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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Seems to me some of the posters here are living in the past.

Now here's the real history lesson - prior to the Jim Crow laws, DC was truly segregated, and was 60 to 70 percent white.  By the 1970s and 1980s, that reversed to being over 70% AA.  But now, a few decades later, it's back to under 50% AA.

In the last several decades, there has been a steady influx of non-AA residents coming in, and some AA have moved to surrounding communities.  Ask the typical non-AA where he or she is from and you will find that most of them are not from around here.  Most are likely to be from all walks of life, from every part of the US, as well as from Europe, Asia and Latin America.  But that's not unique to non-AA - my office is majority AA but on learning where they come from you are more likely to hear something like  NYC, Jacksonville, North Carolina, Chicago, Trinidad, Massachusetts or Ghana than you will hear DC.

A lot has changed in these recent decades, yet there is that small segment of people with multi-generational history in the city and a culture of victimhood, who are still stuck in the past, some of whom will gladly paint all non-AA with the brush of whatever historic and institutional racism and segregation of DC, even though most non-AA in DC are strangers both to DC and to each other and do not have that history.

It's invalid, irrelevant and inappropriate.[/quote]

Demographics have changed. Mindsets have not changed. That's how you have schools in this city that are performing at a high level (Achievement Prep, DC Prep, KIPP, Banneker, HUMS) and are entirely children of color. Perception in many cases is reality. I know this to be true as my peer group is very white, and many, for whatever lame reason, avoid Banneker (don't tour or apply). I heard the reasons and I've read in this forum one mom saying straight out that she thought her child would be a fish out of water. Okay. Now what?[/quote]Yes, I can't speak to the mindset of long-time AA residents but I know that white residents have avoided Banneker (and if they knew about HUMS, presumably that too).  It's not like the culture of victimhood among some AA residents is the [i]only[/i] perceptual problem we're facing in this city. [/quote]

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