African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, D.C.

Race, Class and Social Justice in the Nation’s Capital

Sabiyha Prince

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317184355
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book uses qualitative data to explore the experiences and ideas of African Americans confronting and constructing gentrification in Washington, D.C. It contextualizes Black Washingtonians' perspectives on belonging and attachment during a marked period of urban restructuring and demographic change in the Nation's Capital and sheds light on the process of social hierarchies and standpoints unfolding over time. African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, D.C. emerges as a portrait of a heterogeneous African American population wherein members define their identity and culture as a people informed by the impact of injustice on the urban landscape. It presents oral history and ethnographic data on current and former African American residents of D.C. and combines these findings with analyses from institutional, statistical, and scholarly reports on wealth inequality, shortages in affordable housing, and rates of unemployment. Prince contends that gentrification seizes upon and fosters uneven development, vulnerability and alienation and contributes to classed and racialized tensions in affected communities in a book that will interest social scientists working in the fields of critical urban studies and urban ethnography. African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, D.C. will also invigorate discussions of neoliberalism, critical whiteness studies and race relations in the 21st Century.

Chapter 1
Gentrification, Race, and Neoliberalism in Washington, D.C.

D.C. residents have used oral histories to take discussions of gentrification into the public sphere. For people living in the swaths of subsidized housing faced with demolition, in particular, the collection of their stories has taken on a sense of urgency reminiscent of anthropologists embarking upon salvage ethnography. Individuals and groups have also used conferences and the Internet to disseminate these data.¹ Where African American remembrances of the past have looked askance at gentrification, these oral histories have been described in some quarters as “harkening back to a mythic, culturally perfect moment that was somehow destroyed by White middle class professionals” (Franke-Ruta, 2012). This is but one sign of the race and class oriented tensions that coalesce around this issue.

Handily simplifying and dispensing with the experiential memories of gentrification’s critics has become normative in the mainstream. It is not coincidental that this practice appears correlated with the increasing pervasiveness and entrenchment of gentrification-related demographic shifts. The outcomes of gentrification are not tenuous. It is also apparent that the needs of the poor and low income earners of color which community-based organizations work to protect have been subsumed under the desires of upwardly mobile people who often have entirely different requirements comparatively. Still, critical perspectives of gentrification face a backlash and all of this is taking place as inequalities in Washington, D.C. have sharpened in the face of what these indicators show are failed trickle-down economic policies (Nelson and Ojha, 2012). This online article is preceded by the subtitle: “The federal government has emerged as one of the most potent factors driving income inequality in the United States—especially in the nation’s capital.”

Rather than ignore the specter of uneven development, African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, D.C. acknowledges and historically contextualizes this as the inheritance of race and class-based inequality in the U.S. This book also overlaps the examination of long term hierarchies with a focus on the contemporary, gentrification-related outlooks of African Americans. What do the current ideas and experiences of Black Washingtonians indicate about the state of race relations today? How do the viewpoints and strategies of organizers who work with low income populations facing gentrification reflect upon race relations and social hierarchies in D.C.? These questions constitute the basis of this book and the legacy of racial inequality is central to the historical component of this study. As the past consideration of African Americans in Washington, D.C. reveals, the proprietary narrow-mindedness of some African Americans as well as the handful of exaggerated claims I collected do not lessen the crucial need to acknowledge the connections between inequality and gentrification in the nation’s capital today.

As the introduction suggests, African American standpoint are a central aspect of this book along with the consideration of how myriad perspectives are formed. It begins by fleshing out brief details about my own background that speak to setting but this book is not an auto-ethnography. Essentially African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, D.C. makes its contribution to discussions of this topic through its ethnographic reiteration of what we already know about the link between gentrification and inequality. This connection largely exists because, in all of its capacity to whisk away the charred memories of uprisings and bring a form of restoration to urban environs in previous states of partial disrepair, gentrification is inextricably tied to the machinations of social hierarchies.

