Shani O. Hilton

There Are Many Things To Say About Gentrification

[…A]lthough the sting of displacement is understandably harsh, too many black Washingtonians are doing their own brand of nouveau-Columbusing when it comes to the history of the city. Too often I heard claims of how newcomers were not respecting the history of neighborhoods they moved into. Or people throwing around words like “yours” and “ours” when referencing certain blocks. Every once in a while someone would approach me with a lengthy description of “The Plan,” the long standing conspiracy theory I’ve heard about since I was a kid that the current gentrification trends are part of a diabolical scheme cooked up by shadow power brokers.

But the wildest is the claim I heard that the District’s been Chocolate City “forever.” Actually, Washington’s demographic status as majority black, by strict percentage points, only goes back about 50 years.

Before that, the District was a segregated place, with blacks as the minority. But black communities strived on their own in many ways. When the Brown v. Board of Education decision led to the integration of public schools, white families took flight. Years later, after the 1968 riots, many neighborhoods that were once home to Jewish families and those of working-class white families became black enclaves.

—Clinton Yates has a must-read essay in the Post on the long history of neighborhood demographic change in D.C.

I call it a must-read because it’s refreshing and provocative and makes a broad point that more people would do well to remember: Cities change all the time, and your own lifetime or your parent’s lifetime isn’t necessarily the platonic ideal of how your city should be.

At odds with Clinton’s main point, of course, is this: You can’t talk about neighborhood change without noticing that the same types of people (poor, of color) are often shunted about at the will of people with more money (who tend to be, though aren’t exclusively, white). White flight doesn’t equal displacement. Choosing to leave is different than being property-taxed out.

Still, one thing I particularly liked about Clinton’s piece is that it forces a consideration of the bigger picture. In 40 years, when D.C. is completely different, well, what will we think of the ’80s then? It’s instructive to zoom out a bit and evaluate our feelings about 1950s D.C. when we talk about 1990s D.C.

My old editor Mike Madden argued that D.C. history post-1968 riots could stand to be be better understood, and is more relevant to the city’s new white residents than the old-timey District. I think that’s right, too. (Which is a reminder that this topic is so fraught and complicated and some things sound right and are right while other things sound wrong and are still right and all the other permutations of that.)