September 2, 2011 | 12:29 PM | By

On Sagging Pants and Race

Flickr: Susan NYC

Pull your pants up, was the advice given to a young man asking about job prospects during last month’s National Night Out event led by D.C. Council member Yvette Alexander and D.C. Fire Chief Kenneth Ellerbee, according to The Root DC.

The adults offered one place to start: pull up your pants.

“Oh, you’ve got Ralph Lauren,” Alexander told one of the young men. “I guess you want to show that off.”

What would happen, she asked, if they dressed like that and a nice, white lady walked by. “Do you think she might cross the street?” Alexander said.

One reader, MSTanya, took issue with Alexander’s attempt to illustrate her point:

Why did it have to be a “nice white lady” who walked by. Aren’t there any nice African American ladies who could have been used as an example? Yes, there definitely are, but as per the norm, it’s always a white person being looked at as nice…

We’re still waiting to hear back from the Council member’s office regarding her remarks.

According to “Anthropology off the Shelf,” low-slung pants are a symbol of incarceration. The book notes that “sagging as a style was adopted from prison culture, where belts are prohibited and ill-fitting prison garb is the norm.”

FILED UNDER: Around the City, Culture, The People
September 2, 2011 | 12:00 PM | By

“Why a Washington-Baltimore game sparked Redskins’ segregation policy protests”

A look back to 1961, when locals protested a match between the Baltimore Colts and the Washington Redskins, the only segregated NFL team at the time. And, yes, they lost to the Colts.


Fifty years ago this summer, Marie Young took time out from her normal civil rights activism to picket a football game. “We picketed a lot of places,” recalls Young. “But it usually wasn’t about football.”

— www.washingtoncitypaper.com

September 2, 2011 | 10:00 AM | By

MLK Library To Close On Sundays

Paul Simpson / Flickr

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library is located at 9th and G streets, NW.

D.C. libraries offer major resources to residents, particularly for those lacking computers or Internet access. And the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library, the system’s largest and it’s central library, stays quite busy.

But starting Oct. 2, patrons will have to look elsewhere on Sundays. The library will join the city’s other neighborhood libraries, which have been closed on Sundays since last year.

The new hours at MLK  are a result of a budget shortfall; this particular library has about $700,000 less to work with this coming fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1.

But library spokesman George Williams says that Sunday has been one of the least busy days for the MLK library, when it’s only open from 1 to 5 p.m. The neighborhood libraries, however, had been quite popular on Sundays until 2010 when Sunday hours were cut.

“When the decision was made to close Sundays at neighborhood libraries, patrons made the adjustment” and started coming on other days, Williams says.

FILED UNDER: Around the City, Culture, Digital Divide, Libraries
September 2, 2011 | 7:11 AM | By

Tasty Morning Bytes – Teaching Arabic, How to Talk About Race and a Giant Inconvenience

Good morning, DCentric readers! Before you head off to your holiday weekend, check out these links:

Glenn Beck: Is The Term ‘Colored’ Really Such A Bad Thing? “[Beck] added that all the PC labels we have for another end up making Americans afraid to speak with one another, because Americans don’t inherently want to offend one another. We want to say the ‘right’ thing and take the kindest course of action…His advice? Have no fear and ‘dismiss these human rights frauds.’” (Mediaite)

Chicago school to expand Arabic offerings to district, community In the words of the Principal: “When I get the question from parents ‘why?’ I say regardless of how you feel about it, we’re involved in the Middle East and the more that people here know about language and culture, the better off we’re all going to be. We know that there are not enough Arabic speakers…And it seems to be something everyone understands is a need but few people put into place.” (WBEZ Chicago Public Media)

Practice Makes Progress (How to Talk About Race) “Our ways of dealing with race don’t progress as a nation because we don’t have momentum carrying us. Something bad happens (truth), we talk about it for a while, and then conversation dies out until another bad thing happens (i.e. a hate crime). Our national dialogue never gets practiced because we talk in spurts. In pockets, people initiate dialogues on race all the time (see activists, academia, or other such educational entities). We have to figure out how to connect the pockets so it becomes a more wide-spread conversation.” (Racialicious)
Continue reading →

September 1, 2011 | 2:03 PM | By

Why D.C.’s Latino Population is Up When It’s Black Population is Down

Cameron Nordholm / Flickr

A woman waves the Salvadoran flag during Fiesta DC in Mount Pleasant, one of D.C.'s longtime Latino centers.

Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant, traditionally the center of the D.C.’s Latino community, are much different places now than they were 20 years ago. Big box stores sit upon formerly vacant lots. Pupuserias now have vegan cafes as neighbors. House values have exploded. Ward 1, where these neighborhoods are located, has lost more than 2,000 Latinos over the past decade.

Travel a few blocks south and you see a similar transformation. The U Street area, formerly “Black Broadway,” was 77 percent black; it’s now only 15 percent black. Many longtime residents who had bought homes at modest prices have sold them for large sums. Others were priced out by rising rents. Luxury high-rise condo buildings have sprouted up.

But while the number of African Americans throughout D.C. is declining — by 11 percent over the past decade –the number of Latinos actually increased, by about 21 percent. This growth happened despite the fact that rapidly increasing housing prices have particularly affected longtime Latino neighborhoods, according to the District’s 2009 State of Latinos report.

So why is D.C.’s Latino community growing while it’s black community shrinks?

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: The People, 2010 Census, D.C. Population, Hispanics
September 1, 2011 | 12:09 PM | By

DCentric Picks: NSO Labor Day Concert

Elvert Barnes / Flickr

A view from the Reflecting Pool of the 2006 NSO Labor Day Concert.

What: National Symphony Orchestra‘s tribute to the legends of D.C. music.

