But the possible loss of such funding spurred us to ask: how do needle exchanges work, anyway and who would be most affected if such a cut went through?
A few organizations in the District run needle exchange programs, including Helping Individual Prostitutes Service (HIPS), which works with commercial and informal sex workers in the District. Executive director Cyndee Clay says her group works with about 1,000 people a year, exchanged 8,000 syringes in March and about 65,000 in 2010.
Different providers handle needle exchange differently. For HIPS, clients register and then can exchange dirty needles for an equal number of sterile ones. In addition to the exchange, HIPS workers often take the opportunity to provide health counseling and other drug intervention services.
The majority of clients are African Americans and they are about evenly divided among women, men and transgender men and women, says Clay.
“These populations often never go through the door of a social agency, so those people would effectively be cut off from any services except for law enforcement” if needle exchanges ceased, Clay says.
Who is Tagging the Red Line?
Red Line D.C. Project/Katrina Paz
Saaret Yoseph has been riding the Red Line since she was a kid, and for years she casually observed the graffiti scrawled along the route from Silver Spring to Union Station. But then she became curious about it. Who was doing this?
“Around last spring or last summer, I kept seeing this one name, Ju,” she says. “He would always have images next to his tags, like Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or Kanye West bears, and I just got really, really curious about this one tag. It became kind of a personal hunt but at the same time I became very curious as to what other people thought about it.”
She started talking with a variety of folks: graffiti writers, artists, community organizers, D.C. officials and others, and the conversations weren’t just about art. Discussions about public space, access, revitalization versus blight and D.C.’s changing neighborhoods were all intertwined with the graffiti seen on the Red Line. Thus began The Red Line D.C. Project, Yoseph’s documentary project and associated blog that proclaims “in Washington, D.C., the most accessible art form isn’t in the museums. it’s on the Metro.”
“I’m hoping I’m representative of other commuters who want to have a talk back. The way graffiti is, it’s kind of this one-way conversation,” Yoseph says.
She is now using the project as a way to launch a dialogue (it’s partially funded by nonprofit Words Beats & Life) and she has even folded it into her master’s coursework at Georgetown University, where she is earning a degree in communication, culture and technology.
Yoseph sees graffiti “almost in the same way I look at street signs. For me, it’s what’s the difference between this and looking at Ben Ali Way? It’s really just a marker of the people who have been there and existing in that space.”
One of the things that has most surprised Yoseph is the demographic profile of many — but not all — of the Red Line’s most prominent graffiti writers: white teens or young adults living in Maryland suburbs.
As for why that’s the case, Yoseph isn’t so sure.
“There’s plenty more people to talk to, and more graffiti writers I want to chat with. I’m kind of an outsider coming into it,” she says. “For me, it’s almost about asking ‘why?’ to everything.”
The Power of Perception, the Privilege of Passing
On Friday, Elahe published a post about how fluid racial identity is for people who identify as Hispanic or Latino. Recently, the New York Times unintentionally reminded us of such fluidity when it profiled four local pundits who’ve “made it” despite their youth and facility with new media–all of them were male, “white” and friends with each other. The well-circulated piece, which starred Ezra Klein, Brian Beutler, Dave Weigel and Matt Yglesias touched a nerve:
Rebranding myself as Matteo Iglesias to help evade mockery for all-white, all-male NYT profile of "young" pundits.
@mattyglesias
mattyglesias
But wait, there was more, as Elahe pointed out when she quoted Yglesias in her post:
When the New York Times recently did a piece on me, Ezra Klein, Brian Beutler, and Dave Weigel exactly zero people complained about the massive over-representation of people of Latin American ancestry that reflected. People saw it as a profile of four white dudes. Which is what it was. But my dad’s family is from Cuba, Ezra’s dad’s family is from Brazil, and Brian’s mom’s family is from Chile.
DCentric reader Keith posed an interesting question, in response to that clarification:
Isn’t there a difference between being a White-skinned Latino who identifies as Latino first and foremost and having a Latino and White parent and being White-skinned? I don’t know that any of these bloggers self-identify as Latino…
My initial reaction to Keith’s query: “not really”. Every day I am reminded that how I choose to identify myself is largely irrelevant to the people I encounter, because their perception of my appearance trumps–and thus influences–my reality. I may classify myself as a second-generation, South Asian American of Malayalee Christian descent, but that is almost never what others see.
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