Like other historically African-American cities, my adopted hometown of Washington, D.C. is dealing with an influx of young, well-paid, somewhat clueless single whites.
They move into slick new apartment buildings in neighborhoods that still have traces of the crime that once dominated them, and they don’t quite realize it.
My friend’s wife got mugged and her face badly swollen – just days before her wedding – as she walked home from work late one night last year in one of these neighborhoods. She didn’t do that again – not because she wasn’t a victim (of course she was), but because she adapts to reality.
It’s this willingness to deal with reality as it is, not as college snowflakes would like it to be, that I appreciated in a recent Washington Post feature on the historically black middle-class neighborhood of Shaw, a few minutes north of the downtown sports stadium.
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I spend a fair amount of time in Shaw because of its excellent coffee and beer options (strong signs of gentrification), but it’s very much a neighborhood in transition, as the Post notes:
In the mid-20th century, Shaw was largely a thriving community of middle-class African Americans. But riots following the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. left the neighborhood a wasteland. And in the 1980s and ’90s, it was a nightly battlefront in the crack wars, with rival drug dealers trading lethal gunfire.
Even amid the area’s remarkable revival, vestiges of that sorry history remain. Young gangbangers still occupy recesses of the neighborhood, although their ranks are thinner now. Down-and-outters still loiter, and hustlers still ply the street corners.
You don’t want to be absentmindedly glaring at your phone while walking alone after 10 p.m. any given night, especially if you’re a woman. It’s not just mugging or sexual assault – you might get caught in crossfire, which left another friend’s coworker dead right outside their office.
Hey ladies: ‘You’re inviting a robbery’
The protagonist of the Post feature is Richard Williams, the 66-year-old “unofficial mayor and sheriff of his block.”
Williams lives in a newer affordable-rent apartment building across from one of Shaw’s “high-rise luxury residential buildings.” They were built by the same developer, who got tax benefits in order to help older childless tenants stay in the city.
The residents of the two buildings actually get along pretty well. The value add for the hip young whites, though, is the free wisdom dispensed by Williams and other longtime District residents of modest means:
“For instance, the women around here,” Williams says, standing in front of the building one morning. “If you’re out here at night, fumbling around in your pocketbook for your keys, I don’t care who you are. If I’m outside, you’re going to hear from me, okay? Because you’re inviting a robbery. I’ll tell them, if you’re going to fumble around in your pocketbook, go inside the vestibule and do it.”
He sighs ruefully. “Best thing, I’ll tell them, if you’re getting off the bus, make sure you already have your keys out when you get off the bus.”
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Wanda Cave, a part-time nurse in her 60s who was born in the LeDroit Park neighborhood [a few minutes north], says she has “no problem reprimanding young adults.”
“They don’t give me any back talk. I mean, they say things you don’t want to hear, that isn’t pleasant to the ears. I’ll tell them: ‘I don’t want to hear that language! Keep that to yourself!’ And you know what? They apologize! They’ll say, ‘Oh, I’m very, very sorry, ma’am.’ ”
‘They come from places where they don’t see things like this’
Telling young women how to keep themselves safe in public? How to speak so they don’t get a reputation?
That’s blaming the victim! your average social justice warrior on campus would respond. Don’t tell me how to act. Teach men not to rape. Purge them of their toxic masculinity. I can do whatever I want.
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I’d really love to see Williams educate the pampered bubble people in the Ivy League the way he gives the lowdown to his hapless neighbors about local scam artists:
Williams says this dicey aspect of Shaw isn’t readily visible to the newcomers as they push their pricey baby strollers, pedal their high-end bicycles and stroll along with their heads down, talking and tapping on their cellphones. …
“You see, the younger people around this neighborhood, they don’t know what to do,” he says. “They come from places where they don’t see things like this, a lot of them.”
You could say the same thing about college students who expect the grit and hostility of the world to gracefully retreat whenever they chant their social-justice mantras.
Maybe the administrative bloat of the modern university would accomplish something useful if schools started hiring friendly but firm realists like Richard Williams.
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