When: Gates open at 5 p.m. and the the show starts at 8 p.m., Sunday.

Where: West lawn of the U.S. Capitol. The show will be moved to the Kennedy Center if it rains (call 202-416-8114 after 2:30 p.m.).

Cost: Free.

Why you should go: There are two D.C.’s, but both of them will come together for this event. When else can you hear go-go played on the U.S. Capitol lawn, and by our nation’s symphony orchestra no less? The music of D.C.’s own Duke Ellington, John Philip Sousa and Chuck Brown will be showcased. The show will also be a sort of birthday celebration for Brown, the “Godfather of Go-Go,” who turns 75 this year.

Other events to consider: Saturday is the last day to take advantage of Free Summer Saturdays at the Corcoran Gallery of Art at 500 17th St., NW. Admission, which normally costs $10, is free on Saturday.

FILED UNDER: Culture, Delightful City, Museums, Chuck Brown, DCentric Picks, Duke Ellington, Go-go, John Philip Sousa, National Symphony Orchestra
September 1, 2011 | 11:01 AM | By

“Recent College Graduates Wait for Their Real Careers to Begin”

According to this New York Times article, graduating from an Ivy League school might lead to waiting tables instead of board rooms– at least while the economy is troubled:


“We did everything we were supposed to,” said Stephanie Morales, 23, who graduated from Dartmouth College in 2009 with hopes of working in the arts. Instead she ended up waiting tables at a Chart House restaurant in Weehawken, N.J., earning $2.17 an hour plus tips, to pay off her student loans. “What was the point of working so hard for 22 years if there was nothing out there?” said Ms. Morales, who is now a paralegal and plans on attending law school.

Some of Ms. Morales’s classmates have found themselves on welfare. “You don’t expect someone who just spent four years in Ivy League schools to be on food stamps,” said Ms. Morales, who estimates that a half-dozen of her friends are on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

— www.nytimes.com

September 1, 2011 | 7:19 AM | By

Tasty Morning Bytes – The Ivy League’s Lies, Racial Profiling and Our Mixed First Family

Good morning, DCentric readers! Ready for some links?

Ivy League Fooled: How America’s Top Colleges Avoid Real Diversity “Call it the Ivy League’s dirty little secret: While America’s most elite colleges do in fact make it a point to promote ethnic diversity on their campuses, a lot of them do so by admitting hugely disproportionate numbers of wealthy immigrants and their children rather than black students with deep roots—and troubled histories—in the United States.” (Good)

Racial profiling and terrorism: If you want to screen Muslims, you’ll have to target blacks. “The logic of Muslim profiling is simple. First, Muslims are more likely than non-Muslims to plan or commit acts of terror against the United States. Second, Muslims are more likely than non-Muslims to sympathize with al-Qaida or believe that suicide bombing can be justified…a new survey report from Pew adds a twist to the data: Statistically, the group most deserving of scrutiny under this rationale isn’t Muslims. It’s black Muslims.” (Slate)

Grandma Bunks With Jobless Kids as Multigenerational Homes Surge “The U.S. is experiencing a surge in the multigenerational households that were once a common feature of American life, and Hispanic and Asian families are driving the trend, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released this month. The number of such households, defined as those with three or more generations living under one roof, grew to almost 5.1 million in 2010, a 30 percent increase from 3.9 million in 2000, the data show.” (bloomberg.com)
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August 31, 2011 | 2:37 PM | By

D.C.-Area Gets Blacker While City Gets Whiter

Stacey Huggins / Flickr

D.C. is losing its black population. For more than five decades, the District has been Chocolate City, a place where African Americans were the majority. But that’s changed — this year, the black population likely dipped under the 50-percent mark. At the same time, the city’s white population has grown; the percentage of white folks living in the city is the highest it’s been since Nixon was in office [PDF]. Some neighborhoods that were nearly all black now have more of a mix; others, like just north of U Street, went from mostly black to mostly white.

Some have declared that the chocolate has melted. Perhaps, but it’s not going far.

A report released Wednesday by the Brookings Institute shows that while our city’s black population has decreased, our region’s black population has actually increased over the past decade, up by 12.4 percent.  And our metro area is one of only three in the nation where African Americans make up the single largest racial group, after whites. Even the New York City area, which still has the nation’s largest black population, has Hispanics as its largest group, after whites.

Why are there less black folks in D.C? Some observers point to the rising cost of living in “up-and-coming” and gentrifying neighborhoods, areas where black residents have been displaced by high rents or have sold their now-pricey homes. Some black residents, particularly those from communities east of the Anacostia River, left for the suburbs, for bigger houses, safer streets and better schools. These factors (and others) have contributed to making our suburbs blacker, while our city has gotten whiter.

For the first time this year, our region joins 21 other metro areas in the country as “majority-minority,” places where whites don’t make up the majority of the population. The thing is, D.C. proper has fit that description for some time, and it still does. But for how long?

This post originally stated that African Americans were the D.C.-metro area’s largest racial group. It’s non-Hispanic whites.

August 31, 2011 | 2:07 PM | By

“Maya Angelou says King memorial inscription makes him look ‘arrogant’”

The side of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial is emblazoned with this quote: “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.” But that’s not what King said; it’s a paraphrased version of this longer quote:

“If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.”

Poet Maya Angelou, who was a consultant on the memorial design, has now taken issue with this paraphrased version. What’s your take — is the the quote fine as it is?


“The quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit,” Angelou, 83, said Tuesday. “He was anything but that. He was far too profound a man for that four-letter word to apply.

“He had no arrogance at all,” she said. “He had a humility that comes from deep inside. The ‘if’ clause that is left out is salient. Leaving it out changes the meaning completely.”

— www.washingtonpost.com