Derek S. Hyra. Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Commented by Will Straw, axis codirector (May 2020):
Under what circumstances might the opening of a dog park in a city neighbourhood spark anxiety? This is one of the intriguing questions explored in Derek S. Hyra’s book on gentrification in Washington, D.C. Hyra, an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the American University in Washington (and founding director of its Metropolitan Policy Center), traces the ways in which apparently benign forms of change in the character of urban districts may conceal the soft violence of new forms of exclusion and racism.
The central focus of Hyra’s book is the Shaw/U Street district of Washington, D.C., historically the core of the city’s African-American cultural life, and, increasingly, the home of affluent white gentrifiers. These gentrifiers are content, for the most part, to preserve the neighbourhood’s material markers of Black cultural heritage, which give the area its historical authenticity, even as their own presence contributes to a pricing-out of the area’s original inhabitants and the slow withdrawal of resources for community institutions like public schools. (White gentrifiers are likely to send their children to private schools.)
Hyra’s book deploys a series of useful terms to describe the processes transpiring in D.C. “Diversity segregation” names that urban condition in which communities differentiated by race and class live alongside each other but rarely interact. Any political judgement of the changes affecting the neighbourhood is clouded by the fact that new residents are busily engaged in building new lifestyles devoted to alternative sexualities, vegetarianism, animal care and low-impact forms of transit (like bicycles). If these lifestyles are the familiar markers of a progressive urbanism, they are often, for a neighbourhood’s long-time residents, signs that their habitat is being remade and redefined without them. A dog park, for some of those residents, send out the subtle message that such residents are not welcome.
The book’s title is meant to capture the steady movement of affluent whites into Washington, D.C., to the point at which, in the early 2000s, the city ceased being one in which African-Americans were the majority. The story told in this insightful book is the story of how a metropolis once celebrated (by funk band Parliament and others) as “Chocolate City” is being whitened with time.
