Race and Class

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October 6, 2010 | 2:01 PM | By

For Whom the Gallery Place Mosquito Buzzes…

I just learned that the “Mosquito”, an anti-loitering device which emits a high-pitched beeping that only young people can hear (supposedly) has been turned off at Gallery Place. I write “supposedly” because I’m a wizened old 35 and I could hear it, easily. It was meant to annoy (and thus discourage) the hordes of teens who congregate nearby– some residents think the youth are a nuisance, some business owners worry that they scare off customers. Now, after a month of meeping and beeping, the Mosquito is quiet because “a youth rights activist complained of age discrimination”. More:

The decision to install it at Gallery Place came after a meeting in July, at the office of D.C. Council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), between District officials and business owners who were concerned about the impact of loitering and lawlessness.

In a letter to The Washington Post and the city human rights office, Transwestern, the company that manages the Gallery Place retail, office and residential complex, said the District’s lack of an anti-loitering ordinance limits the ability of police to control crowds. According to the letter, Transwestern told the July meeting that drugs and stolen merchandise were being sold at the Metro entrance at Seventh and H streets; the company recommended the Mosquito as a deterrent to loitering.

Hey Transwestern– you may want to pay closer attention to what’s actually happening in the area. An employee who would only speak to me anonymously told me that the drug vending had nothing to do with teens. He said that while the young people could be disrespectful, loud or annoying, it was adults who were selling drugs. It’s easier to just blame pesky kids though, I get it.

FILED UNDER: Around the City, Race and Class, Teens
October 6, 2010 | 11:56 AM | By

Problematic Presidential Playlists

Nestorsam_

Obama on an iPod

Much has been made of the music on President Obama’s iPod. I saw one news story that made him seem like an old fogey who nostalgically partook in much classic rock; within an hour, I saw another which sounded (heh) the alarm about the Commander-in-Chief liking gangsta rap.

Now, there is this opinion piece, from the Wall Street Journal, calling out the President for listening to hip-hop because “that’s the wrong message for the president to be sending black America”.

For so many black Americans, Barack Obama is appealing and promising precisely because he represents a powerful, necessary alternative to Jay-Z’s version of blackness.

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FILED UNDER: Media, Race and Class
October 5, 2010 | 2:17 PM | By

“Expressing dissent through murder”

Kevin H.

Bryan Weaver has a powerful post up at Greater Greater Washington regarding Jamal Coates, gun violence and how such tragedy seems to replay itself on an endless loop.

Public officials will tell you that the crews have moved on to other parts of the city… so don’t believe your lying eyes. We have been here before, a high profile killing that grabs the up and coming part of the city. But then like collective amnesia we move on and forget.

The point being made in article after article is that last week’s murder happened in the rapidly gentrifying part of the city. But we can’t coffee-shop and bike-lane our way out of this tragedy. There are still numerous people in DC who have degenerated to the point of expressing dissent through murder and haven’t learned to disagree without becoming violently disagreeable, no matter where they live. But my hope is that the people who use those coffee shops and bike lanes can and will be the change — if they care enough to do so….

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FILED UNDER: The People, Crime, Gentrification, Gun Violence, Race and Class, U Street
October 1, 2010 | 4:20 PM | By

Pole positions; it’s all about class.

AHHfred

Aztec Pole Dancing. It is unrelated but everything else was NSFW!

I was reading The Hill when I came across an article in the “Capital Living” section titled, “Pole-sters: Capitol Hill women burn stress, stay in shape with ‘exoterobics’”. See what they did there? So punny, right? Anyway, I dove in while thinking, “it’s about pole-dancing or some flirty aerobics class”.  Then I got to this paragraph:

The exercise program is nothing to be ashamed of, Carroll, owner Michaela Brown and other clients insist. Its strip, pole, chairwork and floorwork classes are “really just…fitness class[es] with different equipment and in higher heels”…

Brown’s new studio opens Friday at 518 10th St. NE, the latest success in her quest to help women find “fun, creative ways to work out.” Though her exercise of choice may seem racy, “I approach pole-dancing strictly from a physical-fitness point of view,” Brown says, and she has already attracted women who work in Congress, the White House, executive agencies and other high-profile places..

And that’s when the weirdness of it all snuck up on me. “Nothing to be ashamed of”.

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FILED UNDER: Around the City, Race and Class
October 1, 2010 | 12:45 PM | By

Children who are “weighed down by a world of no”

nika2

WaPo Metro Columnist Petula Dvorak on “The grinding reality of growing up poor“:

The no of poverty in kids’ lives today means no new clothes, no bed, no sleeping past 5 a.m. or we won’t have time to take three buses to get to your school, no telling the guard at the Metro station that we’re sleeping there tonight, no after-school tutoring program designed just for you, because, the truth is, we can’t afford to get you there and back every day.

This is the daily reality for thousands of our children, especially African American children growing up in the District.

