18th and Potomac

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

Sometimes I use old West Wing episode titles rather than making my own because I live in DC. They’re plays on words for something that really happened. 18th and Potomac is where Mrs. Landingham died in a car wreck. The car wreck in this case is that my smallest dream (therefore my most desperate, my heartbeat) is the least affordable- a house in the DMV is going to set you back enormously. You, your children and grandchildren may buy well and it returns your investment fivefold. But in order to do that, it takes about half a million dollars (at least- better if it’s a 500k downpayment to make the mortgage reasonable).

That’s because in order to get an actual deal, you want to buy the worst house in the best location…. anyone can make money in Georgetown these days no matter what you buy, but the jump in value will be much smaller from the time you move in to move out.

It takes special skill to buy a house in SE Waterfront, which one of my friends did in 2001. If you weren’t there, you have no concept of what it looked like. It was a concrete jungle in a neighborhood with high crime, and this is important, at the time. He completely overhauled the entire thing, building custom everything. That house is worth at least a million just because of the land, more because the house is absolutely one of a kind.

In DC, the sky is the limit on real estate, because as I’ve mentioned before, DC is only 60 sq. miles. It moves fast and furious. I know other cities are more expensive- I’m not sure that the market is as consistently volatile with a third of the House rotating in and out with all their staff, the Senate rotating in and out every six years with all their staff, and the military, intelligence agencies, and State all having jobs that move them around the world (even if the DMV is home base). DC is a permanent address for fewer people than it isn’t.

You don’t get to know our city until you know our poverty. This is because poor people don’t move in the same way as middle class government salaries. Lower economic classes tend to grow where they’re planted because they don’t have the money to do anything else. Therefore, the poorest people are the richest institutional memory. You don’t go to them for history of the nation, you go to them for the history of DC. They are the authority on the riots in the 60s, the night Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated (DC is heavily black, and I think at one point the majority), the best mumbo sauce, go-go music, Duke Ellington, and, apparently, public television. We have three stations within, like 30 miles. It’s fabulous. This Old House is always on somewhere. DC isn’t a city, it’s a whole mood. God willing, I will live here a very long time.

I will never in my lifetime make enough money to buy a house in the neighborhood where I rent, though. The house is just “nice” in comparison to the location, and it’s gorgeous. My mother left me enough money for a down payment on a small house in northeast Texas if I wanted to buy it today (I’d be taxed at 40%, so no thank you), or a better area when I turn 65. Even with leaving the money where it is and not touching it until then (I’m 46 now), it still wouldn’t be a down payment in Silver Spring, Maryland….. I am open to moving within a certain radius, like Hagersville (home of the Southern MD Blue Crabs, who happen to be in the same league with the Sugar Land Skeeters, my home town minor league). I would also consider buying a small house in Baltimore, because getting between the two cities is stupid easy and Baltimore is much, much cheaper. I could even commute if I had to, more and more possible with remote work.

It’s funny, I never would have said that I wanted a house here until I had been here awhile. I lived in Alexandria, Virginia the first time I moved in 2001. (I’ve lived in both MD and VA, but not DC proper…. like I tell people I’m from Houston, when I lived in a suburb for most of it.) I thought of myself as Virginian until I’d been back for more time than I thought it would take. There is a much different vibe in Maryland. MUCH different. You feel it- going over the Potomac introduces you to something you ignore in the South….. Yankees.

Maryland is the last state under the Mason-Dixon line. No one is undermining its pedigree as part of the south. However, our culture is led by New England, not Virginia. Annapolis has politics closer to Trenton and Albany than Richmond. The difference between someone raised in the North and in the South becomes clear…… and racism isn’t everything, but it’s a lot.

