Reclaiming the chocolate city: Soundscapes of gentrification and resistance in Washington, DC

Abstract

In Washington, DC, Black residents have experienced unprecedented levels of cultural and physical displacement since 2000. Because of gentrification, the first “chocolate city,” long been defined by its blackness, has experienced shifts in the economy and commitments by the local government, that privilege policies that facilitate the displacement of Black families. Everyday struggles against gentrification have been of wide-ranging theoretical concern and pose an ongoing challenge for scholars in geography to understand the ways people resist gentrification and displacement. In this article, I show through an analysis of the anti-gentrification movement, #DontMuteDC, how Black people challenge the processes of gentrification by reclaiming space and resisting capitalist dispossession through cultural production. I demonstrate the relationship between Black sound aesthetics, gentrification, and a spatial politics of reclamation. I analyze the movement’s emphasis on go-go music as part of a process to (re)claim their place in the city, which I argue disrupts structures governing and managing normative space. I propose reclamation aesthetics as an analytic through which we can understand Black cultural production and Black place- and space-making practices as responses to socio-spatial inequities.

Race and the infrapolitics of public space in the time of COVID‐19

“…Summers (2021, 33), addressing black resistance to gentrification and dispossession in Washington, DC, has referred to the role that music plays in contesting spatial inequalities and displacements as “reclamation aesthetics”:

Reclamation aesthetics operate as a means through which Black residents navigate spatial inequities and reclaim the spaces from which they have been displaced. Culture and aesthetics have long been locations for encounters entangled with political, economic, and spatial inequities.

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“…7 Beyond the curbside restaurant enclosures, other policies and practices contributed to the diversification of public life and culture during the pandemic, such as the closing of streets to vehicular traffic, the enhancement of bicycle lanes, and, in some cases, the relaxation of "zero tolerance" policing practices that targeted misdemeanor offenses (e.g., unlicensed vending, loitering, and noise violations), which have been disproportionately enforced against people of color, frequently for little more than being black or brown in public. Seen in this light, the reorganization of public space to promote diversity is inextricably linked to reforms in policing and the criminal justice system (Summers 2020).…”

Theorizing Gentrification as a Process of Racial Capitalism

“…Finally, gentrification stakeholders' valuation of neighborhoods are highly context-specific. For instance, while White gentrifiers, developers, and real estate investors generally devalue Black neighborhoods on average, evidence shows that they value predominately Black neighborhoods in tight housing market conditions (Powell and Spencer 2002), as seen in Harlem, New York (Florida 2017; Freeman 2006), and in cities with few or no low-income non-Black neighborhoods, as in Washington, D.C. (Coleman 2021;Golash-Boza and Oh 2021;Helmuth 2019;Hyra 2017;Summers 2019Summers , 2021. Similarly, immigration also affects racialized patterns of valuation, which can create conditions in which Black neighborhoods are valued by White gentrifiers, developers, and real estate investors as they avoid lowincome immigrant communities, as found in Asian immigrant avoidance patterns in Seattle, Washington (Hwang 2020).…”

School Closures and the Gentrification of the Black Metropolis

“…As higher-socioeconomic status (SES) households move back to the city, taking up residence in and transforming parts of the urban core, lower-income neighborhoods of color—in particular, black and Latinx neighborhoods—have mostly remained structurally disinvested, racially isolated, and untouched by broader patterns of urban redevelopment (Pais, South, and Crowder 2012; Sharkey 2013). Notwithstanding noteworthy instances of gentrification in historically black and Latinx neighborhoods (see McElroy and Werth 2019; Prince 2016; Summers 2021), the predominant pattern of gentrification is one where gentrifiers move into urban neighborhoods with fewer residents of color (Sutton 2020; Timberlake and Johns-Wolfe 2017).…”