The Angel of Diversity

Abstract

If you are familiar with Washington, D.C., then you can probably identify Mount Pleasant as a neighborhood just east of Rock Creek Park and north of Adams Morgan that is neither especially good (meaning wealthy and white) nor especially bad (meaning poor and black). Between the 1930s and 1968 it was a woodsy refuge for federal employees fleeing the mosquito-laden vapors of the Potomac. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil disturbances that followed, many whites left, selling their homes to African Americans fleeing the rougher areas east of Sixteenth Street. Beginning in the 1970s Mount Pleasant began to attract immigrants from Guatemala, El Salvador, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Guyana, Jamaica, Haiti, and Ethiopia, to name just twelve of the twenty-six nationalities represented in the local schools. In the mid-1980s, shortly after my husband, Peter, and I moved in, Mount Pleasant's diversity was celebrated in a highly visible way. A long graffiti-coated retaining wall at the intersection of Porter Street and Adams Mill Road was transformed by the Mount Pleasant Latin American Youth Organization into a colorful mural, featuring African drummers, Peruvian pipers, Mexican mariachis, astronauts floating in space, blue whales bounding in the deep, and (at the apex) a beatific face whose long hair streamed outward to curl around eight idealized ethnic profiles. A curious fact about this central figure, whom we wryly dubbed the Angel of Diversity, was that she was white. With her gentle smile and all-inclusive tresses, she was clearly intended to radiate virtue and wisdom. Yet as originally painted, the Angel was snowy-skinned, azure-eyed, and golden-haired. This struck me as odd, given that the makers of the mural were Latino and the taggers who respectfully refrained from covering it with more graffiti were black. All I could think was that somehow the Angel was based on Connie O'Brien, the