When I moved to Seattle's Central District in January 2020, I felt like an imposter. This is a formerly Black neighborhood, thoroughly transformed by gentrification and displacement. One of ways I committed to mitigating my impact as a gentrifier was to learn about the local and historical community, through the eyes of those maintaining it.

Dorothy Brown, in The Whiteness of Wealth asks, "If Blacks replicated white behavior, would the outcome be the same?". Then in engaging and accessible language (we're talking tax law here), she lays out the many and surprising ways why the answer is resoundingly NO.

"White folks in this country have had a racial reckoning in recent years, but it’s been more localized and less meaningful…than media depictions of that racial reckoning suggest…”

Of the many remarkable experiences I had there, two stand out at this moment, both from the Community Remembrance Project. Descendants or community members are encouraged to dig a jarful of dirt from the site of a lynching. There are rows and rows of these jars at the Legacy Museum, each marked with the name of the victim, the brown earthen hues eerily suggestive of the skin color of the lynched.

I am not a fan of newsletter onslaughts, so it's surprising how captivated I am by ARD's daily newsletters.