Washington, D.C. has been struggling with gentrification, from Black neighborhoods to HBCUs, residents are fighting back and not allowing outsiders to take over their home. The latest battle is over Howard University and local officials in D.C. do not appear to give a damn.
See Also: Gentrification Displaces District Of Columbia’s Longtime Black Residents, Study Finds
Howard University students and community residents attended a Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) last week. Many people associated with Howard voiced their concerns with white, local residents using their campus to walk their dogs.
According to WAMU, Rev. E. Gail Anderson Holness, a former chair of the ANC and a Howard University Law School alumna, said, “We welcome all new people, just remember you’re coming into someone’s neighborhood. If someone comes into my house, for example, they have to adapt to my rules. And my house rules don’t change.”
However, voices like these were basically ignored, WAMU reports, “The ANC commissioners moved seamlessly onto the next item with no resolution, the Howard supporters deemed the gathering a ‘waste of time.’ The commission spent 30 minutes of the meeting’s three-hour duration on the issue.”
The issue came to a head last month when Sean Grubbs-Robishaw, a local resident, who admitted to cutting through “The Yard” with his dog and said, “So, they’re in part of D.C. so they have to work within D.C. If they don’t want to be within D.C. then they can move the campus. I think we just need to work together and I don’t think it should be a he or there or here… It’s our community and that’s how it should be.”
Yep, he said Howard University, which has been in the neighborhood since 1867, should move. Watch below:
This is just another example of the entitlement colonizers believe they have in D.C. For example, for more than two decades, a Metro PCS store on the corner of Florida Avenue and 7th Street in the Shaw neighborhood has played go-go music from speakers outside the business. But new residents, living in a luxury apartment in the community, reportedly complained about the music. However, the music didn’t stop and their was an epic, peaceful protest over the weekend, which coined as #Moechella.
Gentrification in the nation’s capital reached a grim milestone around 2011 when the Black population of the former “chocolate city” fell below 50 percent. The influx of young white millennials have changed D.C.’s racial makeup. African-American residents in the historically black Shaw-Logan Circle area plummeted from 65 percent to 29 percent between 1990 to 2010, according to census data.
Let’s hope the colonizers can walk their dogs somewhere else outside of Howard University.
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