In fact, its territory was carved from two slave-holding states. People often speak of DC as if it has always existed in its pure state as if brought to us by virgin birth. It is a city fractured by its infatuation with official remembrance (as seen in its monuments and museums), and its seeming indifference to the personal memories of the permanent residents whose lives have truly shaped it. I’m pretty certain that for many of my classmates at the elite private school I attended, my black classmates and I formed the majority of their substantive interactions with people of colour.īut Washington DC has always been a divided city, most obviously between the officialdom of the United States federal government headquartered here, and the informal lives of the people who inhabit the city and its surrounding suburbs. But young as we were, my siblings and I still felt the racial tensions in assumptions our friends and their parents made about where we should live (read: not in the affluent suburb of Potomac) in the joking remarks white classmates made about majority black sections of the city (automatically the ghetto) to which they had most likely never been in the skin colour of the people riding the metro buses compared to those on the subway or driving their cars and in white people’s presumption of incompetence on the part of the mostly black city officials.Įven more troubling to me was the fact that growing up white in Northwest DC or the surrounding suburbs meant one could get away with not noticing these complex racial dynamics. For that reason, perhaps, the city has been spared some of the worst excesses of police brutality, exacerbated by racial misunderstanding. Yet this great divide did not manifest in the way you might have noticed in other cities.įor as long as I can remember, the majority of Washington DC’s police force has been black. The DC I entered was a divided city, populated by a minority white elite in the upper north-west section of the city that buzzed around the corridors of power and a majority mixture of black wealthy, middle and working class – with the poorest residents confined to pockets of debilitating poverty, and largely ignored in the city’s outward projection of itself. Drug usage and crime rates had steadily escalated through the 1970s, creating a vicious cycle of white flight and depressed municipal revenue, which in turn led to decreased services, increased poverty, worsening crime and further white flight to the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. Uzodinma with his father at his high school graduation Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House was still an active thoroughfare, not yet closed to traffic for fear of assassination attempts or terrorist attacks. Ronald Reagan was not quite two years into his presidency, and Marion Barry was still a mayor celebrated for having made the jump from civil rights activist to consummate city politician. They called it “Chocolate City”: birthplace of Duke Ellington and Marvin Gaye, home of Chuck Brown and the city’s idiosyncratic Go-Go music. I was born in a city that was nearly 70% black. My DC starts in 1982 at the Washington Hospital Center. I am, though, in love with a city that cannot fully love me back. DC is in my blood, my diction, my sensibility and style. I rep Washington DC – hard – despite not having really lived here since I graduated from high school, and despite spending the past few years working in Lagos. I consider this city and these public spaces my own, yet I am cowed by the vastness of its outsized influence. Unlike these interlopers, I was born on this soil, within the 70 sq miles divided into four large quadrants that constitute our nation’s capital. But I’m in love with a city that cannot fully love me backīut walking among the tourists earlier this year, I was filled with both smugness and sadness. Unlike the capitals of other once-great powers which, many hundreds of years old, present a more seamless meshing of monumental memory and daily life, DC is constructed to shout “Here I am! I am powerful!” to the world. Cherry blossom in front of the Jefferson Memorial – ‘a harbinger of Washington’s aggressive hay fever season.’ Photograph: Beau Finley
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