Mile
Zero

A follow-up on last month's gentrification post:

My own relationship with DC has not been particularly positive over the last decade. It's not a immediately romantic city the way I wanted a city to be when I left college. The height limit means that it has no skyscrapers, and the monuments result in a swamp of annoying tourists every summer. Probably snobs in every great city have the same gripes about tourism--sacre bleu!, I imagine a poorly-stereotyped Parisian exclaiming at the horde around the Arc de Triomphe--but it doesn't make it any less frustrating, particularly since Americans are the most tasteless tourists in the world ("you'll get no argument here," sniffs my imaginary French friend, to which I can only respond that at least we're not responsible for Bernard-Henri Levy).

I'm a white, white-collar worker who moved here for school, living just across the river in Virginia. So as a result, my image of the city was (for a long time) a lot like the gentrification version--a mass of tedious political operators schmoozing at Starbucks. I didn't want to live in a place like that, and I wasn't well-positioned to see the DC underneath, or particularly inclined to change my circumstances.

What changed, of course, was taking classes on urban dance. Breaking and popping took me across the river (both literally and metaphorically). Classes and jams got me to travel to parts of the city I don't visit during my average workday. And they brought me into contact with people who lived in DC, who grew up here, who take part in the nightlife and the culture--people from a wide variety of backgrounds and economic classes. Breaking introduced me to new perspectives and let me see DC through their eyes. As someone whose Venn diagram of "worthwhile" intersects almost completely with three other circles marked "interesting," "challenging," and "disruptive," it has been immensely rewarding.

When we talk about multiculturalism, I think there's a sense to which we (and particularly "we" meaning "white people") consider it a duty. Academics do studies evaluating whether diverse neighborhoods are more stressful, or diverse workplaces are more productive, and we nod thoughtfully and probably do not change our minds, because people make most of their decisions on an emotional basis. Multiculturalism is rarely pitched as a pleasurable thing--as something that enriches our experiences. But it is! I may never love DC, but it's because of a multicultural community that I can see why I might like it, and why a gentrified DC would be a real loss.