I presume, given Bauman’s blithe invocation of apartheid, that he’s speaking about race. But race is never explicitly mentioned, and class easily could be substituted for race. He also is not clear about what the divide affects. Is it primarily a housing divide, as Will seems to take it to be? Or is it cultural or economic, as the reference to the “splendours, ostentatious elegance and refined pleasures” of Downtown seems to indicate? Or is it some combination of all of the above?

There is a significant racial divide in D.C., but it’s not as all encompassing as he describes it. There are plenty of white and black folks who live, work, and socialize among one another. The farther down the economic rung a black child is, or the farther up the rung a white adult is, the less likely they will have meaningful contact with the other race. At the extremes, Bauman’s description is probably accurate – though “apartheid” is a lousy word for it – but there are a helluvalot of folks in the middle.

I’d say more in defense of my hometown, but Bauman’s prose is so hopelessly inexact that I wouldn’t know where to begin. I guess this is just his cri de couer, and the rules of logic really don’t apply to it. But this doesn’t seem to reflect “Bauman´s incisive methods of inquiry” that were lauded on the editorial review on Amazon.

I presume, given Bauman’s blithe invocation of apartheid, that he’s speaking about race. But race is never explicitly mentioned, and class easily could be substituted for race. He also is not clear about what the divide affects. Is it primarily a housing divide, as Will seems to take it to be? Or is it cultural or economic, as the reference to the “splendours, ostentatious elegance and refined pleasures” of Downtown seems to indicate? Or is it some combination of all of the above?

There is a significant racial divide in D.C., but it’s not as all encompassing as he describes it. There are plenty of white and black folks who live, work, and socialize among one another. The farther down the economic rung a black child is, or the farther up the rung a white adult is, the less likely they will have meaningful contact with the other race. At the extremes, Bauman’s description is probably accurate – though “apartheid” is a lousy word for it – but there are a helluvalot of folks in the middle.

I’d say more in defense of my hometown, but Bauman’s prose is so hopelessly inexact that I wouldn’t know where to begin. I guess this is just his cri de couer, and the rules of logic really don’t apply to it. But this doesn’t seem to reflect “Bauman´s incisive methods of inquiry” that were lauded on the editorial review on Amazon.