The further you go into the suburbs on the Virginia side, the more people make jokes about this being “St. Bob’s Country,” where “Bob” is Robert E. Lee…. or that if your last name is “Lee” in that area, you are either of THE Lees or you are Chinese. At no time do those people recognize why that’s not funny. If you have any blowback to any of their “jokes,” they will remind you that Robert E. Lee gave the government the land for Arlington Cemetery. To push back on that one is never a good idea, because it’s their only sword in the fight; they get feral when you knock it out of their hands because they’ve lost the high ground so goddamn fast.

Living in Maryland is escaping all of that, because once you cross the river, Virginia isn’t even a thing anymore. The time it takes to adjust to the culture between Maryland and Virginia is longer than it takes to drive here, I’ll just put it like that.

Culture is the entire reason we don’t cross-pollinate, why Zac thinks I live a thousand miles away and Google Maps ETA (0633) tells me that if I leave right now in an Uber it will take 33 minutes…. and it’s only two and a half hours door to door if I took public transportation the whole way (leaving out shortcuts like being picked up at the Metro or Ubering from the station to take care of Oliver, who is a dog. It would cut off my commute to Zac by a large margin if he lived near the Metro, but he hadn’t met me before he decided to move (that was a joke, Zachary- please laugh).

No one I know who lives in Virginia is someone who thinks they’re a racist, and I don’t either unless they’re just white and that’s the only standard we’re going on. I do, because even when people aren’t overtly racist, they still benefit from racism.

Racism is a top-down system of oppression that minorities cannot duplicate. Living in that system, upholding it makes one racist. To be antiracist is to be loud about the fact that you are calling out behaviors you exhibit; you have to realize that you are at least currently steeped in those attitudes if you refuse to grow away from them. I am a huge fan of the writer who, I think, Tweeted that they were tired of catering to old people that lived through the entire ass Civil Rights movement and didn’t learn shit from Shinola.™ I’m paraphrasing.

I have become louder about this as I’ve realized that my white partners have not made the connection and I am too pissed off to be with another white person who cannot admit complicity. I mentioned this was an issue with Daniel, but he’s not the only Southern white person I’ve ever dated, either. Don’t think that shit didn’t happen more than once. I didn’t get the lines about Richmond from nowhere. One of my partners had bigger fuckin’ problems than Daniel about it…. and the worst part is that white people characterize them as jokes because they think minorities are cute.

In “Go Tell a Watchman,” Harper Lee makes the point that white people like taking care of black people and race relations would have been fine if they hadn’t stopped seeing the white savior complex as a good thing. Whites weren’t hiring black people after the Civil War. They could get slave wages at best without colleges being open to them.

Abolutionists/Progressives had left slavery in the dust (introducing egregious hiring practices, redlining, the Tuskeegee experiments and Henrietta Lacks), trading it for their do-gooder feelings. “If we give to charity, we can help minorities by keeping them from falling into the river and not exploring why the current is so strong.

This is where my red mist rage is directed. Fuck the white savior complex. The Green Book was a fucking masterpiece at highlighting bullshit, brilliant because it was so fucking atrocious and satirical- if you were picking up the subtext and feeling more tender toward the black queer musical genius than his fucking driver. That scene in the bar. My God. I have never wanted to give a standing ovation to a musician more. Let’s not ignore the queer part. Mahershala Ali played a big hate double ticket.

I am not “progressive Karen,” the virtue-signaling haircut with an attitude. I won’t unload on someone about it unless it naturally comes up. Cultural norms about race inform those about sexuality. I don’t want to beat white people over the head, I want to say how I feel and have the right people come to me.

If you’re a white person who can’t admit they’re a racist by being enculturated as one, we don’t have much in common. I’d rather spend my time around people who share my values and goals. Which, I might add, means I get along more with queer POC than white, because there’s a special hell for people who have more than one minority at play. I’m not just white and queer. I have two information processing disorders, mentally ill and physically disabled…. although mental illness is not a processing disorder and I am making that distinction. That is the stone cold fact that “mental health goes up and down, but AuDHD will affect you (suck) no matter what”

I am AuDHD (autism and ADHD, I can’t remember if I’ve directly explained the word before- telling you about it in case you want to watch a video on YouTube or something. That’s been the most helpful for me- here’s what to do now that you know. The bitch of it is that autism and ADHD present the same way a lot of the time, but the coding is generally different on the backend. You’re trapped, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.).