Poverty, alienation, and anger fed the firestorms of 1968 and what happened in their aftermath. As Schaffer writes, based on earlier oral histories with African American D.C., in addition to the desperate reactions to Martin Luther King’s murder, “African Americans described a widespread resentment toward generations of political, civil, and especially economic injustice-the latter of which neither the civil rights movement not the federal government had yet to effectively address” (2003/2004, p. 6).

It is also the case that disinvestment occurs in spaces that have an association with otherwise neglected populations it should come as no surprise that these previously-discounted neighborhoods can become locations for intense human interaction when these trends in abandonment are reversed. Such factors tie gentrification to social inequality and this first chapter lays out the frameworks and concepts that have helped in the interpretation of contemporary events and understanding of the changes taking place for particular issues of race, class and social justice. Toward this end chapter one starts with a personal account and then moves on to discuss theories of racism and neoliberalism that help explain the data presented in this book.

Commuting to my Past

Openness about scholarly positionality helps place research within its wider social and historical milieu. For example, this book is about gentrification but at its core is a focus on the ways in which people make sense of themselves, this place and others against the backdrop of a rapidly changing city. African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, D.C. is also concerned with what project participants have to say about the relationships they form across the boundaries of race and class.

Gentrification is firmly rooted in class divisions that, in this instance, are expressed through the complex languages and experiences of race and class combined. As it relates to D.C., these are issues that I have had to come to grips with since my childhood. That is because I was born in Washington, D.C. in 1959 in a diverse setting that was also undergoing marked shifts rooted in the dynamics of race and class.

Portions of this book use auto-ethnographic elements. These are not included to declare exceptional insightfulness due to my native status. This decision was made to promote reflection on the ways researchers’ experiences can shape the gathering, understanding and writing of ethnographic data. I also wanted to circumvent any pretense of neutrality. Researchers have pasts and the discussion of transparency and possible links between identity, methodologies and analytical frameworks reinforces this point. The circumstances of my upbringing provide texture and detail to descriptions of the local environment without any intent to monopolize authenticity.

I lived in D.C. uninterrupted from 1959 until I graduated from high school in 1977 which results in my view of change in this city being long and based on experience rather than the analysis of secondary sources solely. I grew up in a racially diverse community and became an outgoing, community-engaged person with a network of friends, kin and acquaintances that is varied and expansive. This chapter substantiates this description. It also provides a more detailed sense of context and how my perspective has developed over time.

My network is extensive for a number of reasons. I still maintain contact with people I came to know as a child attending elementary school, in addition to those I met in subsequent years. My D.C. work history is also far-reaching. My first paid position was as a nurse’s aide at Freedman’s Hospital during the 1970s. Since that time I have worked as an office clerk with the Department of Housing and Community Development and as a secretary at locations ranging from The World Bank to the K Street business district. During the late 1980s I was a staffer with the Washington Office on Africa under the leadership of Jean Sindab and, later, Damu Smith, with whom I also pushed back against environmental racism in the toxics division at Greenpeace. I have known, worked with, and befriended people from numerous walks of life.

Following post-college stints in Poughkeepsie and New York City, I returned to D.C. in 1984, only to depart again. In 1988, I moved to the Bronx to attend graduate school at the City University of New York in Manhattan. As this history indicates, this book is an ethnographic examination of a place from which I hail but have not been an inhabitant of since 1988. Today I reside in a planned community in Maryland that is located 30 miles northwest of the Nation’s Capital. I came back to the area in 1996 and when I ride into the city to teach, conduct my research, visit family and friends, or patronize the arts, I negotiate geographic boundaries while maneuvering around old memories and dramatically altered facades. To reach my former home today, my commute also reverses the direction of pleasurable Sunday drives our family took during the 1960s and 1970s.

My childhood took place during a volatile period in U.S. history and this planted a number of seeds into my young impressionable mind. My brother and I were exposed the mundane, educational, exciting, and sometimes troubling when we were growing up. The list of experiences included attending political rallies with our parents, gawking at hippies as we rode through Georgetown, and being fascinated by sex workers around 14th and T Streets. In between taking music lessons, attending church, visiting family, attending school, and playing with friends, we witnessed the urban uprisings that followed the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968 and felt that something in the air had changed. One sign of these dimming memories was the National Guard presence in the many communities we were associated with.

