Upon spending even a day wandering other northeastern US cities (for our purposes, say... Philadelphia and Manhattan), your average white resident of the District is hard-pressed to miss the relief into which DC's apartheid structure is rather clearly drawn. Stroll through Thompkins Square Park (or any other public space in lower Manhattan, for that matter) and you're immediately left counting -- on one hand, mind you -- the spaces in which one might be likely to see black families doing their thing within any proximity whatsoever to white families in DC (areas of NW between Florida Ave. and Oak St. offer some minor exception, with regard to Latino/White encounters; not without their own troubling contradictions).
None of this is to idealize such relations in the aforementioned cities; one needn't scroll back terribly far in even the mainstream headlines to locate the last time an innocent black male was riddled with four clips worth of police issue in NYC, and Philly's just now getting around to raising an eyebrow at its current state governor's role (as DA, in the 80's) in exercising nearly 2/3 of his jury-selection dismissals to remove black jurors from the prosecution of a certain black journalist (to say nothing of sworn testimony from a court stenographer that the judge in said case was overheard -- during recess -- relaying that he was about to "help fry a nigger"). Prison statistics being what they are in the US, we're blanketed in the shit, location be damned. Nonetheless, the contrast is stark. After some eleven years in the District, I'm not aware of any such public encounters; any such tangible indication that the lives of whites and the majority of black folks in DC so much as resemble each other or entail comparable aspirations. The neighborhoods that do presently offer up such routine encounters are almost exclusively those blessed with the euphemism of transition, and the encounters therein rarely stray from par for that particular course, nearest the casual observer can discern.
On some level, I suppose one could draw comfort from the apparently exceptional place DC holds in this regard; it lends itself to (at least) the daydream that this clusterfuck is not necessarily insurmountable. There are places that have not quite drifted into the uniquely sustained and brutal war on dignity overseen in our fair city... It's feasible that, buried somewhere within those places, one might come across some semblance of a bread trail back to something marginally less crushing. On another, It seems each passing minute sees the city further structurally outfitted against any such possibility, with skylines that stifle whatever fleeting thoughts one might entertain as to the value of what they've displaced. And no one's laughed out of the room (or strung up by their thumbs) when talk of "Redeeming the Dream" accompanies "commercial revitalization" and the emptying of the neighborhoods that went up in flames when King got popped.
Restraint begins to feel like sacrilege. And maybe it should.
Something akin to that surfaced in me, reading that the exhibit on The Disappeared had been declined by every major museum in the US, finding its only home at El Museo del Barrio. Even for people conscious of them -- people involved in solidarity movements, even -- eras like the not-so-long-gone military dictatorships of Latin America are often enough understood as distant abstractions -- near speculative legend, even -- despite that their atrocities reached such scale as to make the evening news hum of our childhoods, and despite that our country was as much responsible for them as it is the occupations of Iraq and Palestine, the invasions of Lebanon and Somalia, and the steadily unraveling scandal of State-sponsored rightwing death squads in Colombia.
Moreover, given what a comeback the practice of disappearing "persons of interest" has seen under the Bush administration, and the emergence of Guantanamo detention facilities, CIA Black Ops facilities abroad, extraordinary rendition, and the daily reports of raids on undocumented immigrants (often swifted off to privately-run facilities while their children are still in school or daycare)... Nevermind how many US officials are currently indicted or on trial (in absentia) for kidnapping and other violations of international law... It's oddly conspicuous that the educational function of the modern museum has seemingly evaporated into thin air on this nakedly illustrative bit of history. It's more than merely refusing responsibility for the bloodbaths we underwrote beneath the equator some decades ago. It's a matter of the profound structures of violence and domination elaborated in the now, and the fact that their character is anything but novel.
Not surprisingly, the exhibit was simply jaw-dropping. If we'd done nothing else while in NYC, the trip would've been exceptional and well-conceived on account of the two hours we spent in El Museo, alone. And were we not also aiming to hit the Facing Fascism exhibit next door (which left us both feeling a bit under-whelmed), they'd have had to drag us out at closing.
Beyond that, NYC was a blur of bedhead, coffee, vegan restaurants, bookstores, demanding cats, and sore feet. We didn't catch up with nearly as many folks as I'd have liked, but that really just makes for convenient cause to go back again and often.
