Throughout history nobody has mistaken Beantown as a black town. Boston has long since had a lily white persona. And it shows. In recent years, Harvard held a panel entitled 'Has Boston shed its racist reputation?' However, the panelists couldn't even answer this daunting question. They merely acknowledged the city's lack of progress in becoming more racially inclusive.
The bus riots of 1974 have left unresolved racial tensions that seem to plague the city today. Boston just has never been the best place in the U.S. for blacks to live, work or play.
Speaking of play, does the Bostonian pigment prerequisite extend to sports arenas? Boston has had its share of great white superstar athletes. For years, Kevin McHale and Larry Bird were the face of the Celtics and more recently Tom Brady has become the city's poster boy.
With the NBA season underway, Beantown has a big three in basketball to match their reigning big two in baseball. Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz will have to share Boston's athletic spotlight with Celtic-old-head Paul Pierce and the newest additions of Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett.
In some record books, Manny and Ortiz have surpassed Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig as the best one-two punch in baseball history. Could the three-headed monster offense of Pierce, Allen and Garnett re-write sports history too?
Even if they don't, the three have brought the Celtics back into big-time b-ball conversations. And Bostonians love it. While the city has instantly embraced their black superstar athletes, many black residents still find themselves on the outside looking in.
With Boston's current crop of black superstar athletes, it takes us back to the question 'Has Boston shed its racist reputation?' This question can only truly be answered once more progress is made outside of sports arenas.
Majority Mind Solutions
*Boston's black superstars like Manny, Ortiz, Pierce, Allen and Garnett should make their presence know in Boston's black communities and all of the city's few diverse districts in order to cultivate tolerance and acceptance of all races.
*Sports owners and their vice presidents of community relations should reach out to Boston's local black youth and give them a helping hand through athletic, social and educational programs.
Majority Mind Questions
Do YOU have any potential solutions to add to the list or do you think there is no problem in the first place? Feel free to respond!
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1 comment:
Ha! I was just having this same conversation with my girlfriend....
As a lifelong Bostonian who grew up in the public schools shortly after the busing riots, I think it's been a while since the city as a whole had trouble embracing non-white sports stars. Not a LONG while, though. I'm thinking back to Mo Vaughan in the '90s, maybe Jim Rice or Marvelous Marvin Hagler before that. Many of these athletes HAVE done an enormous amount of work in the city's communities, Vaughan especially, but Papi, Pierce and the late Reggie Lewis as well.
But as to the broader question of whether it makes any difference to the town's racial rep --no, don't be silly.
First, you have to separate the rep from the reality. Boston's a symbol, always will be, of white northerners' racism. How do you erase a photo of white men spearing a black man with an American flag? I honestly don't think it will ever lose that reputation, not in my lifetime, the same way the South will always be associated in the popular mind with lynchings and slavery.
But the real Boston has changed profoundly since the '70s. Those changes haven't come from athletes leading the way. In fact, the changes haven't come from black Bostonians becoming more integrated into the city as a whole, either.
Rather, long-time residents both black and white have been displaced in many areas by newcomers who don't share the historical baggage of the '70s. These newbies are either immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, or the Caribbean, or are part of the ever-churning pool of college grads who settle in the city.
The newcomers, I think, have blunted the old battles somewhat. Boston either is now or will soon be "majority minority," and while the various groups may not see eye to eye on issues, the balance of power has still shifted significantly away from the former Irish monopoly.
Plus the old poor white neighborhoods like Charlestown and South Boston have been gentrified beyond recognition, another sign that the Irish power base is waning. (Poor African-American neighborhoods like Roxbury and North Dorchester have gentrified too, but much more slowly, I think because of the decision in the '80s to re-route the southern half of the Orange Line subway through tonier Jamaica Plain. Black communities' physical isolation has been a sticking point ever since, with the current "Silver Line" bus system a half-hearted gesture of apology.)
Anyway, when I was younger I used to have a hard time believing Boston was "more racist" than other cities. I mean, more racist than Chicago? Than Cleveland? What about DC, where I'm living now, which Stephen Colbert called "the chocolate city with a marshmallow center?" In a country like this, where's the "less-racist" city?
I always figured the "most-racist city" peg was a national version of what you see in Boston itself--where well-off whites in the surrounding suburbs look down their noses at the racial conflict in town, ignoring their own complicity in the issue.
But I've lived around some more over the past few years, and yeah, Boston's different. Most significantly, it seems like there's less interaction among middle-class whites and blacks in Boston than what you have elsewhere.
I think it comes down to a numbers game, though. The only difference between Chicago and Boston, for instance, is that black residents have political clout thanks to their numbers. The segregation isn't any starker in Boston, and the whites in Chicago aren't any less indifferent to what goes on in African-American communities than they are in Boston. But Chicago's black people seem at home in their city in a way that (I think) many African-American Bostonians don't feel.
Not that Chicago is any paragon of racial comity or anything. But I think the differences between the two cities are illustrative of some of the power dynamics at work in racial issues, if only because the towns are so similar in many other ways.
So to sum up: Boston will embrace its three basketball players (especially if Garnett says something like "It's better here than I'd expected"), but that won't affect what is really a question of political and economic power.
Here ends a Beantown native's rambles.
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