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Jim Vance's loss is profound for me personally. Any fool can see that Chocolate City is long-gone. But we are nowhere near done watching its symbols and institutions crumble away, some slowly like a drip-drip. Then some suddenly, shockingly, like losing Vance.
When I ran into Jim Vance a couple months ago in our bourgie Silver Spring neighborhood, the man exuded all of the swag, all of the suave for which he was known. Tall and handsome with that signature ear-ring, all I could manage was a solid, soulful handshake. You know the one where your rise up and pause prior to landing?
For a brief moment, I allowed myself the fantasy that my wife and I might still somehow be able to provide our children with a semblance of the experience I had of growing up in a city where your news anchor was black, your mayor, your teachers, dentists, doctors, etc. etc. In fact, many of those are in place for our family at this time. But the writing is on the wall with the shifting demographics, and in the way that upper middle class blacks and whites have more in common with each other than with the working class blacks who were the identity of my hometown. These are waves of undeniable motion.
And then, wham! Jim Vance?! That's a rogue wave that smacks you hard and exposes the futility of nostalgia.
Yes, I believe there will continue to be large numbers of black folks in the DMV. But this shift transcends numbers. This is about a shift in values, culture, class, and of course, race.  The absence of Vance's baritone voice and infectious laugh will make this shift painfully obvious.