Word: georgetown
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...quadrants, with the Capitol building at the center. Southwest is the smallest quadrant. There's not much there to discuss. Northwest is the largest quadrant. It is predominantly rich and white and has a reputation as being the safest part of the city. Most interns live in the famous Georgetown and Dupont Circle neighborhoods of Northwest. The eastern quadrants of the city, particularly Southeast, are predominantly minority and poorer and have a more dangerous reputation. Being confronted by the disparity between those reputations has been an education unlike any other...
...having dinner a month ago with a friend and her parents in suburban Maryland. They were mortified that I was going to be living in Southeast. They forbade my friend from coming down to visit my place because they feared crime. When I lived in Georgetown last summer, she was welcome to visit as much as she wanted. That a knife attack occurred on my old Georgetown block the week before I dined with them was meaningless. Further, there had been no reported crimes in my Southeast neighborhood, Eastern Market. Since then, there have been two high-profile murders...
...number of shops, restaurants and bars line Pennsylvania Avenue and 7th Street, the main thoroughfares. Townhouses, some dating from the early 1800s, hug the side streets, home to the typical (at least for the District) army of government workers. In other words, Eastern Market is a lot like Georgetown...
...talk about race and class and be taken seriously. I hope you'll give me the benefit of the doubt, because I'm pretty sure both of these factors influence opinions about my neighborhood. Eastern Market used to be a depressed neighborhood and is undergoing something of a renaissance. Georgetown has been the established center of Washington money and power for 200 years. Eastern Market is adjacent to more run-down and depressed areas on three sides. Georgetown juts against areas that are even more ritzy and exclusive. Although Eastern Market itself is predominantly white, many of the surrounding blocks...
...fear of the different and the unknown. I do not believe my friend's parents are racist or elitist. Such epithets imply a much more active hatred than I see at work in people's fears about my neighborhood and the surrounding areas. Instead, I think that my Georgetown and suburban friends fear Southeast for the same reasons that cross-racial friendships are rare. People are more comfortable with other people who are like them. Well off, white suburbanites feel more comfortable with other well off, white suburbanites. The run down buildings and the different colors of skin are unsettling...