Why read Black in Place?

Book cover of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City

Book description

While Washington, D.C., is still often referred to as "Chocolate City," it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this shift better than the H Street corridor. In this book, Brandi Thompson Summers documents D.C.'s shift to a "post-chocolate" cosmopolitan…

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American history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Black in Place as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Tanya Maria Golash-Boza

Author

Read this book if you want to understand the nuances of blackness in the nation’s capital.

Brandi Thompson Summers argues in her book, Black in Place, that gentrification along the H Street Corridor in DC has involved the embracing of blackness as an aesthetic alongside the displacement of actual Black people. Summers explains how blackness came to be valued as a prized aesthetic at the same time that Black people experienced the heavy policing, predatory lending, and displacement that both make possible and accompany the gentrification of Black neighborhoods.

From Tanya's list on how DC became the most gentrified city in the country.