chocolate city
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Bustin’ The Beat: Go-Go Officially Designated As the Music of Washington D.C.
Chuck Brown would be proud. Chocolate City finally – officially – has its own sound, on the books. This week, D.C.’s mayor signed a bill making go-go the official music of Washington. “Today, we are proud to say that DC’s official music will always be Go-Go, because there is no DC without Go-Go and there…
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#MoeChella Is What Happens When Natives Push Back Against Colonizers; Thousands Converge on City for Go-Go
For one night, Washington, D.C., took off its hard bottoms, dress pants, work suits, office dresses and let its pinned-up braids down, to collectively sing “Pretty Girls” all over 14th and U streets in a symbolic go-go gathering that stomped on the colonizers’ graves. It was brilliantly dubbed #MoeChella, a mashup of Coachella (an uber-white…
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‘I’m From Here’: Washington, DC, Natives Fight Back Against the Whitewashing of Chocolate City
When I arrived in Washington, D.C., more than two decades ago to attend Howard University, one of the first things I noticed was the diversity of black people, all different kinds: rich ones, poor ones, bougie ones and the natives, born and raised in D.C., who introduced me to mambo sauce, go-go music and New…
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How Gentrification Destroys Black Voting Power
Remember when the nation’s capital was so black that Parliament Funkadelic nicknamed Washington, D.C., “Chocolate City”? Maybe you’re old enough to remember when California’s Bay Area was so black that it birthed the Black Panthers and everyone knew what Sir Mix-a-Lot meant when he rapped about an “Oakland booty.” If you’re too young for that,…