We had an election in DC recently. It got rather fractious, which is so unlike DC. It seems (and I’m open to being proven wrong) to be in part that it was the people who rode in on the current administration’s coattails and a few a few years before who really brought it to a head. Those who have the least have always been part of the market for populism and I don’t bear them any real ill will. In a class war I rarely, if ever, agree with the people who want to hold themselves up as ideals based on their income or education; I don’t even believe the nonsense about middle class tax cut. $250K a year is not middle class, it’s rich.
Someone posted a picture of sign of a young black man with a message of no fenty¹ = no gentrification and I took that to heart over the days that passed. Unlike most of the policy wonks who now inhabit DC and their spouses, I’ve briefly lived on the edge. I got food stamps for 6 months and used what little unemployment insurance payouts I got to pay my rent, with $100 a month to spare. I made tortillas at home because I had the time and I searched day and night for another job. I hoped with all that an irreligious person can hope that I didn’t get sick and would need Medicaid since they’d just shut the decrepit but still vague sense of hope embodied in DC General. My boyfriend at the time, for all his, my and our joint later flaws, was a good man who helped me when I couldn’t help myself. Even then this was after commuting 1.5 to 2 hours each way by bus to a job that I hated, that slowly sapped me of my soul and that even after I was laid off I wished I still had, because I needed that paycheck. And yet I knew, if I abandoned every hope, I could maybe fall back on my parents, because the middle class can. I know most in my position could not, and as I rationed the stuff that I couldn’t buy on an EBT (the debit card that replaced food stamps) with my $130 a month, I was not the worst off, and I never lied to myself or others.
Once that line of sheer black and white absolutism becomes greyer and greyer, it’s easier to dart across it, to stay for a bit, to stay far too long, and to commit acts that are both unforgivable and in the microcosm of context almost understandable. The luxury of my upbringing and Swedishness kept me on one side, but I felt awkward and both vaguely responsible for and not about the open trunks on Euclid in the dim, pale light of street lights that seemed to sigh with resignation that they could do nothing to stop a trade that in the long term did us all no good. I understood their presence, their purpose and even if I usually wished their absence, I knew better than to walk on the north side of the street. MPD knew too, and they didn’t seem to be too interested either.²
I don’t own DC. I don’t own property in DC. I only have as much as it allows me to have. Gentrification can be summed up as: It’s not an easy life to be pushed out of the place you’ve had as home by capitalism, even if it is part of the unwritten contract those born in this land signed up for. Having never belonged anywhere I know what that sign means even more than a lot of people: the tenuous attachment to a place I love that I can now afford (in large part more than before) because I had the chance to deploy, to take danger pay and insane hours of OT, and change my situation. At the same time I can’t expect the same of others, and that bitterness isn’t felt as strongly by me.
The moral of this story: I’m never going to refer to someone as sub-human even with felonies on their back, or because they are poor or because some deeds are objectively evil. Not only do I believe in hope and redemption, even if under some cynical strictures, I believe that experiences and the luxuries of our position make certain easy things easier and certain hard things harder. America has hosted some of the most gifted philosophers (Rawls et. al) on the placement within the economic ladder and yet little of this knowledge is widely discussed. I may not always choose to associate with people whose actions are reprehensible, but they don’t cease to be human for that reason; humanity is not just for the rich or the well-placed.
¹Fenty is DC’s current mayor. He is biracial in a way that his much lighter skinned challenger is not. I voted for Fenty, choosing to overlook a number of corrupt decisions I found displeasing. He is also a young man who rubbed more than a few people the wrong way and his challenger had the support of the old (often corrupt) guard in DC, and his failure to see what were even obvious errors to a white boy like me as errors was galling to many. DC used to be ruled by a triumvirate that generally agreed but compromised often: elderly black women who remembered a time before the Civil Rights Act and segregation, white liberals in one ward, and gays and lesbians. Now we have lost some to age, and in the rest the troika has been overrun with new mostly straight, almost exclusively white, and grad-school educated whites who have no understanding for the sentiments of anyone but themselves.
² Their absence is positive, as I never knew what they contained but could hazard a guess and be half right.
