White Triumphalism in Gentrifying D.C.

Ethnic change in Washington D.C. has gone so far that white hipsters are getting cocky about rubbing the noses of poor blacks in the new white dominance. The Washington Post reports:

While I sat for the better part of an hour — okay, perhaps longer than that — outside H Street Country Club on Saturday enjoying a few libations as the Northeast corridor’s fabulous festival unfolded around me, I watched club owner and impresario extraordinaire Joe Englert [a white guy] and his compatriots do a rather brisk business in a repurposed piece of D.C. political memorabilia. 

His navy-blue T-shirts bearing the legend “Mayor Barry: Making a great city even greater” were going gangbusters. 

That would be the official logo of Marion Barry’s 1986 re-election campaign. An original sign, incidentally, hangs above the stairs down into the basement of Englert’s Capitol Lounge on Pennsylvania Avenue SE. 

Most of the folks I watched buy the tees were, shall we say, not in Barry’s base demographic. 

While Englert acknowledged the shirts’ appeal to master ironists, he insisted he printed up the shirts out of appreciation for Barry, not to mock him. 

”I think people, even newcomers, sort have a fond view of him,” he said. “He’s a folk hero. He’s as close to Johnny Appleseed as you’re going to get here.”

This doesn't strike me as polite or prudent. Considering what happened to Matthew Yglesias in May just for being a white man walking down the street in D.C. at night, being a white man walking down the street wearing an intentionally racially insulting T-shirt, apparently thinking that poor blacks are too stupid to realize you are mocking their demographic defeat, sounds like a really bad idea.

On the second thought, a lot of these hipsters might not even get that they are racially gloating over the upcoming economic cleansing to Baltimore of the remainder of D.C.'s poor blacks. They possess elaborate conceptual vocabularies for thinking well of themselves, so they might even believe that they believe that "folk hero" nonsense.

By the way, in 25 years, will the next generation of white hipsters ironically wear vintage 2008 "Obama: Hope and Change" t-shirts? They might not be worth much right now, but you should stock up on them because they could be an ironic gold mine someday.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer