Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City

Derek S. Hyra

• Editore: University of Chicago Press
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226449678
• Argomento: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoria: Soziologie

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.

Part One

The Setting

One

Making the Gilded Ghetto:

Welcome to 14th Street

Tim Christensen, the White, middle-aged president of the Logan Circle Community Association, enthusiastically describes the new farmers’ market that opened at Washington, DC’s 14th and U Streets intersection:

Oh, it’s really nice. There’re produce stands. . . . They’ve really diversified, so they go way beyond produce. So you can get organic, grass-fed meat and all kinds of really interesting pastas and that sort of thing. There’s a pasta guy, and he’s Italian. . . . His pasta is unbelievable. He has this ravioli, duck-egg ravioli, where he puts a duck-egg yolk inside a ravioli package raw and refrigerates it, and he suggests having it for brunch with bacon and hash brown potatoes. It’s unbelievable! . . . At 14th and U, who would have thought?

Not too long ago, this intersection was one of the city’s most infamous drug markets, and was described as such by two African American, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists. Leon Dash designated it the “heart of Washington’s drug corridor” during the late 1980s, with its “clusters of drug dealers, addicts and jugglers standing on all four corners of the intersection.”1 Eugene Robinson explained that throughout that decade, “U Street and its environs had become one of the city’s most notorious open-air illegal drug markets, offering mostly heroin . . . [and] quickly diversifying into cocaine.”2 Today, this once infamous drug market has been transformed into a thriving farmers’ market.

Just a block north of the 14th and U Farmers’ Market, Shaw/U Street’s economic and racial transformation is starkly apparent. For years, the northwest side of the intersection housed the AM.PM Carry Out, an “old school” soul food breakfast and lunch takeout (fig. 1). Like New York City bodegas, the carryouts in DC serve moderately priced food to people on the go. Most of AM.PM’s customers were working-class African Americans. In 2010, however, it closed due to “lease issues,” most likely escalating commercial rent.3 In 2014, the former carryout location, under different management, became Provision No. 14 (P14), an upscale neo-American culinary experience where patrons can order a $28 burger of foie gras, truffles, goat cheese, and lobster.

Figure 1. AM.PM Carry Out.

Next to this posh eatery is Martha’s Table, a nonprofit social services organization that distributes almost six hundred thousand meals yearly to homeless families and at-risk youth. Martha’s has been on this block since 1982.4 In the mornings, long lines of homeless people, mostly African American, wait to enter Martha’s. After eating, many hang around—some even camp out with their belongings all day—to catch up with friends and pass the time until their next meal is served.5

Across the street from P14 and Martha’s are two luxury condominium high-rises, Langston Lofts and Union Row (fig. 2), built in 2005 and 2007 respectively. Their contemporary urban design, with large exposed steel structures and iron patios, contrasts with the iron bars once covering the windows at the carryout. The condo units offer upscale urban loft living, with large floor-to-ceiling windows, wood floors, open floor plans, granite countertops, and stainless steel kitchen appliances. In 2015, one-bedroom units in the Union Row complex were listed between $350,000 and $500,000, two-bedrooms between $600,000 and $900,000.6 The base of Union Row’s commercial space houses Yes! Organic, a newly established natural grocery market, and Eatonville, an upscale, soul food–style restaurant where urban professionals enjoy pecan-crusted trout, fried chicken, and live jazz.

Figure 2. Union Row and Langston Lofts.

The first-floor commercial space of the Langston Lofts development is occupied by Busboys and Poets, a bookstore, coffeehouse, wine bar, performance venue, and restaurant all in one, which pays homage to the community’s African American heritage.7 At any given time, Black, White, and Hispanic students, professionals, and urban hipsters use their laptops at communal tables, peruse the bookshelves, or visit with friends seated at the long dark-granite bar, on fabric and faux-leather couches, or at dining tables. The private Langston Hughes Room at the back of the restaurant holds a stage for book launches, poetry readings, and other performances. In this presentation space, the likes of Cornel West, Ralph Nader, and Eve Ensler have spoken on race, politics, gender, and culture to people enjoying a cappuccino, beer, or glass of wine.

