Lots of mail last week focused on one article: a piece in the Sunday Outlook section headlined “I Won’t Let D.C. Lose Its Flavor” and written by Natalie Hopkinson, a writer on The Post’s Weekend section staff.
It is about the purchase, by the author and her husband — both well-educated, twenty-something African Americans — of their first home, a rowhouse in the District’s Bloomingdale section. But it is really, as Hopkinson says, about much more.
The fact, she wrote, “that we had emerged victorious from a six-month battle at the height of the District’s real estate wars — skirmishes in which we were often the lone black faces vying for homes in historically black neighborhoods — said something else: ‘We damn sure are not about to let white folks buy up all the property in D.C.’
“In the small act of choosing to buy our home where we did, I believe that we became part of a growing group of African Americans who are picking up where the civil rights movement left off. From our perspective, integration is overrated. It’s time to reverse an earlier generation’s hopeful migration into white communities and attend to some unfinished business in the ‘hood. . . . We not only have to invest in the inner city, but we can’t let white people beat us to it. . . . We wanted to hold a line, stake out our turf.” This is “Chocolate City,” Hopkinson wrote. Will it turn to vanilla? “Not if I have anything to say about it. . . . It’s our responsibility as black people to return to these historically black communities that are finally rebounding. . . . There is a real sense among black Washingtonians that the city is slipping away from us.”
Of those who wrote or called me, the overwhelming view was that this was a “highly offensive” and “racist” article, an example of a “double standard” at The Post in which blacks are allowed to express views that would not be allowed from white reporters. Some readers transposed those remarks so that, in one example, a Post writer would call on white residents of Prince George’s County to stand their ground against a rising black population. “Sounds different this way, doesn’t it?” Anyone taking that position would be branded “a separatist or possibly racist,” this reader said. Other white readers said they wanted to live and raise their children in mixed neighborhoods and found the article sad and illogical. Cities change over time and don’t belong to any one group, they said.
Steve Luxenberg, editor of the Outlook section, says, “It’s part of our job to publish pieces that provide insight into how people think, with an emphasis on views that are neither predictable nor safe.” He says that over the years, “Outlook articles by white authors about race have generated plenty of criticism from black and Hispanic readers. Moreover, the parallel isn’t right: Most blacks and whites don’t come from equivalent places in America, so they can’t write the same article.”
Luxenberg points out that people in the District are talking about gentrification and its effect on the city and that Hopkinson’s thoughts, as she prepared to buy her first house, are part of this conversation. “For many people, such an investment would have nothing to do with race, but for her it did and that made some people uncomfortable. But the antidote to uncomfortable opinions is not to prevent them from being heard.”
The changing face of Washington is a powerful, complex, ongoing story that undoubtedly has strong racial and ethnic components. My view is that Hopkinson’s thoughts are revealing and worth knowing. I wouldn’t label them racist, because she was calling on blacks to act not so much against whites but in their own interest as she perceives it. But her views were presented in inflammatory, in-your-face, racial rhetoric that alienated many readers rather than illuminating a complicated issue of history, place and emotion.
