David McMullinMay 3, 2023

The other day, talking about issues on the fediverse, @mekkaokereke proposed an (apt) analogy which led to a tangential conversation about racism in Boston. I noticed, as I have whenever this comes up, a curious thing about what “Boston” seems to represent in the public imagination.

A thread (a rant?) about #Boston #demographics…
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https://musicians.today/@mcmullin/110283766606470442

David McMullin (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Boston resident here with one clarification: Boston is _not_ especially white. What it is is segregated. But there are plenty of Black people here and they’re not hiding. (Imagine listening to everyone agreeing about how white NYC is, as if the Upper East Side below 96th St. is the whole city.) Whether Boston is as racist as everyone thinks, I’m not qualified to say. (Black Bostonians can tell you.) But compare it to NYC, Philadelphia, New Haven—not VT.

Musicians Today
Show threadDavid McMullinMay 3, 2023

I’m not going to offer an opinion about racism in Boston, because there are 1.3 million residents of color in the Boston area who can speak about that with more authority.

Does that surprise you? That’s actually what I want to talk about.

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Show threadDavid McMullinMay 3, 2023
One thing everyone seems to agree on is that “Boston” is about the whitest city there could ever be. That’s apparently its defining feature. People say things like “I lived there for a year and there were no Black people anywhere!” Then it turns out they’re talking about Cape Cod or the exurbs beyond 495. Or Vermont, even.
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Show threadDavid McMullinMay 3, 2023
You could never get away with saying “New York City has no diversity at all,” and then trying to back that up by talking about Greenwich or the Hamptons. But use that logic for “Boston” and everyone just nods along. Whatever this place is that people mean when they say “Boston,” it’s not the actual city of Boston.
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Show threadDavid McMullinMay 3, 2023

The City of Boston itself is less than 50% white. Granted, the city lines are rather arbitrary, and it’s part of a larger metropolis including several other municipalities and rings of suburbs. But many of the nearby communities are also quite diverse. It gets whiter the farther out you go, but however you define Greater Boston, it’s going to include a substantial nucleus of non-white residents: 1.3 million, according to the Census Bureau.
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https://statisticalatlas.com/metro-area/Massachusetts/Boston/Race-and-Ethnicity#figure/place/non-white-population

Show threadDavid McMullinMay 3, 2023

The only way Boston could be as white as everyone thinks is if these people just don’t count.

The “Boston” people are thinking of seems to mean: just the white parts of the largest possible geographic area around the city, excluding most of the city itself. And sure, if you do it that way, then “Boston” is all white.

But so is Chicago. So is Detroit. And no one ever talks this way about those places.

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Show threadDavid McMullinMay 3, 2023

Why are people so committed to this odd mythic conception of an all-white “Boston,” and what agenda does it serve?

(Not a rhetorical question; I’m honestly curious.)

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Show threadDr Joseph PierceMay 3, 2023

@mcmullin I went to school in Mass (UG and PhD), and I research urban place politics. A coupla comments here.

One: Boston in the 1940s/50s was *very* white. Two: it was for decades significantly whiter than peer eastern cities (DC, NYC, etc) even as it diversified.
Three, saying Boston is "very white" is a way to gesture at the specific history of racial animus there without unpacking it. White residents defended the essential whiteness of Boston in a way that felt different than in DC or NYC.

Show threadDr Joseph PierceMay 3, 2023
@mcmullin People may not have a good vocab for it, and you're surely right that there's some spatial segregation-driven ignorance. But if people visited the city 20 years ago and lack a vocabulary to say "the race politics in this place felt somehow less progressive than in other similar cities," saying the city is "very white" is a way to reference it. That's my experience of how whiteness is used when talking about Boston, anyway.
Show threadGminks
@joepierce @mcmullin this exactly. And coming from the south, it was jarring.
May 3, 2023 at 4:22amWeb