I wondered myself. I've lived in a variety of racially-mixed and minority-white areas of Minneapolis over the past twenty years, but I knew Chocolate City would be different. We chose the Adams Morgan neighborhood; my husband had lived here years ago and correctly predicted it would contain the racial mix and urban amenities that feel most comfortable to us. It didn't take long for me to surmise that Adams Morgan, much like the Whittier neighborhood in Minneapolis, sits upon a fault line between majority-white and majority-black neighborhoods. A city is a city, right? Just mind your manners, roll up the windows when you are playing Buck Owens, and try not to comport yourself like an entitled white prick. But there were immediate challenges this ultra-liberal Midwesterner was not prepared for far beyond closeting the remainders of my small-town upbringing.
The first challenge was a direct sucker-punch to my liberal white fear-of-exploitation guilt: turns out black women work at Starbucks here; lots of black women; almost every Starbucks. Barring black punks and lesbians at lesbian coffee shops, I'd never had my overpriced, sign-of-the-white-devil lattes made by a black woman. "She must hate me," I'd think, "this is one of the most obnoxious white habits and she has to make it for me." I realized how infrequently I'd been served by a black person in Minnesota. When she'd say, "Is that all?" I'd hear, "Why don't you make your own overpriced coffee you lazy yuppie." To be sure, neither my husband nor I feel comfortable paying a person of a different race to do a personal service; it just seems demeaning. I don't get pedicures, my husband polishes his own shoes. Though it's really not logical--patronizing a minority business is certainly not exploitation--we both experience an irrational queasiness imaging a black man or Asian woman bent over our feet while we read the paper.
I soon realized DC contains an enormous and stable population of black people and a much more transient population of white professionals. So guess what? There are a lot of jobs to be had serving coffee to white geeks. And, a Starbucks run and staffed by black people turns out to be refreshingly devoid of corporate bullshit; just people punching the clock and making the coffee and treating customers with casual politeness.
Oh yes, the manners... As I've mentioned often, I grew up in a small town in Minnesota. I cannot pass someone on a sidewalk without smiling or saying hello. I can't turn down a request for spare change without saying "Sorry." And I'm comforted by the small talk of strangers. Black people in DC seems to share these characteristics more than the busy-busy-watch-out-I'm-so-important social intercourse of the white people here. I'm so much at ease with the desultory "How you doing?" "All right, how you doing?" day-to-day interchanges common wtih black people in this city than the blank-eyed, pretend-not-to-see of the whites. I talk to the black garbagemen ("Nice day, huh?" etc) who serve my building more often than the white couple that shares a wall with us.
Racial paradise in DC? Hardly. Consider Adams Morgan an armed truce. Just to the east of us, the neighborhood of Columbia Heights is experiencing a gentrification push of monumental proporations. And we're getting priced out of Adams Morgan so we are considering moving to Columbia Heights. Part two of "Race and the City" will discuss whether or not white people have a right to live where ever they want and whether the tales of random nut-punchings of white guys by black teens on Clifton Street are enough to make us pitch our tent amid the granola fields in Takoma Park.
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