30% of D.C. kids are impoverished. Dvorak’s piece includes a glum story about a social worker who took her mentee to see “Karate Kid”; the teen loved the movie and the martial art so much, the social worker secured free lessons for her in two different neighborhoods– neither of which she could afford to travel to.

FILED UNDER: The People, Children, Poverty, Race and Class
September 30, 2010 | 3:30 PM | By

Hunger-Free Kids Act…would leave kids hungry

Justin Knol

SNAP cuts mean it would be hard to buy fresh fruit.

Annie Lowrey at The Washington Independent spoke to anti-Hunger activist Joel Berg about Congress’ attempt to cut Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (i.e. food stamps). The cuts are being made to fund a Child Nutrition bill championed by Michelle Obama. The whole article (which includes a transcript of Lowrey and Berg’s conversation) is a sobering read. Of course, I excerpted the saddest bits for you below (emphasis mine):

TWI: And what will the impact be for kids?

Berg: This cut is taking something away from every other meal for children in low-income families, to help get them a better lunch. Someone in the White House last week, I saw, claimed that the child-nutrition bill will dramatically reduce child obesity.

That’s ridiculous. They are cutting the budget from kids at home to pay for kids in school. If kids eat in school every day, in a year, that’s still only 16 percent of their meals, because there are weekends, there are holidays, there are nights, there is summer. There is no way that marginally improving 16 percent of your meals is going to dramatically change your diet — especially not if you are taking away from the rest.

People want to claim victory. They want to make exaggerated claims that the child-nutrition bill will help. The most heartbreaking thing about it, for advocates, is that this is supposed to be our great champion bill that was going to solve everything! We thought it would dramatically decrease child hunger. But, the fact is, you have hunger advocates lobbying against its passage. Our emotions are ranging from outraged to heartbroken. I’m really just gobsmacked that this happened.

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FILED UNDER: The People, Hunger, Money, Poverty, Race and Class, Schools
September 30, 2010 | 2:00 PM | By

Race and Education Reform

Wayan Vota

D.C. Charter School

The always eclectic PostBourgie blog asks “Should We Avoid Race When Discussing Education Reform?”

…in so many discussions about education reform — a topic that seems to be inescapable right now — the issue of race is avoided…

You can see this at play in the documentary Waiting for Superman, in which the achievement gap is mentioned, but only as it pertains to class. But there are racial disparities in student achievement, even when controlling for parental income. In fact, when the movie talks about the halcyon days of American education in the 1950’s and 1960’s, there’s no mention at all of school segregation or desegregation or how they’ve impacted how American schools function.

I’d also add that bringing up race means inviting one of those predictable conversations in which the problems facing youth of color are chalked up to dysfunctional pathology. Still, it seems hard to ignore the role race plays in the achievement gap, as the disparities in performance often persist even when when the black and brown kids are middle class with college-educated parents.

FILED UNDER: Education, Race and Class, Schools
September 27, 2010 | 5:18 PM | By

But wagging fingers is so satisfying and easy!

On September 22, some bloggers participated in a “virtual protest” called “No Wedding, No Womb”– an attempt to force a conversation about out-of-wedlock births in the black community. NPR’s Michel Martin spoke with Christelyn Karazin, the founder of NWNW on “Tell Me More”; Karazin told Martin that she felt like “we need to do something.” The ever thoughtful G.D. over at PostBourgie wasn’t impressed:

There are reasons besides the push’s barely masked antifeminism to be ambivalent about this whole endeavor. The movement has the stunty feel of holding funerals for (the “n-word”) or stomping on hip-hop CDs (‘member those?) with explicit lyrics; it’s taken a tricky issue and reduced it to a bunch of folks being showily indignant…You can’t really change broad social trends by appealing to people’s feelings; you have to actually change the conditions that inform the calculus by which people make the decisions they make. It’s annoying to have to even say this, but keeping black men out of jail or bringing up high school graduation rates or whatever might actually require more complex solutions than getting enough people to wag their fingers really, really hard.

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FILED UNDER: Race and Class
September 23, 2010 | 10:16 AM | By

Talking about, not to each other.

Yesterday, Prince of Petworth (a blog I respect greatly, run by Dan Silverman) published a guest post called “B.J. on the White People Moving in”, by Danny Harris of People’s District– another blog we’ll look at, later today. For now, I want to focus on PoP and the charged discussion this post generated; it got so hostile that at one point, commenters were attacking Silverman for even hosting it. What angered everyone so much? This:

“You can think what you want about what I am saying, but I see everyday how my neighborhood has changed, and how blacks and whites are treated differently. My neighbors, these white kids, threw a party with music until four in the morning with a hundred bikes locked up on the street that blocked people’s driveways and made a big mess. Didn’t no cops show up. I had a cook out with my friends in our backyard and the cops stormed through the alleyway and broke it up because we were being loud. How am I supposed to understand that? Tell me that I shouldn’t be angry about what I see. I’ve been living in this place my whole live and now some new comers tell me how to do what I do.

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FILED UNDER: Around the City, Gentrification, Race and Class