Chocolate City Research Articles

Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America

Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America

Introduction

Introduction

Go-Go Drums, Murals, and Other Weapons in the War for Black Lives

Abstract This analysis of the rhetorical wars around the 2020 US presidential election centers go-go music, a genre that is the cultural expression of the once majority-Black District of Columbia, also known as “Chocolate City.” Combined with other expressive tools in social media and visual art, go-go music amplified Black voices and provided an axis of resistance for a political coalition including artists, elected officials, and street activists, which ultimately toppled a white supremacist political regime.

Making and Unmaking the Chocolate City: Three Recent Works on Washington, D.C.

Making and Unmaking the Chocolate City: Three Recent Works on Washington, D.C.

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

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.

Fluorescent Flags: Black Power, Publicity, and Counternarratives in Go-Go Street Posters in the 1980s

Abstract This semiotic landscape analysis probes urban patterns of racial placement and displacement through an archive of music publicity posters. The music poster archive is a site to map the so-called “Chocolate City” of Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, explore its calendars, rhythms, textures, communication technology, history and movements of segregated black life. These posters advertising go-go music, the city's indigenous black popular music, asserted a territory of black economic, cultural and political power. They resisted the narrative of a sanitized “White City” designed for white tourists. The city's cultural entrepreneurs challenged false dominant narratives and public policies that marginalized black urban culture as dangerous and deviant. A crack-down on postering in the late 1990s was an early harbinger of gentrification.

Evaluation of the impact of flood on groundwater quality in hand-dug wells in Monrovia, Liberia

Globally, acceleration in population growth and changes in land-use patterns have increased human vulnerability to floods. In Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia, flooding remains unabated due to the heavy downpour of rain, poor drainages and the construction of buildings in waterways. In 2018, a major flood event occurred causing several residents of Monrovia to lose their personal belongings and even rendering some homeless. Besides damages to private properties and infrastructure, there are fears that the flood may have affected water resources in the area. This study, therefore, sought to assess the impact of flooding on water quality within a total of twelve (12) hand-dug wells in four communities in the Cape Mesurado peninsula of Liberia. Using the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) Standard Methods, a suite of physico-chemical (turbidity, pH, lead, nitrate, nitrite, phosphate, cadmium, copper and zinc) and microbial (E. coli and Fecal coliform) parameters were evaluated during both dry and wet seasons. To adequately assess the impacts of flooding on groundwater quality, water samples were collected from three flood-prone communities (Clara Town, Vai Town, West point) and one control community (Chocolate city) with results compared against WHO standards. A two-tailed Student T test was employed to point out significant differences between the results of dry and wet seasons. An increasing trend was observed in pollution levels from dry to wet season and all of the water samples analyzed fell short of the appropriate World Health Organization (WHO) standards for safe drinking water; suggesting that water samples from these sources are unfit for human consumption. Significant differences were observed between dry and wet seasons concerning turbidity, nitrate, nitrite, copper, lead, cadmium, E. coli and Facal coliform with no significant variation in pH, Phosphate and Zinc. Based on the findings of the research, it can be concluded that flood adversely affected water quality in the study communities with an even more pronounced consequence in the flood-prone communities of Clara Town, Vai Town, and West Point. It is recommended that the public be warned against consuming water from all of the test sources and proactive measures are adopted in the flood-prone communities to avoid contamination from municipal solid wastes and other refuse before flooding. The authors recommend that more studies of this nature be periodically expanded to other flood-prone communities across Monrovia to regularly monitor water quality and flood impacts on the socio-economic livelihood of the population.

“Chocolate City, Rest in Peace”: White Space–Claiming and the Exclusion of Black People in Washington, DC

Urban sociologists and gentrification scholars have long been interested in examining the combination of structural and micro–level forces that result in the displacement and exclusion of low–income residents from changing neighborhoods. However, the types of everyday activities and the social and spatial practices that exclude residents who remain in these neighborhoods are an understudied part of the gentrification story. How are exclusive spaces created? What are the specific social processes that lead to exclusive space? I draw on in–depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork to examine how white residents in a historically black neighborhood claim space through their everyday actions and interactions. These space–claiming practices are at times subtle and at times overt, but often draw on a repertoire of physical, mental, and social practices that combine to create spaces that exclude black people—including long–term black residents, black gentrifiers, and black visitors to the neighborhood—from public space.

