The lie spreads faster than the truth these days, especially when it comes from a podium wrapped in the power of the presidency. This week, President Trump stood before the cameras and told America that Washington, D.C., was spiraling into chaos — that crime was out of control, that only federal muscle could restore order.
But the truth? Crime in D.C. is down by 26%. The city, like any city, has its struggles, but it is not the war zone he paints it to be.
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This isn’t just about bad data or lazy speechwriting. This is about erasure, about stripping away self-determination from a city that has been denied it for generations. Monday’s announcement — that D.C.’s police will be placed under federal control and that the National Guard will patrol its streets —is a familiar chapter in America’s long book of overreach. For Black and other marginalized communities, this is déjà vu with a fresh coat of authoritarian paint.
And make no mistake — your tax dollars are paying for this unneeded display of federal force. Money that could have gone into schools, housing, transit, health care, and climate resilience is instead being spent to militarize a city that did not ask for it. This is the same pattern we’ve seen time and again: cut the programs that build communities up, then fund the ones that control and contain them.
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There is a history here. Federal power has always found its way into our neighborhoods when it wanted to control, not when it wanted to help. We’ve seen this movie — when “law and order” meant turning our blocks into military zones, when budget cuts bled out programs that fed the hungry, housed the homeless, mentored the youth, and healed the wounded. We know what happens when the state arrives with tanks instead of teachers, soldiers instead of social workers, surveillance instead of sanctuary.
D.C. is more than its struggles.
But here’s what they rarely say: D.C. is more than its struggles. Like any other great metropolis, it is a place of ambition, creativity, and genius. It is home to small business owners who built success from the ground up, artists whose names are known around the world, and universities like George Washington and Howard that have educated some of the nation’s most brilliant and powerful minds.
Too often, the country’s image of D.C. is reduced to poor Black folks who “don’t know what they’re doing” — a lie that erases the city’s true breadth. Some of America’s brightest lights were born here: Al Gore, Dave Chappelle, J. Edgar Hoover, Cory Booker, Jamie Raskin, Marvin Gaye, and Duke Ellington. This city has shaped presidents, lawmakers, innovators, and cultural giants.
Trump’s move destabilizes more than a city — it destabilizes trust in democracy itself. Washington, D.C., is not a colony. It is a living, breathing testament to resilience, stitched together by people who have fought through redlining, underfunded schools, police violence, and decades of being told their voices didn’t matter because they didn’t have a vote in Congress. And now, the White House treats it like territory to be subdued, not a home to be respected.
Those who challenge power in this country always pay.
Where are they when democracy isn’t an abstraction but a block in D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood, or an apartment building in Anacostia, or the front steps of a church on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue? Where are they when democracy looks like a grandmother who still votes every year, even though her city’s fate is decided by people she didn’t elect?
The silence is deafening. And in that silence, I hear the truth — maybe we are alone again. Maybe it will fall, as it so often has, to those who have been most denied freedom to lead the fight for it. The same hands that picked the cotton, built the railroads, marched across bridges, and buried children taken too soon. The same hands that turned grief into movement, and movement into law, only to watch the law be stripped away again in the next generation’s lifetime.
I am not naïve. I know that speaking out against this will come with a cost. Those who challenge power in this country always pay — sometimes with reputation, sometimes with livelihood, sometimes with life. But I also know that the cost of silence is far greater.
If history has taught us anything, it’s that control is never ceded willingly once it’s taken.
The people of D.C. have already given this country more than it has ever given back. They pay federal taxes without voting representation. They endure federal oversight without federal protection of their autonomy. They send their children to wars ordered by presidents they had no hand in electing. And now, they’re being told that their own police force, their own streets, their own safety will be dictated from outside their borders.
This isn’t about safety. It’s about control. And if history has taught us anything, it’s that control is never ceded willingly once it’s taken.
So maybe the question isn’t “Where are those of courage?” Maybe the question is, “When will I stop waiting for them?” Because if I’m honest, I think I already know the answer.
It must be me. It must be us. It must be the people who have lived through every tactic designed to break us — because we’re the only ones who know how to survive them. It must be the people who understand that democracy isn’t something handed down from on high, but something built from the ground up, brick by brick, truth by truth.
If history is any guide, we will not win this in a single march or speech. It will take years. It will take the stubbornness of those who refuse to give up, even when the rest of the country looks away. But I truly believe, in the marrow of my bones, that freedom is worth that fight.
D.C. is worth that fight.
Dr. Mustafa Ali is a poet, thought leader, strategist, policymaker, and activist committed to justice and equity. He is the founder of The Revitalization Strategies, a business focused on moving our most vulnerable communities from “surviving to thriving.” Ali was previously the senior vice president for the Hip Hop Caucus, a national nonprofit and non-partisan organization that connects the hip-hop community to the civic process to build power and create positive change.