Pondering meaning of changing D.C. demographics

Similarly, the city’s cultural offerings seem unlikely to lose their emphasis on black artists and audiences. “No one is getting major foundation funding without being asked about the diversity of their audience and their offerings,” said Anne Corbett, executive director of the Cultural Development Corp., which creates spaces for arts groups and issues grants to D.C. artists. “Whatever the census shows, in the arts world, all we can think about is we need to do a better job of drawing audiences of color.”

Students of urban change argue that a city’s ethnic self-image often survives for generations after the defining group loses its demographic dominance.

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Washington, D.C. residents describe the changing demographics of their neighborhoods.

“Cities have a certain background, and that culture permeates, even long after that group is no longer the majority,” said former D.C. mayor Anthony A. Williams, who teaches a course called “Leading Cities” at Harvard University. “The Irish influence in Boston is still very powerful, even though Irish people are no longer the bulk of the population.

“Just as [Massachusetts Gov.] Deval Patrick had to be steeped in Irish institutions to succeed in Boston,” Williams said, “the black institutions in the District will continue to dominate the city’s politics — the whole grapevine of churches, social groups, fraternities.”

That abiding identification with the long-dominant group means the latest census numbers do not portend a major shift in the city’s identity, said Blair Ruble, director of the Comparative Urban Studies Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center and author of a new book, “Washington’s U Street: A Biography.”

“The census numbers create a symbolic moment, but the data overamplifies the change in the city,” he said. Ruble argues that racial change in neighborhoods such as Shaw steal the headlines, but what makes the U Street corridor so important as a cultural and business center is that “it has always served as a zone of contact,” a racial, cultural and economic crossroads. That’s why 14th and U is where the largest crowds gathered on the night President Obama was elected, he writes.

“The larger truth is that we’re headed into a period in which all Americans are minorities, and Washington is ahead of much of the country in figuring out what that will be like,” Ruble said.

Political strategists looking at the data on race see support for two contradictory story lines:

A sharp increase in the proportion of white and Hispanic voters has led some black politicians to worry that their dominance in citywide elections — the District has not had a white mayor since the beginning of home rule in 1975 and has had only one non-black council chairman — will inevitably wane.

Marshall Brown, a longtime D.C. campaign strategist whose son Kwame is the council chairman, worries that the shift in population will result in a racially polarized electorate. “The longtime white population, the people who got involved in statehood, civil rights and environmental causes, thought of this as a black city,” said Brown, who is black. “But the new white voters aren’t involved like that. They want doggie parks and bike lanes. The result is a lot of tension.