When I was getting ready to move to Washington, DC, in 1988, I had been told that it was the most segregated city in America. Although segregated, for sure, there were certainly cities even more segregated: Milwaukee, Detroit, and Chicago, to name a few.

I moved at a time when the District’s population had been declining for decades. The city’s population peaked in 1950 at just a smidge more than 800,000 people: 64% White, 35% Black. By 1960, it was already majority Black, as White flight to the suburbs had already begun. By 1980, the city had lost 164,000 people in only 30 years; more starkly, it had lost 346,000 Whites but added 168,000 Blacks.

By the time I arrived, the city had been majority Black for nearly 30 years. The city’s tax base had been decimated by White flight. Unemployment among Blacks was high. The crack epidemic had struck hard and deep, and the murder rate had risen to more than 1 per day.

Yet, I found deep pride in the city among Blacks—and delight in its brand: Chocolate City! Yes, you could easily find deep poverty in many of the city’s Wards—especially Wards 7 and 8. Still, you could just as easily find members of a rising Black middle and upper middle class in the city, residents and commuters both.

Although I had lived in Philadelphia in 1987 and 1988, when it had a healthy-sized Black population (about 38%), I lived in a large duplex in Mt. Airy, a predominantly wealthy White section. During that time, I only interacted with African Americans when I played pick-up basketball at various parks and playgrounds.

I made a conscious decision in my move to Washington to change my mono-racial experience. That was made easier because, for the first time, I worked in organizations that employed African Americans at professional and staff levels beyond just a single individual or two.

 I sought out, developed substantive and honest relationships with, and befriended many African Americans in my first decade in the city. I had dinners, went out for drinks, and hung out at apartments with Black friends and colleagues. I got called out on my biases and prejudices at times. I learned to live with a certain amount of discomfort in conversations that tackled race and racism. I learned to see better the experience and perspective Black friends and colleagues regularly had in White-dominant spaces.

I began to read books that touched on race that I had never encountered before—by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Ellis Close, Octavia Butler, Malcolm X (yes, for the first time), Michael Eric Dyson, Nathan McCall, Nikki Giovani, Terri McMillan, Walter Mosley, Cornel West, and William Julius Wilson, among others.

I became far more informed—and sensitized—to what White America had subjected Blacks to, well beyond enslavement. My high school curriculum never covered any of these topics. I never took a history course in college, let alone a Black studies class. This territory was all new to me. I was puzzled at why—just like I had seen in North and West Philly—too many parts of Washington were just as poor, rundown, and, frankly, depressing – and deeply, deeply segregated.

How could this still be in the 1990s, I wondered. It took me a long time to put the puzzle pieces together.

In 1999, I visited a friend who had moved out to Salt Lake City and changed his politics from liberal to conservative/libertarian in the few short years he had lived there. In conversations with him over several years, I was just stunned that he had concluded that the plight that Blacks found them was all their own doing because, he argued, America had been a level playing field ever since we passed the Civil Rights laws in the 1960s.

I argued with him as cogently as I could, but I still did not know enough to counter how fundamentally wrong I thought his views were on race and our nation’s trajectory regarding race since the 1960s. We ultimately agreed to disagree. Eventually, over a few years, I ended our friendship over his continued insistence to argue his points. I have talked to him only once in the 23 years since. 

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