Do I have to pick a hometown?
Eight Years a Washingtonian, The Conclusion.
So we are finally at the end of my series of lessons I learned from moving to DC. You can read the master list here.
And I know one of you is out here waiting to tell me, especially if you’re new here within the last five years, that I should try Baltimore if I need all the things that I need. Spoiler alert, I did, from August 2017-September 2018 and I might do it again.
I want to open up today’s email with this musical selection because it sets the tone of my mood as I’ve gone back and forth between living and working in DC and Maryland since 2017 AND missing NC hard.
(We’re doing Kermit’s version because his isn’t giving white man trying to imitate the powerful Maori haka from last week. Also, Kermit’s version is what made me really get into this song after finding it on YouTube in 2017.)
Especially since lesson seven was that I’m not going home to NC like that, but I do want to! But four-hour car rides and eight-hour train rides are a long time, no matter how much I try to trick my body. This is not just an hour-long car ride! This MARC train is not that fast! Folks aren’t just frozen in time and it’s been almost a decade since I left North Carolina!
When I drafted this series, It was originally supposed to be me dropping letters daily, and on eight specific things, and these reflections were supposed to be quick and casual.
However, what it’s done is deepen my understanding of why I chose DC, and why I feel this bistate pull between North Carolina or Maryland and a nudge to explore living in other parts of the world.
“If you are Black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South. Stop talking about the South. As long as you are South of the Canadian border, you are South.”
I would extend that to everywhere someone is Black, is the South. Anti-Blackness is global. Queer and trans antagonism is global. Abelism and classism are global. But so is love. And so we are.
North Carolina, my beloved home state, split the ticket with its presidential vote and governor. We are as purple as we ever were. The [Raleigh] News and Observer spelled that out perfectly.
But that purple in real life for me means tolerance amongst my immediate and a good chunk of my extended family, but not enthusiasm for my queerness and even my outspokenness and activism.
It means a future marriage between myself and Les would be welcomed by my home county’s registrar of deeds (who was one of the first in North Carolina to perform a queer marriage after the Obergefell decision in 2015, hey Jeff!). But negated by a reversal at the Supreme Court because we never reversed that 2012 vote against it off our state constitution and all of the prior non-enforcement and codification efforts could be undermined.
And by the way, that vote was 61.04% to 38.96% for the amendment compared to 52.43% vs. 47.7% in favor of same-sex marriage in Maryland’s 2014 vote. Even though Prince George’s and Charles Counties, our Blackest counties, voted against the Maryland amendment. I’m sensing a pattern here and I hate it.
But, Greensboro or Durham gives me all all that food I miss, that folks in PG can’t be bothered to cook or even learn to cook, the way that I have loved and now adore Old Bay. But then Baltimore does. I can shoot the shit with old friends just because. Baltimore can do that too. Oh, and it’s cheaper to even eat and have a place to live, as long as I can either get a job or sell enough coaching and services to maintain said place. Same, deal no matter which city.
So, let’s talk more about why Baltimore is in the equation. No, it’s not the be-all and end-all, but as Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott recently said, you will get your food good both on the inside and outside of the container. I paraphrase.
Still, I’ve found most of my arts and southern-esque community in Baltimore, with a side of Hyattsville and the Gateway Arts/Baltimore Avenue Corridor (in Prince George’s [PG] County, Maryland) and Alexandria. You will want to target those three as long-term homes if you’ve made it here to the end of this series and you too want the best opportunity to find like minds while being exposed to new and exciting things, that don’t require you to sell your soul.
I want to thank my Baltimore, Hyattsville, and Alexandria fanbase, colleagues, stitch group, and others who have connections to these three cities in particular, who reached out to me when I had posted on these platforms over the years that I needed help and connected me with shelter, job opportunities, and other fun.
And of course, a special thank you to Les, who opened her literal door to Prince George’s and Charles Counties for me, as well as to the larger queer community in Maryland and DC.
So yes, pros and cons on a personal level.
And pros and cons on a regional and macro level.
First, the key reason that the Baltimore-Washington region seems less like THE SOUTH, comes down to school segregation. In 1954, after Brown vs. Board of Education and Boiling vs. Sharpe were ruled in favor of school desegregation, DC and Baltimore desegregated their schools immediately. This immediately triggered a white flight response in both cities and expedited the migration of white families into the adjacent counties and independent cities, turning them into suburbs that would cater to their need for hate and seclusion, built on top of the original plantations that were taken and shaken from the Native folks and the Black freedman neighborhoods and villages that had sprung up post-antebellum.
Of course, as time went on and more incomes and laws changed, the white neo-colony suburbs became less white, but some of those families would keep moving further out, predicated by old white farms selling for “progress” and the Black villages having their land claims stolen and challenged and their own perceived economic salvation.
Only in the last 15 years has the concept of new urbanism and living in the core of the city come back in vogue for white folks of means and, to be honest, Black folks too. But so many of us who were in the cities were forced into housing projects or neighborhood rebuilds, and now many of those same folks are losing their homes again, because of property taxes and family conflicts for who owns these properties that get amplified when folks can’t agree on whether to sell or not.
My childhood in very blue-dot Greensboro, NC came with Sesame Street and going to diverse elementary schools with kids from housing projects and kids like me whose parents had low and mid-level working-class jobs and who had the benefits of being able to get homes through their job’s respective credit unions. Oh, and we had our textile and furniture mills.
Honestly, before we lost the mills, we were on equal footing as being beyond “the South”.
Let me say again, that every city in the South is beyond the South because ultimately capitalism is racialized.
DC had the federal government and Baltimore had port-adjacent factories like Bethlehem Steel that would hire Black folks in masse.
DC managed to push through some of the racism around providing transit, but as we talked about in the Metro part of this series there were gaps.
Baltimore made a good effort, but its purple nature has reared its head with transit access and education support and funding.
But now, here we are facing the political environment we have. And so far, I only want to be in Maryland proper with laws that affirm my right to be in my queer, uterus-having body on my side, or in the blue dots of North Carolina where it doesn’t take a law for people to show up for me 100%, but the laws and economy may still preclude them from being able to be there. Only time will tell where I end up!
I’m going to leave us with these two musical selections, that make me think about each of my adopted hometowns:
One more thing. I realized over the past few days that I do have something unique to offer y’all and friends of y’all who may have been caught off guard by the election results. That was me in 2016 and I would love to help you. Right now, I’m encouraging my folks who have professional development budgets to burn out before the end of the year or a little extra savings who are looking for a coach to sign up.
My next series on here will be sharing these tools in general, so you can start the process regardless of where your coins are sitting.
This is a moment and a movement and we can be at home, wherever we are!
And, if you want to join me in my favorite resistance hobby, crochet, I’m teaching that in-person in DC this coming Friday.