Those living in Union Row or Langston Lofts, dining at Eatonville and Busboys, or shopping at Yes! Organic stand in sharp contrast to some of those eating just across 14th Street. Eatonville, Busboys, Yes! Organic, and P14 cater to the more affluent new arrivals—the mainly White but also Black and Hispanic, gay and straight professionals; Martha’s serves, and AM.PM once served, the longer-term, low- and moderate-income Black population that formerly was the majority in this community.

From the Dark to the Gilded Ghetto

In the 1960s, a leading Swedish anthropologist, Ulf Hannerz, and a prominent American anthropologist, Elliot Liebow, studied the impoverished Washington, DC’s Shaw/U Street neighborhood. Their work resulted in two urban classics: Hannerz’s Soulside and Liebow’s Tally’s Corner.8 While each explored different sections of Shaw/U Street—Liebow studied a carryout much like AM.PM, and Hannerz a street near the community’s geographic center—they both observed severe deprivation. As Liebow noted, the area at the time was nearly all Black and had the city’s “highest rate of persons receiving public assistance; the highest rate of illegitimate live births; the highest rate of births not receiving prenatal care; the second highest rate of persons eligible for surplus food; and the third highest rate of applicants eligible for medical assistance.”9

Despite their setting in a bleak neighborhood environment, these books changed how people across the globe viewed inner-city Black American life. Through their detailed ethnographic accounts, the authors showcased the human side of the ghetto and described the complex strategies people used to organize their lives as they struggled to survive amid concentrated poverty. For Hannerz and Liebow in the 1960s, Shaw/U Street represented, like New York City’s Harlem and Chicago’s Bronzeville, the quintessential Black American ghetto.10

From the 1960s until the 1990s, Shaw/U Street was a space for understanding what historian Arnold Hirsch coined the “second ghetto,” and what Kenneth B. Clark labeled the “dark ghetto.” Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto and Clark’s Dark Ghetto explained the powerful forces and detrimental outcomes arising from the formation of socially walled-off, impoverished, inner-city Black spaces during the mid-twentieth century.11 The decisions of White-controlled city councils, planning commissions, and public housing authorities to concentrate high-rise public housing in certain neighborhoods; the decisions of White-controlled banks to redline and deny credit to African Americans; and the decisions of White-operated companies to leave inner-city areas were critical to the downward spiral of these neighborhoods into concentrated poverty pockets.12 The harmful influence of concentrated poverty on individuals living in these neighborhoods was not labeled as neighborhood effects until years later by urban sociologist William Julius Wilson, but the influence these areas had on dysfunctional behaviors such as crime, drug use, poor school performance, and teen pregnancy, as well as poor health outcomes, were duly noted by Clark.13

Yet while Shaw/U Street once symbolized the dark ghetto, today it represents the gilded ghetto. In Dark Ghetto, Clark coined gilded ghetto to describe the similar pathologies of the affluent in the segregated White suburbs. “There is a tendency toward pathology in the gilded suburban ghetto,” he wrote. “An emptiness reflecting a futile struggle to find substance and worth through the concretes of things and possessions. . . . The residents of the gilded ghetto may escape by an acceptance of conformity, by the deadly ritual of alcoholism, by absorption in work, or in the artificial and transitory excitement of illicit affairs.”14 Clark saw in the suburban ghetto ill behaviors comparable to those occurring in inner-city Black America.

This book, which analyzes the making of the gilded ghetto, uses the term not as a reference to suburban challenges or pathologies but rather to indicate the intricate social ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: The Setting
• Part II: What’s Going On?
• Part III: What Does It All Mean?
• Appendix: Select Washington, DC, Old Downtown, and Shaw/U Street Demographics
• Notes
• References
• Index