I also have a Bipolar II diagnosis. I’m a big hate double ticket in that I am both making people uncomfortable with my queerness in some arenas, and infantilized in others. Discrimination either comes from straight culture not accepting me, or all people with wrongheaded ideas about autism, ADHD, and bipolar rendering me an incapable adult….. or alternatively, the reaction to saying I’m autistic is generally “you don’t look autistic.” When I figure out how to do that, I’ll let you know. If you know an autistic person, you know one autistic person. No two people are alike, and AuDHD is more complicated than autism alone.

Therefore, I feel incapable enough on my own time. I do not need any reinforcement in this arena.

Editor’s Note:

All of the sudden, I have developed an *immediate* need for coffee. Hold please.

Now that I have coffee next to me, we can get back to why living in DC is so important to me.

I would have not grown in any of these ways regarding antiracism if I hadn’t moved, full stop. Living here in 2001 was only my second exposure to black people that didn’t speak AAVE, and had a completely different culture (the first was meeting black people in The Bahamas- Freeport specifically- with a British [RP] accent). I am no longer a product of my northeast Texas upbringing, and I just thought about this- I was no longer a product of my upbringing the moment we landed in the Bahamas.

I got out of my culture, and I noticed. The repetition of that idea had an impact, that black culture was not monolithic. The first time was in the 80s. The second was 2001. Most people don’t ever learn that when they’re eight or nine in the Deep South; most people in the Deep South don’t go to The Bahamas, and I’m not being an asshole. Look it up. People rarely leave their state and don’t have passports, and this is not limited to the South. They’re oblivious because sometimes they can’t get out, sometimes they don’t wanna. That’s a crapshoot.

And, of course, even then you’re taking a huge bet on cultural awareness. Americans are Americans everywhere we go. If there’s anything that going to The Farm would do for me that I’d value more than anything else is language skills in something besides English…..

I’m closer to being fluent in Spanish than anything else- I identify as gringo Texican- the white girl with seven abuelas in three different cities. Incidentally, I also have a Lebanese Omm (Arabic for “mother”). She speaks the Levantine dialect, so I’m sorry if this is not the word for mother in others- I was trying to be sweet. I am at least worth a “habibi” from her most of the time… (it’s Arabic for “sweetheart,” or something like it…. akin to mulkvisti in Finland- “one I hate less than the others”).

The other invaluable asset to spy training is not looking like so much of an American when I travel…. especially when not starting to count from my thumb in Europe can cause such devastation. 😉

Luckily, I don’t have to go to The Farm to pick up all these things, because between retired spies on YouTube and the plethora of non-fiction books on espionage I have enough information to be able to adapt into a lot of cultures. I can’t always look “not American,” but I can at least be aware of cultural norms even if I can’t social mask them.

In effect, my smallest dream is fulfilling my largest. In order to travel, I need to know the feel of home. The feel of home is being excited about world events, making history… have always made history.

Because let’s face it. When you’re talking about the United States,

I live in the history.

Now, not only is DC where we keep the history of the nation, I am part of it. I am loud about it in some spaces, quiet in others. I will never be anything but a silent observer in Frederick Douglass’s house, the African American History Museum, or staring at the stunning photographs on the wall at Ben’s Chili Bowl. It’s actually, in some ways, a more moving experience than the entire museum. I reserve the right to change my mind when I go back to see Chadwick Boseman’s original Black Panther costume. He’s a hometown sensation and I absolutely will stand in front of it and cry.

What I have noticed through having a blog is that being a silent observer allows me to take that information away and slam it into the faces of people who most need to hear it. I am not responsible for changing the black community, I am responsible for changing my own….. living where I most want to live in the world.