With the help of the mass media I was mildly traumatized by the assassinations and riots of the mid-to-late 1960s but it was impossible to avoid exposure to information on the events that were sweeping the nation and my local community. Mom, an elementary school teacher and Dad, postal clerk, were habitual consumers of the news. David Brinkley, Chet Huntley, and Walter Cronkite were regular dinner guests at our house. We were one of those families that watched television while eating, and my mother also subscribed to Ebony, Jet, Look, and Time magazines. Plenty of reading material could be found around the house that covered the tumultuous happenings of the day. I became fixated on one particularly haunting cover of a July 1967 issue of LIFE. It depicted the, still living, body of a boy hit by gunfire in Newark, NJ. The figure of the injured child filled me with dread and fostered this unrealistic fear that I, too, would be struck by a stray bullet. For a while, this mild obsession replaced any trepidation I may have felt about the snaggle-toothed man I was certain lived in my closet.

This was the context in which our family’s Sunday jaunts to the ‘burbs captivated my young imagination and soothed my fleeting yearning for more bucolic surrounds. These short trips were also racialized excursions because the suburbs of D.C. were, to the members of my racially-sensitized household in particular, a different world. Entering spheres of Whiteness was, an act laden with intrigue and potential risk for African Americans. I didn’t know what was on my parent’s minds but the inscrutability my brother and I associated with the suburbs and its inhabitants was linked to our, largely, segregated daily lives.

Through my household’s upward residential mobility, the complexion and class background of our friends and acquaintances became more diverse in 1966. We left the neighborhood of Lamond-Riggs to move into a larger, detached house purchased in the White-flight community of Michigan Park. In addition to having White friends and neighbors for the first time, there were such key, NE institutions nearby as Catholic University, The Model Secondary School for the Deaf, and Providence Hospital. This contributed to the community’s heterogeneity and stoked our curiosity about the new neighborhood.

With this transition I gained an assortment of friends, including hearing-impaired teens of various backgrounds and the children of math, history, and anthropology professors at Catholic University. Their families were the noted group of Whites who did not flee integration. The hospital also did its part fostering community excitement by bringing into the midst of our urban, yet quiet, neighborhood that quintessential stimulant to the youthful imaginary: the stranger who came in the form of employees and hospital visitors who parked on our street. There were also the visits from rabbits, chipmunks, and, on one noteworthy occasion, an albino squirrel, which caused a mild commotion which the animal got stuck on the windowsill leading to my parent’s bedroom.

Still, the suburbs were more spacious and unspoiled than anything we knew, even “nicer” than Shepherd Park, the Black middle class neighborhood along upper 16th Street NW that everyone we knew called The Gold Coast. Because my parents talked about race frequently in our presence, my brother and I tacitly understood that the White people who lived in our new neighborhoods formally, had moved to such areas outside of the city upon the arrival of African Americans. Understanding this city has been a process of learning about what in a sense has always been readily accessible knowledge. Not until the research for this book was complete did my parents inform me that they avoided taking us on drives through Virginia because this was a state many African Americans viewed as unfriendly to Blacks. I was also an adult before I discovered the extent of White enclaves that existed in D.C. outside of Georgetown.²

In actuality, all of these enclaves were foreign to me. We didn’t know anyone who lived in Georgetown. Our only connection involved what my mother shared with me during an oral history interview about her father living there with extended kin after migrating to D.C. from South Carolina during the 1920s. As kids, my friends and I would take the bus there to buy raunchy comic books and cheap bangles. We were keen on getting sandwiches from Booey Mongers and shopping for jeans at Up Against the Wall. Yes, I was familiar with Georgetown but oblivious to the existence of American University Park, Chevy Chase, Spring Valley, The Palisades, or other White enclaves.

