Bostonist did not play organized football as a youngster (we come from a baseball family) and we don't much care for the mania that parents bring to youth sports these days. But the news that five suburban (mostly white) Pop Warner youth football teams are quitting their league so they don't have to play against the (mostly black) city teams from Boston has us so worked up we can hardly contain ourselves. (Be warned: we are about to climb up on the soapbox of righteous indignation.) The teams, Needham-Wellesley, Framingham, Norwood, Natick, and Weymouth, say they are concerned about city teams' "intimidating" rap music, their "hard-hitting" style of football (um, it's football, right? It's supposed to be hard-hitting), and the danger of playing at city fields, since a Pop Warner player was hit in the stomach by a stray bullet last summer. Of these concerns, only the last strikes us as anything other than a total pretext, and even that seems like a tremendous failure on the part of the suburban parents. What lesson are the suburban kids to take from this? That when you encounter people unlucky enough to be caught in a bad situation, the best thing to do is retreat from them and protect yourself? It's practical, but hardly charitable, and it reinforces the notion that poor people's problems are theirs and theirs alone, even when the poor people in question are only 11 or 12 years old.
Worse still, this represents the elimination of one of the few remaining chances for privileged, mostly white children and poor, mostly minority children to spend time together and get in the habit of feeling comfortable around one another. As such, a new generation will be schooled in the more subtle, modern racism that has replaced the rock-throwing and impaling-with-a-flagpole of a generation ago. Say what you will, but Bostonist continues to find that many young white adults, though they hold no specific malice in their hearts, feel a general, indescribable unease around black and hispanic people, or assume that minorities are necessarily tougher and possessed of more street smarts. (We vividly remember the discussion in our mostly white criminal law class, in which many many students believed that it was reasonable for a white person alone in a subway car with four black people to feel apprehensive if not downright threatened. We grew up being the only white kid in the all-black subway car, and we can assure you that it's not that bad.) While the causes of this are too numerous to elaborate upon here, we think one problem is that many white kids are raised without real contact with other races and cultures. Their families have retreated from urban public schools and from many city neighborhoods, and they grow up inevitably seeing non-white kids as foreign and other.
Of course, there is another reason the suburban teams might want to leave, as the Globe article points out: they're badly outmatched, and no one likes to lose a lot of games (exhibit one: the softball team we play on, which is coming closer every week to forfeiting for lack of players). Still, Bostonist hopes the city teams will not let the suburban teams sneak out under poorly conceived pretenses: whatever league Norwood & co. go to, Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan, Mission Hill, and the South End should seek to join as well. Eventually, the suburban teams will be forced to retreat so far to avoid playing the Boston teams that they'll end up having to play in Springfield and Hartford, where they will inevitably be greeted, once again, with "intimidating" rap music (and salsa).
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