July 22, 2008
NYT Blogger: Boston Most Racist City?
Sudhir Venkatesh, who writes the "Freakonomics" blog for the New York Times, has reheated the old chestnut that Boston is the most racist US city. He doesn't cite any evidence, mind you, and, like many who make this claim, he bases his assessment on anecdote. Commenters are torn. Some seem to have visited Boston only in passing. ("Anyone who’s from here knows that you take the Red Line if you’re going to a white enclave and the Orange Line if you’re going to a black one." Especially handy advice if you are heading for the notoriously white enclave of Ashmont.)
The busing incidents happened 30 years ago, and the Yawkeys are long gone from Fenway. Massachusetts is one of only three states to elect a black governor since Reconstruction, and the Celtics just won a World Championship without playing a single white guy. Nonetheless, transportation and school resources are unevenly distributed, and racial epithets can still be heard on the streets.
Does Boston deserve the label of racism? Is New York City, for example, all that better?
Image labeled "Bostonist" by Flickr user WallyG.
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It must have been a slow news day, if this is the best he could come up with. I'm sure the Times is quite proud.
As someone who grew up in the city, the racism is there. It trickles down from the older generations and it's up to the youth the use their heads and do something about it.
But as for being the most racist, I've seen worse....
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You didn't actually read his post, did you Rick?
Nowhere does he claim that Boston is the most racist city, and the entire purpose was to solicit reader opinion before sharing what social scientists think.
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I didn't explicitly make the claim that he explicitly made the claim. Just that he warmed up the chestnut. So, I can reasonably ask you the same thing: Did you even read my post?
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when i told people i was moving to boston, most everyone warned me that it was the whitest city in america. (i guess they'd never been to some parts of wisconsin.) but in boston i see people of all colors every day; in austin (and portland, too) i felt awash in white.
i don't think it can (or should) be denied that racism is part of boston's history, but we need to focus on moving past that and creating a new image of boston. it's interesting that most of the NYT commenters equate segregation and racism. while segregation is certainly undesirable and institutionalizes racism, it may not necessarily reflect individuals' attitudes about race, or how people treat each other. i do think, though, that segregation perpetuates mutual lack of understanding, and makes it easier to maintain racial stereotypes.
and the commenter who said "I simply NEVER saw people of color wandering around downtown Boston" has simply NEVER been to downtown boston. at least not on any day i've been there.
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By "segregation," I assume you mean de facto segregation and not forced segregation?
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well, what do you mean by forced segregation?
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i meant segregation by law or other institutional means (the Yawkey Red Sox, reportedly, housing discrimination).
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It’s important to note that Sudhir Venkatesh is not claiming Boston to be the most racist. He is merely asking his readers to think about how one would measure racism, presumably in a quantitative method. This is no different than how Freakonomics looks at many other topics.
As someone who has lived in both Boston (1 ½ years) and New York (10 years), I can tell you that racism is alive and well in both cities, as it is across all of America (and the rest of the world). Boston has a pretty bad reputation and history when it comes to racism, but from what I’ve experienced, today a lot of that is gone. Perhaps someone from South Boston might have a different perspective.
What makes Boston very different from New York is the segregation. New York City (except for maybe Staten Island) is much more racially (and socially) integrated than most cities. That includes workplace integration, neighborhood integration, and social integration (shopping, leisure activities such as the people who pay to watch the Celtics/Sox, people who play sports). Cambridge and Somerville are somewhat integrated, and perhaps you can make a case for JP and the South End (which I would argue in 5 years will only integrated because of gov’t housing).
However, Boston’s fire department has way more African-Americans than the FDNY (relatively and perhaps absolutely even with the size disparity of the two).
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Rick, skeurto is right: You mischaracterized the Freakonomics post completely. Venkatesh raised the question, which is legitimate. But you said, "He doesn't cite any evidence, mind you, and, like many who make this claim, he bases his assessment on anecdote."
But he didn't make an "assessment", and he didn't "make this claim."
You're the one fanning the flames.
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What's wrong with fanning the flames?
Here are Venkatesh's words (posted under the headline "What Is the Most Racist City in America?"):
"And I was surprised how openly some of the city’s African-American residents talked about experiencing racism at work, in bars, and on the streets.
Does it make sense to classify Boston on a racism index? Is it any different than other cities?"
That sounds like an assessment to me.
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Venkatesh's article is intellectually lazy, but it does raise the good question of whether there aren't significant differences among kinds of racism. I am sure that racial "incidents" in Boston are fairly common compared to other cities. Living in supposedly progressive Cambridge for two years now, for example, I have witnessed a hate crime directed against blacks (which the police deserve credit for investigating), and a few epithets directed against people of other races on the street (not always, however, a white-on-black thing). Sometimes that kind of public racism is serious, as in the hate crime, but sometimes its significance gets overplayed when we forget about structural racism, which is not often as publicly ugly as some of the Boston examples. I don't think segregation in Boston is as extreme as L.A., for example. Boston racism is publicly visible because people of different races actually bump into each other on the street; that kind of encounter just doesn't happen as often in L.A., once you get past the higher social classes. Yes, Boston is publicly racist in a way I haven't witnessed in other towns, but I wonder whether the brand practiced here isn't just a caricature of what we imagine racism to be, and whether its effects aren't in fact less significant than in other, less publicly racist cities.
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i think mac is going in the right direction. it's not really all that useful to characterize a city as "racist" or even "segregated"--it's useful to analyze individual cities' situations and determine WHY people demonstrate racist behavior, or WHY different races are geographically separated, and what can/should be done about it. austin, for example, is a city that prides itself on its progressiveness, but is also extremely segregated. is austin not "racist" because people don't openly throw around racial epithets (most of the time), or is it "racist" because it's so segregated? but that's not even necessarily a meaningful question: the meaningful question is, what can/should be DONE about the existing racial situation, whatever it might be?
on that note, "fanning the flames" and talking about race is absolutely necessary if we're ever to make actual progress toward better race relations. pretending that "educated" people (as most bostonians like to think of themselves) are never racist or complicit in racist systems perpetuates an imperfect system.
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Amen, Kerry. Especially on that last point.