I continue to negotiate this urban—suburban and racialized continuum today. Leaving my home I commute to my past when I hit 95 South and head across the Beltway.³ Driving through Prince Georges and Montgomery Counties in Maryland, I head for Georgia Avenue, then 16th Street in D.C.’s northwest corner. Depending on my route, I may, consciously or subconsciously, relive old experiences in these spaces. Passing near the Kaywood movie theater elicits thoughts of the girls on my block keeping a sharp look out for cute boys with prerequisite large afros; catching a glimpse of Mudricks corner store off of Bladensburg Road, would always bring to mind us kids stopping on the way to and from Ruth K. Webb Elementary to buy button candy, edible necklaces, chewable wax lips, or Coke bottle—shaped candies filled with a colored liquid. When I take New Hampshire Avenue in I often cast a fleeting glance toward Nicholson Street immediately after crossing Eastern Avenue, because that was one of the last addresses for my dear Aunt Helen who died of a sudden stroke almost a decade ago. Before entering into the District a veritable buffet of immigration’s stamp on the Washington suburbs lines the avenue in the form of restaurants and clothing stores established for the East and West African, Afro Caribbean and Latin American patrons who live in the area. In addition to being in close proximity to the city boundary, there are other connections to D.C. I was told by Mexican American and Los Angeles transplant and activist Sylvia Montenegro that many of the Latino youth she works with in Langley Park and Takoma Park Maryland are former residents of such gentrified communities in NW DC as Adams Morgan and Mt. Pleasant.

Conducting field work in one’s home town forces the discerning ethnographer to sort out a hodgepodge of memories and spatial perceptions that both support and undermine that old adage that you can never go home again. As a native Washingtonian and a social scientist, I view this city through lenses that both illuminate and distort my vision. As such I have learned through experience why researcher positionality and its impact on praxis and analyses clearly come into play and should not be ignored. However, as I embraced the “union of possibilities”⁴ of native anthropology, I also recognized the intersection of class, gender, age and the other differences that worked to separate me from my research participants (Slocum, 2001). This made me mindful about avoiding simplistic notions of field connectedness. Although my awareness was heightened around this issue I also learned that my origins proved advantageous given the wide networks I was and remain a part of in Washington, D.C. Mining the depths of my contacts resulted in access to a tapestry of African American people along with information that hasn’t been previously discussed in ethnographies of D.C. The auto-ethnographic elements of this book help me emphasize the plurality of African American Washington and reinforce the acknowledgement of the self as a tacit guide. I do this while staying rooted to the understanding that ethnography too heavily dependent on memory, nostalgia, intuition, and personal attachments is not good social science⁵ because intimate knowledge of places and politics is no prudent substitute for participant observation and the other mainstays of qualitative inquiry in anthropology.

Auto-ethnographic reminiscences aside, I spoke at length with African Americans natives who hailed from different parts of the city and were of various ages and class backgrounds. Some, like me, came of age during the 1960s and 1970s, so I took my analytical cues from them in an attempt to grasp what it meant to be young at that time. They, too, talked about marked contrasts between urban and suburban and exchanged ideas about “folk amalgamations of race and behavior”⁶ through discursive constructions of the city, home, school, and the people they know—local store owners, neighbors, mentors, family members, and friends. The ideas and behaviors I note are the content of past and present-day cultural assemblages and these elements are the very focus of this book.

The data from each generation provided patterns out of which a host of unifying ideas began to form. The women and men in their 70s and 80s shared stories that sometimes wedded contradictory themes such as scarcity and abundance. They told of grappling with Depression-era poverty and segregation while simultaneously leaning on the support of extensive social networks and being comforted by a profusion of music and leisurely enjoyment on the expressive culture scene. This is not to suggest this was a monolithic group. Some individuals had more personal hardships over the course of their lives than others, as well as differing ways of responding to life’s difficulties.

The stories of my parents and grandparent...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Gentrification, Race, and Neoliberalism in Washington, D.C.
• 2 Race and Class Hierarchies in D.C. History
• 3 Arrival, Belonging, Difference: Exploring the Oral Histories of Elder African Americans
• 4 Race, Place, Representation, and Attachment
• 5 Race, Class, and the Individual Dynamics of Gentrification
• 6 Race, Class, and the Dynamics of Collective Responses to Gentrification
• 7 Furthering an Anthropology of Gentrification in D.C.
• Bibliography
• Index