Sure I could overlook being one of a few Black people for a while (I went to a predominately white high school, and then a predominately white college where I was sometimes the only Black person in my class), but after a couple weeks of seeing hardly any Black people… well, it started to eat at me.
DC isn’t called the Chocolate City without good reason. Even if there are nothing but White folk where you work, you can always find a happy hour or a club or a mall where Blacks are in the majority. I have nothing at all against white environments and white people in general, but sometimes a girl just needs to see some people who look like her.
Three weeks in, I started to get that itch. I tried listening to Black music, but by then I’d listened to all my CDs a million times and was bored with them. I’d been to a couple clubs suggested by Time Out London searching for browner folk and all I found was some "international" crowds listening to something called house and garage (and because of the British accent of the person who told me what the music genre was, I thought for the longest it was called 'horse and carriage.')
I searched, but I could not find. And finally, I just asked the only Black people I saw—salesgirls. They were my age, they were Black. That alone should be enough in common, right?
Wrong. They looked dumbfounded when I asked, “uh, where are all the Black people?”
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