Photo by Mr. T in DC

You can’t get into a conversation about the District without inevitably talking about how divided it is. Beyond the fact that whites do fairly well and African Americans don’t, the city is visibly divided by geography — it’s all too often that Rock Creek Park is used as a marker for where rich D.C. starts, just as much as the Anacostia River is a marker for where poor D.C. starts. While clichés about our D(ivided) C(ity) tend to mask more complicated realities, they’re not totally off base, and they bleed into just about everything we experience on a daily basis, from crime to politics.

Today that Post reports that recent Census numbers have found that whites in the District make more than three times what their African American counterparts do, a gap that has widened since 1990. At the same time, the gap between the two groups is much narrower in the suburbs around the city, primarily in Prince George’s County. Writes the Post:

Demographers and city activists say the difference reflects four decades of upper- and middle-class blacks abandoning the city for the suburbs, coupled with a more recent resurgence of affluent whites moving to the District. Some speak of the city’s middle class as a vanishing phenomenon, propelled in part by rising housing prices.

In a sense, what we’re seeing in the District is that the African Americans that are staying are amongst the poorest in the region, while many of the whites arriving are younger, well-educated and upwardly mobile. The District largely lacks a middle class, mostly because such a high proportion of jobs are reserved for those with advanced degrees. And in this, again, there’s division — the Census found that while nine of 10 whites have college degrees, only two in 10 African Americans do.

Narrowing these divisions will take a generation, and one of the most powerful means to do so is education. But even here the District has a ways to go, despite the many improvements that have been seen over the years. The Post also reports today that the gap between white and African American students the D.C. schools is larger than anywhere else in the country. On a fourth-grade math test, for example, white students scored 60 points higher than their African American counterparts. (In Cleveland, it was only 21 points.) Those gaps are linked to — you guessed it — income.

For more on the depressing yet all-too-real world of a divided city, read DCentric’s recent series on how jobs — or the lack thereof — is so closely linked to race.