Race and Class

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September 30, 2011 | 2:55 PM | By

There are Only 90 Doctors East of the River

Flickr: NCinDC

Howard University Hospital

If you reside in Columbia Heights, Dupont Circle or Friendship Heights, chances are, you live near a practicing physician. For D.C. residents who make their home east of the river, it’s a very different situation, according to a recent article in the Washington Post, which focused on a potential shortage of doctors in this city. One part of the article stood out to us; when it comes to a lack of practicing physicians, certain areas in D.C.- have it much worse than others.

In Ward 3, for example, there is an abundance of physicians, with “literally hundreds of doctors to choose from,” said Michael Williams, chief of health-care operations for the nonprofit D.C. Primary Care Association. But he said only 90 doctors list a business address east of the Anacostia River.

The District has a “severe mal-distribution of physicians” rather than a shortage, given that roughly 23 percent of the population lives east of the river but only a tiny fraction of physicians have a business location there, he said.

The Post reported that there are 4,000 full- or part-time physicians in D.C. but it’s important to keep in mind those doctors are sometimes seeing patients who work in the city, but live in Maryland or Virginia. So doctors who maintain a practice in the city are treating patients from across the region, which for locals makes finding a doctor even more challenging.

FILED UNDER: Around the City, Health, Health disparities, Race and Class
September 26, 2011 | 11:31 AM | By

Poverty By Race in D.C.

Sharon Drummond / Flickr

The District’s poverty rate — 19.9 percent — is the third highest in the nation. But the way that rate breaks down by race shows that not all groups are affected equally by poverty.

These figures come courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau, which recently released its American Community Survey 2010 estimates for poverty and race. (Keep in mind the figures have various margins of error.):

Poverty Rate Median Income
White  8.5% $99,220
Hispanic 14.7% $60,798
Asian 20.1% $77,098
Black 27.1% $37,430
 *American Community Survey 2010 Estimates

Kathryn Baer of Poverty and Policy also points out that the percentage of D.C.’s children living in poverty has risen to 30.4 percent, the second-highest childhood poverty rate in the country. Baer writes:

In short, these are mostly grim figures — and a far cry from the “one city” Mayor Gray envisions.

To my mind, the child poverty rate rings the loudest alarm bells because we’ve got volumes of research showing that children who live in poverty have much higher risks of poor health, developmental delays, academic difficulties and other problems;

These, the research shows, pave the way for lifelong poverty — and thus another generation of children who are born with two strikes against them.

FILED UNDER: The People, 2010 Census, Income disparity, Poverty, Race and Class
September 21, 2011 | 4:17 PM | By

‘You know there are two Twitters, right?’

You know there are two Twitters, right? #REM trending, but the top TT in the US is #youknowyoughetto. (Black Twitter 1, Other Twitter 0.)
September 21, 2011 1:49 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@jfdulac
J. Freedom du Lac

African Americans make up 25 percent of Twitter users, despite only making up about 12 percent of the general population, according to a 2010 Edison Research study.

Twitter is relatively “blacker” than the United States in part because of how easy it is to access the popular status-updating program via cell phones. Sending a tweet uses nearly the same number of characters — 140 — allowed for text messages. Half of all Twitter users send tweets with their mobile phones, and people of color are more likely to access the Internet using cellphones. So, high-speed internet is wonderful, but unnecessary for using Twitter.

Circling back to the tweet above from Washington Post reporter J. Freedom du Lac, it would behoove us to be mindful that black people may also listen to R.E.M., non-blacks are probably using or reading tweets classified with the “#youknowyoughetto“-hashtag and trending topics are not a zero-sum game. If “Troy Davis” is not trending, that doesn’t mean people aren’t talking about him. It just means more people are talking about “#newfacebook,” or whatever else is popular at any given moment on “black” and “other” Twitter.

FILED UNDER: Media, Race and Class, Social Media
September 9, 2011 | 3:01 PM | By

Do We ‘Demagogue By Demographics’ in School Debates?

D Sharon Pruitt / Flickr

Why did the city shut down failing middle schools in mostly black neighborhoods in Ward 5, while parents in gentrifying Ward 6 successfully negotiated plans to improve and keep their schools open? Was it that working and middle class black parents gave up on these neighborhood schools and didn’t fight to improve them or keep them open?

Maria Jones, a black Ward 5 parent, says no; she argued during a  City Council roundtable on Wednesday that wealthier Ward 6 residents wielded their influence and power them in getting approval on a plan to improve and keep their schools open, the Washington Post reports. Meanwhile, Ward 5 still has no middle schools.

City Councilman Tommy Wells (Ward 6) said that Ward 5 deserves good schools, but the ones it had were failing students. “I don’t think it’s helpful when we demagogue by demographics each other’s wards” he told Jones, adding that Ward 6 has large segments of public housing and homeless families:

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FILED UNDER: Education, Race and Class, The Root, Ward 5, Ward 6
August 31, 2011 | 11:11 AM | By

On Blaming the Black Middle Class

Flickr: afagen

“Stop Picking on the Black Middle Class; It didn’t abandon urban communities, despite what some say,” is the headline of Natalie Hopkinson’s article in The Root.

