This week’s Democratic primary in D.C. showed that racial strains still run just below the surface in the nation’s most liberal city. As The Washington Examiner’s Freeman Klopott reported yesterday, the subtext of the election was fear of white gentrification by the black community. The Examiner believes this is a misplaced concern, but we don’t think it’s racist. We understand that feelings still run high over federal control of the city before 1967, giving rise to apprehensions that new white residents might somehow marginalize blacks.
This subtext prompted Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy to play the race card in a distinctly ugly way in a column published Thursday under the headline “Ding-dong, Fenty’s gone. The Wicked mayor is gone.” Milloy accused Adrian Fenty of being a “cruel mayor” who “inflicted deep hurts” by abandoning the city’s “most vulnerable residents,” pushing them aside in favor of a mostly white middle class that could afford condos. He accused Fenty, a fellow black man, of trying to “recreate a more sophisticated version of the plantation style, federally appointed three-member commission” that governed the city for more than a century. Fenty’s “troika,” which also included Attorney General Peter Nickles and Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, “eerily mirrored the old ante-bellum system of control,” Milloy wrote. “It all makes for a kind of friendly facism in which D.C. government serves the interest of business leaders and landed gentry.”
Milloy’s column was also an unreasoning attack on the eternal truth embodied in the 1964 Civil Rights Act that government should be color-blind. In effect, Milloy insists that the D.C. mayor’s primary duty is to run a large jobs program for black residents, not to fix failing schools, promote economic development or cut a bloated bureaucracy – all of which, needless to say, would greatly benefit the city’s African-Americans.
Fenty, who was endorsed by both the Post and The Examiner, made his share of mistakes, which we have duly noted. But it is totally unfair and racially inflammatory to accuse him of “evicting” low-income black residents. The gentrification of the city began well before Fenty was elected mayor in response to the financial stability ushered in by former Mayor Anthony Williams. Like it or not, gentrification will continue under Mayor Vincent Gray. That is, unless the city government returns to the bad old days when it was a national embarrassment, which will surely happen if Milloy’s divisive attitude become the norm.
Milloy implies that Fenty is directly responsible for the city’s demographic changes. Milloy is not the only one: Tuesday’s primary vote pitted mostly black older residents who supported Gray against mostly white newcomers, who voted for Fenty. But the real culprit is D.C.’s rent-control policy championed by Council member Jim Graham, D-Ward 1. The Examiner warned four years ago that owners of rent-controlled apartment buildings would convert them to luxury condos just as they did in New York City, forcing poor black tenants out of the city and sharply reducing the supply of affordable housing – exactly the opposite of the law’s intended effect. By 2014, population trends show, the District will likely have a white majority for the first time since the 1950s – and it’s not Adrian Fenty’s fault, as Courtland Milloy surely knows.
