"Just a Nigger Warehouse." Construction Underway of Playground Surrounded by Barbwire at D.C.'s Cruddy, Boarded Up Homeless Shelter with No Hot Water, A/C or Heat
Fortress D.C. [photographs by Vince Brown]. Making sure there is a decisive borderline between the white gentrifiers and the criminalized Black poor, the D.C. Govt has created its very own white supremacy megaplex near the Stadium-Armory Metro station. All on a single litter-strewn campus sits a clinic for meth rehabilitation and sexually transmitted diseases, two jails (the CTF and the main jail), the former city morgue and the crumbling down D.C. General, an old hospital which now functions as the City's emergency homeless shelter. This architectural and spatial arrangement keeps the Black 'lost and found' out of sight and out of mind.
As explained by Mike Davis, in this racist environment 'white people's security has less to do with personal safety than with the degree of personal insulation, in residential, work, consumption and travel environments, from unsavory groups and individuals.'
Finding that "D.C. General is a playground desert" [MORE] and merging urban design, architecture and the police apparatus into a single, comprehensive security effort, D.C. has started construction on a playground at its super foul homeless shelter. As you can see the playground is temporarily surrounded by barbed wire or a cage. Or perhaps the cage is permanent to keep the Black children more self contained and in greater confinement.
Maybe a little cleaner place to stay than an alley, the shelter/hospital built in the early 20th century features no hot water, a/c or heat [MORE] and is often beset by dysfunction, decay and disease. For instance records show that a young Black girl woke up with so many insect bites on her legs and her bottom that she had to be taken to the hospital. [MORE] Sometimes, it is the estimated 600 children living there who suffer the most. [MORE]
Nearly all of its residents are Black or Brown. That is, it is occupied solely by niggers, which means victim[s] of white supremacy. [In the absence of white supremacy, niggers would not exist. MORE] This situation would never be tolerated if white children lived there.
The city will spend approximately $450,000 to construct the playground and it is scheduled to be completed at the end of September. The Homeless Children's Playtime Project led the effort to have the playground built. [MORE]
The Department of Parks and Recreation website shows the closest public playground at 17th and C streets SE, about a half-mile walk from D.C. General. The playground is located on an unfenced triangle area of grass, sandwiched between three roads.
Although some white folks might be consciously oblivious to the racist warehousing of Blacks, to most white folks that is the entire point - and powerless pariah groups, such as homeless Black people, hopefully read the meaning immediately.