Race, Class, and the Struggle for Neighborhood in Washington, DC

Race, Class, and the Struggle for Neighborhood in Washington, DC

Author: Nelson F. Kofie

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-11-17

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1317732804

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First published in 1999.This case study examines how low-income residents, community leaders, the Nation of Islam, and the police joined forces to close down an open air drug market. The research shows how a previously stable black community became severely destabilized and documents the efforts of community members to mobilize their neighbors around home ownership, tenant empowerment and jobs. Adopting a holistic perspective, the author examines tensions between opportunities and constraints dictating the aspirations of individuals, the historical factors influencing the course of events in their community, and the agenda of various government and private agencies. This three-year ethnographic study observed the community's rejuvenation and the drastic reduction in drug-related crimes, antagonism between the police and the Nation of Islam, and the demise of the HUD funded tenants' home ownership initiative. (Ph.D. dissertation, George Washington University, 1996; revised with new preface, introduction, bibliography, and index)


Race, Class, and the Struggle for Neighborhood in Washington, DC

Race, Class, and the Struggle for Neighborhood in Washington, DC

Author: Nelson F. Kofie

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-11-17

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1317732790

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

First published in 1999.This case study examines how low-income residents, community leaders, the Nation of Islam, and the police joined forces to close down an open air drug market. The research shows how a previously stable black community became severely destabilized and documents the efforts of community members to mobilize their neighbors around home ownership, tenant empowerment and jobs. Adopting a holistic perspective, the author examines tensions between opportunities and constraints dictating the aspirations of individuals, the historical factors influencing the course of events in their community, and the agenda of various government and private agencies. This three-year ethnographic study observed the community's rejuvenation and the drastic reduction in drug-related crimes, antagonism between the police and the Nation of Islam, and the demise of the HUD funded tenants' home ownership initiative. (Ph.D. dissertation, George Washington University, 1996; revised with new preface, introduction, bibliography, and index)


Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City

Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City

Author: Derek S. Hyra

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-04-17

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 022644953X

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For long-time residents of Washington, DC’s Shaw/U Street, the neighborhood has become almost unrecognizable in recent years. Where the city’s most infamous open-air drug market once stood, a farmers’ market now sells grass-fed beef and homemade duck egg ravioli. On the corner where AM.PM carryout used to dish out soul food, a new establishment markets its $28 foie gras burger. Shaw is experiencing a dramatic transformation, from “ghetto” to “gilded ghetto,” where white newcomers are rehabbing homes, developing dog parks, and paving the way for a third wave coffee shop on nearly every block. Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City is an in-depth ethnography of this gilded ghetto. Derek S. Hyra captures here a quickly gentrifying space in which long-time black residents are joined, and variously displaced, by an influx of young, white, relatively wealthy, and/or gay professionals who, in part as a result of global economic forces and the recent development of central business districts, have returned to the cities earlier generations fled decades ago. As a result, America is witnessing the emergence of what Hyra calls “cappuccino cities.” A cappuccino has essentially the same ingredients as a cup of coffee with milk, but is considered upscale, and is double the price. In Hyra’s cappuccino city, the black inner-city neighborhood undergoes enormous transformations and becomes racially “lighter” and more expensive by the year.


Streetwise

Streetwise

Author: Elijah Anderson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-08-09

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 022609894X

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In a powerful, revealing portrait of city life, Anderson explores the dilemma of both blacks and whites, the underclass and the middle class, caught up in the new struggle not only for common ground—prime real estate in a racially changing neighborhood—but for shared moral community. Blacks and whites from a variety of backgrounds speak candidly about their lives, their differences, and their battle for viable communities. "The sharpness of his observations and the simple clarity of his prose recommend his book far beyond an academic audience. Vivid, unflinching, finely observed, Streetwise is a powerful and intensely frightening picture of the inner city."—Tamar Jacoby, New York Times Book Review "The book is without peer in the urban sociology literature. . . . A first-rate piece of social science, and a very good read."—Glenn C. Loury, Washington Times


White Fragility

White Fragility

Author: Dr. Robin DiAngelo

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2018-06-26

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0807047422

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The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.


