In a previous life, I was a radio producer and learned pretty quickly that if you ever entered a drought in callers, just mention race and watch the phones light up. That sentiment has certainly held true in this form as well. In my last piece, I attempted to tackle the issue of segregation, its relation to power, and what effect that has on young people growing up in that environment.
This past week, Devin Cole (with support from Jackney Prioly) took this a step further and explored these issues on a specific recent issue: that of the Harvard/Yale – Cure Nightclub incident. Based on the response I got last week, and the action in the comments section of Devin’s article, this is certainly an issue that Bostonian’s are passionate about. First, let me say that as long as people remain respectful and productive, I believe only good things can come from discussions of race in our city. But, unfortunately, all too often we take these discussions as an opportunity to once again divide ourselves into factions of belief and blame.
One of the more interesting discussions that I had after posting the article had nothing to do with race at all. A friend of mine jokingly pointed out that I had fallen in love with the use of the possessive adjectives (my, our, etc) in relation to the city of Boston. What he thought was an oversight (or a glimpse into my delusions that I ‘own the place’) was actually a rather intentional use to emphasize how much these issues affect us all. It is a sentiment that I’ve seen shared in Devin’s article when he declared “Boston is an exceptional place…it will never reach [its] potential when groups of people are shut out” and also by City Councilor Ayanna Pressley when, following the Cure incident, remarked that situations like these are bad “not only because we don’t want to move back, but also because this is bad for Boston’s brand and there is an economic impact to that.” When we talk about this place as “ours”, we include ourselves in the discussion and, if we truly want to move forward, we have to take responsibility and ownership for both the good and the bad.
We have to take ownership over the fact that racism is a system that exists in our city. This generally makes us uncomfortable because no one wants to be labeled as a racist. In my article, I used the Boston Police as an example of authority and its relation to race, which caused a friend of mine in the Boston Police to point out that Boston excels in many of these areas where other, similar cities lag behind.
Many of the comments to Devin’s article bring up that Boston has grown significantly in recent years to become a more open and tolerant place or, by contrast, that it is not nearly as friendly as other, more diverse cities. These points are all valid and, in many cases, very true, but I believe they ignore the root issue of: it exists, it’s here, and it’s not good for us. Michael Beal, the Harvard organizer of the Cure Club party, wrote in a letter to the would-be-party attendees that “after having spent the last few hours with the club owner, I do not believe him to be a racist; which only adds to my consternation around what this event says about race relations in our country.” Say what you want about the facts surrounding the incident, but I believe that this statement steps above the belief and blame game and brings up a larger discussion about systems that affect us all, not just isolated actions of bigotry.
So what can we do about it? Is this simply something that will evolve with time? It blows my mind sometimes to think that our parents grew up in a world with different drinking fountains. And I’m sure it blew their minds that their parents grew up in a world where women weren’t allowed to vote. I’m sure our kids with think we were insane for some of the things we said and did, but what can we do in the meantime? I say, first things first: embrace the power of a possessive adjective. This is our city after all.