The piece references a recent Washington City Paper article, which asked “As parents in places like Capitol Hill embrace neighborhood schools, has D.C.’s black middle class given up on them?” Hopkinson answers, “If I were looking for a culprit in a racial group, the black middle class is the very last place that I’d be sniffing around.”

Hopkinson also describes her attempt to stop her next-door neighbor from selling crack. Confronting the man and shaming his customers didn’t work, so she called 311 and spoke to a black city employee who suggested that she do what the “white folks” did. Hopkinson wasn’t interested in that advice:

I was too furious to hear the rest. What in the Tiger Mom hell did my being white, black or purple have to do with the fact that this man was selling crack? “Just get someone over here!” I barked, and hung up the phone. Still, crickets.

Sadly, this attitude is par for the course in D.C. When you’re white — maybe especially in a very black city like Washington, D.C. — people pay attention. Some of it is the sheer novelty of whites living in previously all-black neighborhoods. Some of it is historical, and the socioeconomic position of whites in relation to blacks.

Whatever the reasons, as the city continues to gentrify, getting whiter and richer, progress is credited to white folks. It’s as if they deserve gold stars for consenting to live among the Negroes and cleaning up the Negro mess. Never mind the complicated cocktail of race, class and history that has shaped the city’s fortunes over the years. If you’re black, well … just try to be more like white people!

In the original City Paper feature, Jonetta Rose Barras wrote:
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FILED UNDER: The People, Gentrification, Race and Class
August 25, 2011 | 5:03 PM | By

Race, Class and Unplanned Pregnancies

Flickr: Trevor Bair

A recent study from the Guttmacher Institute found that while the overall rate of unintended pregnancies hasn’t changed, there are considerable disparities between the percentage of unplanned pregnancies experienced by wealthy and poor women in America.

Researchers also found a widening gap based on race and income. African-American women had the highest unintended pregnancy rate — more than twice as high as non-Hispanic white women.

Also, the rate of unintended pregnancies among low-income women rose, leading the researchers to conclude: “the rate for poor women was more than five times the rate for women in the highest income level.”

And about those women with higher incomes:

In contrast to the high rates among certain groups, some women in the United States are having considerable success timing and spacing their pregnancies. Higher-income women, white women, college graduates and married women have relatively low unintended pregnancy rates (as low as 17 per 1,000 among higher-income white women—one-third the national rate of 52 per 1,000), suggesting that women who have better access to reproductive health services, have achieved their educational goals or are in relationships that support a desired pregnancy are more likely than other women to achieve planned pregnancies and avoid those they do not want.

In the United States, almost half of all pregnancies are unintended. The Guttmacher Institute discovered a sobering fact; despite educational achievement, marital status, race or age, lower-income women still have higher rates of unplanned pregnancies. There was a 50 percent increase in the number of unintended pregnancies among women whose incomes were below the federal poverty line. Meanwhile, the rate of unplanned pregnancy among wealthier women decreased by 29 percent over the same period of time.

FILED UNDER: The People, Children, Poverty, Race and Class
August 19, 2011 | 11:28 AM | By

Five Takeaways ‘On the symbolism—and politics—of bicycling in D.C.’

Flickr: M.V. Jantzen

Bike lane, Dupont Circle

Is the anger in D.C. toward bicyclists misdirected? This week’s  Washington City Paper cover story explores the issue. Here are five points in the article that stand out:

Bike lanes are inaccurately characterized as a “welcome mat ”  for rich, white gentrifiers. Yet some of the locals in Ward 3,which includes Tenleytown, dislike bike lanes as much as people  in Ward 7, Fairlawn . So people of all races and classes can find common ground in their discomfort with bike lanes: “If anti-bike-lane sentiment were really about race or class, it’s unlikely that a white guy from Ward 3 and a black guy from Ward 7 would sound nearly exactly the same when they talk about the topic.” Reporter Alex Baca suggests the feeling comes from old-timers who see the bike lanes as a symbol of change.

Bikes are seen as oppositional to cars. Cars symbolize powerful things like freedom and the “American” way. Bicyclists are then tarred with an extremely negative brush: “Anyone with access to a Bruce Springsteen album knows there are deep veins of American culture where four wheels signify freedom, adulthood, and maybe even America itself. Those who shun automobiles, by extension, shun all of those things. Like grown-ups playing kickball or attending Twitter-fed snowball fights, such a rejection of traditional adulthood seems like the realm of the privileged.”

It’s the media’s fault. Quick, what’s an easy way to encapsulate complicated social dynamics, change, race, class and everything else that might cause tension in a city? Bike lanes! “David Alpert, editor of the blog Greater Greater Washington, suggests the brouhaha was propped up by media outlets looking for a quick way to frame last year’s mayor’s race. ‘I think to some extent it became an easy shorthand for people writing about race relations and about divisions in D.C.,’ he says.”

D.C. is not special. People love to compare the District to New York City, which isn’t rushing to embrace bike lanes, either. “Look at New York, where transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan has been vilified in Park Slope (where brownstones sell for nearly $2 million) and Staten Island (a stronghold of the white ethnic middle class) alike for installing lanes.”

