Some old heroes are too sacred to mock

A Washington DC pizza chain must offer financial amends for making light of the late Mayor Marion Barry.

There are two types of demographic change:

• The Good Kind when the white share of the population goes down (due to utterly natural forces that are completely immune to any decisions about public policy made by anybody — any hint of skepticism on this point makes you a Great Replacement conspiracy theorist).

• The Bad Kind when the black share goes down due to the horrors of gentrification.

When the Good Kind of demographic change happens, white people must of course expect statues of their traditional heroes to be torn down and the new people to mock their memories. For example, the main founder of Caltech, 1923 Physics Nobel laureate Robert Millikan, has had his name eviscerated from places of honor at Caltech because he held common pro-eugenics ideas at the time.

But when the photographic negative threatens to happen, sensitivity, nuance, and restraint are required to avoid insult to sacred icons of black history, such as Washington DC Mayor Marion Barry.

White Republicans are probably too low IQ to understand the sophisticated concept that:

Robert Millikan is Bad, but Marion Barry is Good.

Washington DC has been experiencing the Bad Kind of demographic change, with its black share of the population falling from 59% in 2000 to 41% in 2020, while its white share grew from 28% to 38%. One cause of this trend is that after 9/11, practically every federal agency decided they needed their own set of armed men to defend them in case Osama Bin Laden comes gunning for the Small Business Administration or whatever. So, the white parts of DC are an armed camp and thus quite safe these days. (The black parts, not so much during the Racial Reckoning.)

The Washington Post reports today:

A pizzeria’s mockery of Marion Barry struck a nerve in a changed D.C.

&Pizza’s ad campaign referencing Barry’s cocaine use upset many Black Washingtonians, who saw the move as a troubling sign of cultural erasure.

By Ellie Silverman and Paul Duggan

November 1, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Outside a pizza restaurant at the heart of D.C.’s vibrant U Street corridor, a crowd of protesters gathered last Friday, enraged, they said, by an appalling insult to a hero of theirs whose legacy they had showed up to defend.

They railed, stomped and chanted outside the empty restaurant at 12th and U streets NW, which had closed in advance of the widely advertised demonstration after a few days of escalating outrage over a menu item lampooning the cocaine addiction of Marion Barry, an icon of a vanished era in the capital city, a man who was called “mayor for life.”

In today’s gentrified Washington, some protesters fear, Barry’s long-ago accomplishments are fading from communal memory, even as his notorious transgressions stick. What appeared to be a White-led business’s attempt to profit off a Black leader’s pain left many native Washingtonians more than furious; their anger seemed tinged with sadness, with a deepening sense of loss in a city transformed over a quarter-century of rapid change.

“It’s like they’re participating in cultural erasure,” Ronald Moten, a protest organizer, said of the &Pizza restaurant chain, which debuted and then quickly scrapped a pastry dubbed “Marion Berry knots,” coated with powdered sugar, and an ad campaign featuring thinly veiled references to Barry’s struggles with addiction and his notorious 1990 drug arrest.

“These type of insults happen to my community every day,” Moten said. “They just usually go unchecked. But not this time.”

In a private meeting this week, the pizza chain, which lists 43 outlets in the Mid-Atlantic region, and a coalition of activists dubbed Knot in DC reached a tentative peace. In a statement Thursday, &Pizza promised several steps to make amends, including partnerships and financial investments to help minority-owned businesses in D.C.; internships for students from local high schools and historically Black colleges; and additional “cultural awareness programs,” including mentorship efforts and diversity training within the company. …

In some ways, the Friday night protest seemed less about a pastry than about endangered history and who would protect it; it seemed less about Barry than about the memory of a bygone generation of Black leaders who are understood and revered by a dwindling number of D.C. families. That a pizza chain founded in 2012 would ridicule the late mayor’s human weaknesses — as if that were the most notable aspect of his life — seemed to aggravate the cultural anxiety of Washingtonians who feel alienated amid the city’s vast transformation in the new millennium.

“It was not funny,” said Michael Crowder, 51, standing in the crowd at 12th and U. “I don’t think that could’ve been done 20 years ago.”

This trend of cultural erasure — illustrated by the Marion Berry knots and accompanying ad campaign — has impacted communities across the country, said author Brandi T. Summers, a Columbia University sociologist who studies the phenomenon and has written about the District.

As an example, she recalled a sandwich shop and bar that opened in a gentrifying area of Brooklyn in 2017. Its White owner advertised an old “bullet hole-ridden wall” on the premises, as a news release put it, and sold 40-ounce bottles of rosé in paper bags, like malt liquor, in a tone-deaf nod to the neighborhood’s downtrodden past. Protesters descended en masse, decrying the gimmicks as racist.

“It’s very common,” Summers said. “And it’s particularly offensive to people who have been there for a long time and are trying to hold onto their hopes and their places in the city.” Worse still, she said, “they’re making a mockery of these people’s past. It’s not just that Marion Barry’s time is gone, but also that they’re making fun of his particular time.” …

The legacy of D.C.’s ‘mayor for life’ is complex. While many forces beyond his control fueled the District’s financial collapse in the 1990s, critics say heavy spending he commissioned as mayor in an effort to shore up social safety nets undermined the city’s long-term fiscal health. And controversies swirled about him almost constantly involving wasteful cronyism in government, municipal contract improprieties, the self-enrichment of Barry buddies and the recurring paralysis of poorly run D.C. agencies.

That was part of the Barry story, too, all of it a dimming history now.

Barry, who died in 2014, struggled through substance abuse recovery and relapse for years, punctuated by a 1990 arrest and subsequent six-month prison sentence after he was videotaped smoking crack cocaine in an FBI sting late in his third mayoral term. Such was his political staying power, especially in the District’s poor and marginalized communities, that following his release, he was elected mayor a fourth time and later served on the D.C. Council for a decade.

... The initial apology did little to lower the temperature. The company had struck a nerve among activists who have for years worked to focus public attention on what they see as a disregard for deeply rooted Washingtonians, for families that experienced the advent of self-government in the District, and all the triumphs and failures that followed.

In satirizing the personal failures of a mayor who helped raise thousands of people out of poverty, Moten said, Burns’s pizza chain displayed its “ignorance” of the District’s history and of the sweeping social and economic forces that changed everything in the early 2000s, creating a city so different now that many long-time residents no longer recognize it.

By the early 1970s, after decades of White flight, about 70 percent of Washingtonians were Black, and they enjoyed a sense of self-determination. Empowered by Congress, which granted the District partial home rule, voters elected a predominantly Black municipal government. Barry won his first mayoral race in 1978, and guardians of his legacy remember what he achieved for the “Chocolate City” in the years after D.C. ceased to be ruled by an old U.S. House committee stacked with White Southerners. …

Then, shifting social forces upended the city’s demographic and economic makeup, ending in flight, a concentration of poverty and an eroding tax base that put the District on the brink of bankruptcy, prompting Congress to take control of municipal spending for six years. The new D.C. — today’s District — emerged from that crisis; a place where newcomers of all races, but largely affluent White people, arrived, driving up rent prices, increasing property values and tax bills and leaving many native Washingtonians struggling to get by in a city vastly different than the one they once knew. As of last year, Black residents made up less than half the D.C. population of 680,000, according to federal census data.

“You look back now at how important it was for Black folks to make a place for themselves in these chocolate cities all over the country,” Summers said, “and you have a complete reversal happening.”

And as culture is erased, so is memory.