Tweet
Obama and the multitudes who enjoy poking fun at Washington whenever snow falls are actually missing the point, however: the smart DC and its immaculate monuments and museums that the tourists (and, dare I say it, even Obama himself) see is by no means the real, impoverished Washington so close by.
I live in the privileged white enclave of Georgetown, and this difference between appearance and reality is always succinctly symbolised for me when snow comes and Georgetown is suddenly invaded by black men wielding shovels, who go from door to door offering to clear driveways and pavements for 50 bucks or so. Who the black men are and where they come from are questions that I suspect rarely occur to most of Georgetown's 5,000 or so white people; they just come from "out there", meaning swaths of the city that most whites have never seen.
In reality, the nation's capital is a strikingly poor little city of just 61.4 square miles, with a population of just 600,000; two-thirds of them are African Americans or Latinos, and unemployment hovers at about 10 per cent. More than 100,000 lost their health insurance last year, the city has the highest incidence of HIV in the country, and a third of the population is functionally illiterate.
To rub it all in, hugely valuable real estate in DC is occupied not just by federal government buildings and those monuments and museums to which all the tourists flock, but by 174 foreign embassies and international organisations, such as the World Bank - none of which pays a penny in much-needed taxes to the city.
http://www.newstatesman.com/north-am...ton-city-obama
http://snow2.co.ho.md.us/GridMap.asp?Col=9&Row=8