A key reason why some residents are against bike lanes has nothing to do with race or class: They simply weren’t consulted first. A lack of outreach or communication from city government resulted in resentment: “Bike lanes in D.C. seem to come with an extra emotional charge, a legacy of the way they were installed—rapidly, and without much notice to or input from the people nearby—under Fenty and his transportation czar, Gabe Klein.”

 

FILED UNDER: Media, Bicycles, Bike Lanes, Gentrification, Race and Class
August 9, 2011 | 10:45 AM | By

How to Ask Someone ‘Where are you from?’

Where am I from? I was born in Southern California, to immigrants from India, thanks for asking.

Last week, while in an elevator, a well-dressed, slightly-older woman looked at me intently and said, “You have interesting skin,” before asking its origin.

I have dark skin, black hair and large brown eyes.

Despite the fact that this issue has been written about over and over and over again, people still don’t get that asking “Where are you from?” is problematic on many levels. The question may come from a good place, but it often puts the recipient in a bad one. It’s also worth considering who gets asked about their origins and who doesn’t. If you don’t ask everyone where they are “from”, why not? Why is the question frequently aimed at people who have darker skin, immigrant parents and yes, interesting backgrounds, if not to emphasize difference?

Here are some ways to ask someone about their heritage without sounding boorish or entitled:

Use a compliment. Sports Illustrated model Chrissie Teigen is asked about her Norwegian-Thai ancestry daily and doesn’t mind, but she had this advice for the curious: “I usually go with ‘What’s your background, you are beautiful”.

Be direct about what you are asking. On DCentric’s Facebook page, reader Laurie Peverill volunteered that she asks strangers about their “family history”, instead of the nebulous “Where are you from?” She adds, “Assuming that very few of us are actually from here originally, everyone has a great answer.”

Ask other questions first. DCentric reader Jasmin Thana also used Facebook to convey how she is dismayed that “Where are you from?” is often the first question strangers ask her. “Know my name first. Have a conversation with me, then you can ask where my ancestors are from. The question annoys me because they’re trying to put me in a box and if people just guess correctly, the look on their face is like they just won a prize.”

In a DCentric post from April, my colleague Elahe wrote, “All of this isn’t to say that I, or other second-generation Americans, aren’t also proud of our heritage and roots.” But the hope is that one day, people will be content to see the children of immigrants as peers, and not ethnic riddles to be solved.

FILED UNDER: The People, Immigrants, Race and Class
August 2, 2011 | 12:18 PM | By

Affluent Minorities Live in Poorer Neighborhoods than White Counterparts

Cynthia Closkey / Flickr

A class divide doesn’t fully explain racial neighborhood segregation, a new Brown University study finds.

Nationally, affluent blacks and Hispanics live in poorer neighborhoods than where the average low-income white person lives.

The D.C. region bucks the trend somewhat; here, wealthy minorities live in areas with the same, not higher, poverty rates as where poor whites live. The proximity of Prince George’s County may skew the results for the region, the Washington Post reports. The county, which is 65 percent black, is home to high concentration of affluent African Americans:

Blacks and Hispanics… who earned more than $75,000 lived in neighborhoods that were virtually the same as neighborhoods populated by whites earning under $40,000, as measured by average income, poverty rates, education levels, home values and housing vacancies.

“Income, and being successful in class terms, does not necessarily put you in a different kind of neighborhood,” said John Logan, a Brown University sociologist who analyzed census data in his study released Tuesday.

Many in D.C. proper view class, not race, as the District’s biggest divider, but racial segregation is more prevelant in the city than in the region as a whole. And the wealthiest areas in D.C. also have the fewest numbers of African American residents. For example, the black population accounts for only 5 percent of Ward 3, the city’s wealthiest area, where the median income is about $97,000.

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FILED UNDER: The People, Housing, Neighborhoods, Race and Class, Segregation
July 28, 2011 | 4:15 PM | By

America’s Widening Wealth Gap: Your Take

Zeal Harris/Flickr

"Grace" Mixed Media on Wood, by Zeal Harris

Earlier today, The Diane Rehm show discussed how the widening wealth gap in America is marginalizing African American and Hispanic families:

That’s the finding of a new study by the Pew Research Center. The median wealth of whites is now 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households. And though the recession cut across all races and ethnicities, Hispanics were especially hard hit. Hispanic families accounted for the largest single decline in wealth in the last few years.

Some listeners took the time to comment on the show’s official site. Commenter
monte had a request:

Please include in this discussion how the role out of wedlock births and the exploding number of single parent households figure into these wealth gap figures. Single parent households, black 70%, hispanic 50%, white 30%.

The effect of government welfare subsidies that in reality destroy the work ethic of minority groups. Also the cultural disrespect of education.

This Black Voices article from 2010 corroborates those numbers for single-parent households; “Compared to the 72 percent in our communities, 17 percent of Asians, 29 percent of whites, 53 percent of Hispanics and 66 percent of Native Americans were born to unwed mothers in 2008″.
Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Media, Diane Rehm, Race and Class, Social Media, WAMU