Why Do People Oppose Making Washington D.C. a State?

 ...race, probably.

I've always supported full rights for the District's residents, including when I lived there in 1972. And I never understood the arguments against statehood.
 

 

From an article in Wednesay's Washington Post:

“For a solid 100 years after 1871, we know for a fact that the reason the city lost the franchise was principally about race,” said George Derek Musgrove, co-author of the report, as well as “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital.” “The justification for the city losing the franchise, and for maintaining it as a voteless capital of the democracy, was principally about race.”

"At the heart of the resistance to granting suffrage to D.C. residents: a fear of Black political power.

It’s all in the record, Musgrove said. Look no further than the 1890 explanation from Sen. John Tyler Morgan of Alabama, a former Confederate Democrat and enslaver, about why D.C. residents lost the right to vote in even local elections years earlier:

“In the face of this influx of negro population from the surrounding States, [Congress] … found it necessary to disenfranchise every man in the District of Columbia … in order thereby to get rid of this load of negro suffrage that was flooded in upon them. That is the true statement. History cannot be reversed. No man can misunderstand it.”