BRANDI THOMPSON SUMMERS: With the racialization of certain people, certain bodies, I’m also saying that there’s an aestheticized quality to that as well, especially as it relates to development, as it relates to how you want to see your city. And so with D.C. I saw that there was a particular interest in maintaining elements of blackness in the city despite the fact that policies didn’t necessarily support the types of services or opportunities to keep Black people in place in the city. And so there was this dual process of racialization and the aestheticization of those actual people.

My name is Brandi Thompson Summers. I teach urban geography at UC Berkeley and I’m the author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City.

Parliament Funkadelic, they had a song called “Chocolate City,” in the 70s, and it was significant because they identified several cities in the United States that either had a Black majority or had a strong Black political presence, cultural presence, artistic presence. But really the pulse of the song was to emphasize the ways that Black people have power. And it was during this Black Power era, after the Civil Rights movement had really taken off, and the concept of a chocolate city is that we wouldn’t allow, really, the strains of anti-blackness to prevent Black people from having, really, honestly, living. We oftentimes don’t consider how important race has been to the structure and development of different cities. So I certainly wanted to pay attention to how that’s taking place in the nation’s capital. And in particular, because it was considered the first chocolate city, or the first major city with a Black majority. And I wanted to see where blackness still exists in a city that no longer has a Black majority.

The book really began by happenstance. I had arrived in D.C. in 2011 and happened to put my clothes in a dry cleaner on the street, or in the neighborhood, where I did my research: H Street. I started reading about it and learned that it was one of the three corridors in Washington D.C. that had been affected by riots—or what I say in the book, uprisings—after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4th, 1968. And what was interesting was how the city was branding the neighborhood. I started to notice there were articles in the New York Times or articles in the Washington Post. They started identifying it as this welcoming diverse space. But if you walk down the street, it felt very different. As I dug more, I started to learn about its history, specifically the period in the mid-twentieth century: DC was majority Black but also the neighborhood was majority Black. It became an important commercial center specifically for Black residents because of segregation; so Black people couldn’t shop in Downtown D.C. The government stopped investing in that particular area. So certainly we saw white flight that took place, and that’s what contributed to the population being significantly Black. But at the same time, there are ways in which white flight is described as this passive experience that white people just chose to move to the suburbs when really there were policies that enabled this shift that did not allow Black people to actually move and go into these other areas where they could have more land and property.

So, following the 1960s and 1970s, you saw—and really until the 1980s and ’90s—you saw this period really come under some hard times. H Street was understood as a ghost town, despite the fact that people still lived there. It wasn’t until really the 1990s—and more 2000s, I’d say—that the landscape started to shift gradually, because there was this newfound interest in the area as being potentially salvageable. And so that’s when you saw some entrepreneurs, particularly white entrepreneurs, coming in and opening bars, restaurants, and other social spaces that were more catering to tourists or others who lived in other neighborhoods. And also, you started to see the local government focusing more on the ways in which diversity, vibrance, cultural history could attract more attention to the area.

I’ve thought about aesthetics in different ways in the book. So on the one hand, you see the architectural aesthetics and ways that cultural heritage and history play into the development of the area, or the redevelopment of the area. So riot architecture—the barbed wire fences and the bulletproof glass and those very heavy steel and metal bars that are often outside of businesses—you start to see those types of relics disappear as neighborhoods change and as the cities want them to become more inviting. The other way I think about aesthetics in the book is really thinking about a racial aesthetics and connecting that to an urban environment. And so in particular, I think about blackness as an aesthetic rather than simply focusing on Black aesthetics in terms of cultural production. And when I think about blackness as an aesthetic, especially more recently, I’d say in the last, you know, 15 to 20 years, and thinking about cities and thinking about gentrification, you start to see markers of race on the street. Whether race is reflected in public art, when you see actual Black figures painted on a wall. I use an example in the book where I went to a Whole Foods Market and saw a chocolate city display that was filled with $20 and $30 chocolates.

What was important for me was understanding the narratives. So not necessarily telling the big-T truth, but understanding the ways people talk about a space. That of course means that I have to read newspapers. That means that I have to look at blogs. That means I have to look at tweets that are being tweeted about the particular neighborhood. That means I have to sit at a bar and really overhear conversations. I really needed to do that work in order to understand how this place worked, but then also how the stories about this place really impacted the ways that the city moves through it.

The older business owners would tell me that, you know, “This used to be a Black neighborhood where there were Black businesses, or at least there were businesses that cater to Black people.” They would sometimes, especially those who owned barber shops and beauty salons, say, “We’ve been here through hell, essentially, and we’re still trying to hold on.” And that particular story didn’t necessarily surprise me. It was that the barber shop owner was next to the tattoo parlor, and the tattoo parlor owner would talk about how they loved the edge and grit of the neighborhood. But at the same time, they liked it because it wasn’t like tony Georgetown. They really wanted to be of the people. So you didn’t find that the new business owners were necessarily conservative. In fact, they found themselves to be particularly liberal. They wanted to invest in the history of the city, but at the same time, they didn’t see themselves as complicit or implicated in this transition—this business landscape that was shifting really dramatically. The existence of both at the same time was what was jarring for me.

There’s this emplacement of blackness on the street that is favored more over Black people actually existing in the city and in the neighborhood. And in that way, I think that aesthetics needs to become a really important element as we think about gentrification, as we think about displacement, because we do invite certain ideas or certain objects of taste, and then push out certain ideas of what’s beautiful, of what’s interesting, of what’s creative. But then the people who produce it may not be the ones we want to survive and kind of stay in the area.

In thinking about Black geographies, or Black geographic thought, the presumption, as Katherine McKittrick says, the presumption is that Black space matters and that blackness is always geographic. So the understanding that we may have been indoctrinated with is that Black people have no place, that we are placeless. It’s really important to demonstrate that Black people have a place, and it’s been constituted through racism, but at the same time constituted through this production of space and these various cultural, economic, and political elements.

So while there have been various ways that Black people have been spatially contained, Black folks have still made do—and more so than that, right? Given racist laws, specifically around space, specifically around, again, politics and economics, there are ways that Black people have thrived and created community, and that that’s inherently geographic. The importance of identifying these kinds of spatial patterns of where blackness can go is what matters. So that’s why I don’t necessarily focus on the actions of a gentrifier, let’s say. I don’t want to focus on the actions of an individual person. It’s more so the ways that the state and the movement of capital, and how Black people negotiate with those things in order to create a place in the city to show that Black people have a place, should have a place, and have created these various vestiges of space in a city like D.C.