Chris Myers Asch, and George Derek Musgrove. Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 624. $39.95 (cloth).

Chris Myers Asch, and George Derek Musgrove. <i>Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital</i>. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 624. $39.95 (cloth).

Whose Turf, whose Town? Race, Status, and Attitudes of Washington DC Residents toward Gentrification

Once coined “Chocolate City” by residents of the majority black capital city, Washington, DC, has more recently been referred to as “Chocolate Swirl.” Since the early 2000s, Washington has experienced marked shifts in its racial and socioeconomic composition. Census data indicates that from 2000 to 2012, the district’s black population decreased from 60% to 50% while the white population increased from 30 to 48%. Homes that then sold for $200,000 are now selling for over $800,000. While arguments of the advantages and disadvantages of gentrification are prevalent, this research explores a frequently overlooked perspective. Using 2014 Washington Post Poll data, we explore the perspectives of current DC residents and examine the impact of race and class on attitudes toward the costs and benefits of gentrification. Results indicate that, while race is a significant indicator, class position is a more salient determinant of resident attitudes toward gentrification in Washington, DC.

Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life

Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life

Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life

Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life

Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove. Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital.

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Chocolate cities: A brief note from a race and capitalism perspective

ABSTRACTMarcus Hunter and Zandria Robinson have provided us with an innovative methodology for analysing “maps” of African Americans’ lived political, social and cultural experiences past and present. Their powerful innovation is creating maps of the black experience based on black people’s lived experience. They argue that carefully tracing spatially blacks’ political, social and cultural patterns over time leads one to the conclusion that the shared experiences of blacks throughout the polity (and indeed throughout the Diaspora) have far more in common than not. I argue that we can better understand not only the maps that black people have created, but also chocolate cities themselves by using an analytical framework that integrates the analysis of the lived experience of black people with a structural analysis that interrogates the articulation of white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy. This framework is related to the developing research into racial capitalism that is now being conducted globally.

Free space is valuable space: lessons from Chocolate Cities

ABSTRACTIn our reading of Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life as a work of liberation sociology, we discuss contributions to Black critical thought and praxis this book uniquely makes. Hunter and Robinson craft a Black-owned analytical approach by rezoning the United States map into a charting of African American social and cultural milestones. To apply the re-centering methodological and theoretical innovations this book encourages, we extend its themes to the contested racialized terrains of literacy and education in the US. One contemporary response to systemic educational racism, Black homeschooling, is reconceptualized as a resistance movement. Inspired by the provocative work Hunter and Robinson have done, we situate the Black homeschooling within the tradition of critical Black thought, and its enduring emancipatory warrant.

Notes on chocolate cities

ABSTRACTChocolate Cities is a work of Black urban studies, treating the entire US as a variegated “South.” Despite regional differences the US retains its endemic white supremacism. Based on this recognition, the authors argue, it is necessary to reimagine and revaluate the breadth and depth of Blackness throughout the country. The authors proceed virtually to reinvent Black urban sociology and thoroughly to reinterpret Black cultural studies. In doing so they challenge US census data and much of the sociology of race, as well as drawing on a wealth of intellectual, political, and popular cultural resources that explore the breadth and depth of Black peoplehood. In many ways, Chocolate Cities returns us to the Black nationalist framework: W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Zora Neale Hurston, Ida B. Wells Barnett, Aretha Franklin, and Tupac Shakur all appear here, as do intersectionality studies, LGBT activism, and the Movement for Black Lives.

Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria F. Robinson’s Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life, University of California Press 2017

Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria F. Robinson’s Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life, University of California Press 2017

Black to the future: re-drawing space and time on the chocolate map

The South is everywhere, and everywhere is the South! In their new soul stirring book, Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life, Marcus Hunter and Zandria Robinson conduct a complete overha...

Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital by Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove

Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital by Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove

Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital; Historic Capital: Preservation, Race, and Real Estate in Washington, D.C.

Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital; Historic Capital: Preservation, Race, and Real Estate in Washington, D.C.