Snow-Storm in August

Snow-Storm in August

Author: Jefferson Morley

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2013-04-09

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0307477487

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In 1835, the city of Washington simmered with racial tension as newly freed African Americans from the South poured in, outnumbering slaves for the first time. Among the enslaved was nineteen-year-old Arthur Bowen, who stumbled home drunkenly one night, picked up an axe, and threatened his owner, respected socialite Anna Thornton. Despite no blood being shed, Bowen was eventually arrested and tried for attempted murder by district attorney Francis Scott Key, but not before news of the incident spread like wildfire. Within days Washington’s first race riot exploded as whites, fearing a slave rebellion, attacked the property of free blacks. One of their victims was gregarious former slave and successful restaurateur Beverly Snow, who became the target of the mob’s rage. With Snow-Storm in August, Jefferson Morley delivers readers into an unknown chapter in history with an absorbing account of this uniquely American battle for justice.


Chocolate City

Chocolate City

Author: Chris Myers Asch

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-10-17

Total Pages: 624

ISBN-13: 1469635879

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Monumental in scope and vividly detailed, Chocolate City tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation's capital. Emblematic of the ongoing tensions between America's expansive democratic promises and its enduring racial realities, Washington often has served as a national battleground for contentious issues, including slavery, segregation, civil rights, the drug war, and gentrification. But D.C. is more than just a seat of government, and authors Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove also highlight the city's rich history of local activism as Washingtonians of all races have struggled to make their voices heard in an undemocratic city where residents lack full political rights. Tracing D.C.'s massive transformations--from a sparsely inhabited plantation society into a diverse metropolis, from a center of the slave trade to the nation's first black-majority city, from "Chocolate City" to "Latte City--Asch and Musgrove offer an engaging narrative peppered with unforgettable characters, a history of deep racial division but also one of hope, resilience, and interracial cooperation.


Family Properties

Family Properties

Author: Beryl Satter

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2010-03-02

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1429952601

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Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago -- and cities across the nation The "promised land" for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation's worst ghettos and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.'s first campaign beyond the South. In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true causes of the city's black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country: not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation. In Satter's riveting account of a city in crisis, unscrupulous lawyers, slumlords, and speculators are pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney who launched a crusade against the profiteers—the author's father, Mark J. Satter. At the heart of the struggle stand the black migrants who, having left the South with its legacy of sharecropping, suddenly find themselves caught in a new kind of debt peonage. Satter shows the interlocking forces at work in their oppression: the discriminatory practices of the banking industry; the federal policies that created the country's shameful "dual housing market"; the economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the city's most vulnerable population. Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America is a monumental work of history, this tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance, will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed urban America. "Gripping . . . This painstaking portrayal of the human costs of financial racism is the most important book yet written on the black freedom struggle in the urban North."—David Garrow, The Washington Post


Places of Their Own

Places of Their Own

Author: Andrew Wiese

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-04-24

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0226896269

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On Melbenan Drive just west of Atlanta, sunlight falls onto a long row of well-kept lawns. Two dozen homes line the street; behind them wooden decks and living-room windows open onto vast woodland properties. Residents returning from their jobs steer SUVs into long driveways and emerge from their automobiles. They walk to the front doors of their houses past sculptured bushes and flowers in bloom. For most people, this cozy image of suburbia does not immediately evoke images of African Americans. But as this pioneering work demonstrates, the suburbs have provided a home to black residents in increasing numbers for the past hundred years—in the last two decades alone, the numbers have nearly doubled to just under twelve million. Places of Their Own begins a hundred years ago, painting an austere portrait of the conditions that early black residents found in isolated, poor suburbs. Andrew Wiese insists, however, that they moved there by choice, withstanding racism and poverty through efforts to shape the landscape to their own needs. Turning then to the 1950s, Wiese illuminates key differences between black suburbanization in the North and South. He considers how African Americans in the South bargained for separate areas where they could develop their own neighborhoods, while many of their northern counterparts transgressed racial boundaries, settling in historically white communities. Ultimately, Wiese explores how the civil rights movement emboldened black families to purchase homes in the suburbs with increased vigor, and how the passage of civil rights legislation helped pave the way for today's black middle class. Tracing the precise contours of black migration to the suburbs over the course of the whole last century and across the entire United States, Places of Their Own will be a foundational book for anyone interested in the African American experience or the role of race and class in the making of America's suburbs. Winner of the 2005 John G. Cawelti Book Award from the American Culture Association. Winner of the 2005 Award for Best Book in North American Urban History from the Urban History Association.