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I just read Andrew Stephen's New Statesman cover article (10 Jul 06) - The house of slaves - in which Stephen discovers buried racial secrets and larger truths about his Georgetown home in Washington, DC. It left me quite concerned yet affirmed that, finally, here was uneasy recognition of the precedent for the current "georgetownization" of the rest of Washington. This is my word for this particular mass gentrification, which has everything to do with "race", which in much or even most of the world and certainly the Americas is linked to economic class. Who cares that Washington, ironically, has long been the majority-Black capital not only of the United States of America but also of the U.S. Upper South ? Some of us do care deeply, and yes, Virginia, there is a region called the Upper South. Washington, DC definitely is not in the North. We eat grits. All this led me to Pinko Feminist Hellcat's 18 July entry: "Collective Responsibility", logged at Feminist Blogs. I was taught one of the things that makes us truly human is our ability to choose to change actions and behaviours that we haven't changed in the past but likely should have. Meanwhile there must be 10 (ten) of those tall, T-shaped construction cranes stationed in just one immediate area of DC. On the afternoon of Wed, 19 June the load on one of these cranes ripped right through the trailer top of a passing truck like it were paper. Traffic was backed up big time. Media silence. Eerily, in much-reported Washington it's far easier to get news from Iraq, Tony Blair, Congress or the White House than to find out what's being planned and what's going on locally, and why and how a privately owned crane nearly killed the (Black) driver of a truck rolling down a major street. Two witnesses say police seemed to blame the driver and took him away. The guy barely escaped with his life! Yet condo construction continues. Nothing stops. Almost no one says anything. The georgetownization goes on.
