So. This is disgusting. But also not terribly surprising.
There's some history to this guys refrain of "not my neighborhood" that I'm going to thread about a bit, because it's important to know and it's rearing its head in new and ugly ways lately.
There's some history to this guys refrain of "not my neighborhood" that I'm going to thread about a bit, because it's important to know and it's rearing its head in new and ugly ways lately.
Boston is a very diverse city. It's also a very segregated one. The roots of that are tied into the second wave of the Great Migration. Lots of northern cities saw a large influx of black Americans relocating from the south, trying to escape Jim Crow oppression after WWI & II.
Jim Crow was worse in the South, but racism and segregation were all over and surely prominent in the North. The Great Migration affected Boston the most int he 60s and a consortium of Boston banks met to discuss housing options for the rapidly growing African-American community.
This group was called B-BURG (Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group). They formed after the Federal housing authority finally reversed their clearly racist and discriminatory mortgage lending policies. B-BURG needed to give newly arrived black residents homes. But where?
That's when the leader of B-BURG drew a red line around the neighborhoods of Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan -- three traditionally Jewish neighborhoods. There are Black-based Churches in Dorchester that used to be synagogues. Roxbury too.
Over the course of the next five decades, thanks to white flight, block-busting and other racist real estate policies, the demographics of these neighborhoods changed dramatically. Ask anyone from Boston where a majority of POC, these 3 neighborhoods are the answer.
Dorchester is enormous. And it's changing rapidly. It's being gentrified now and has been for several, several years. People are having a hard time affording Dorchester. So here's this guy, screaming at this black woman for "parking her bike" in "his neighborhood."
What we're seeing is a new manifestation of the same old racism that has plagued Boston and segregated our diverse population for decades. Southie had riots about integrating schools after we bused Dorchester students into South Boston. Now, thanks to gentrification, we get this.
This is the end result of that racism. The only reason B-BURG sold the rapidly growing black community homes was because they felt their hands were tied. So they segregated them, lumping them into neighborhoods they already deemed "undesirable."
They then pushed the Jewish population out by making racist threats about the changing demographics, getting them to sell their real estate cheap and then turn around and charge the black population more with insane, crippling interest rates.
But now? Now that real estate is so rare in Boston and we've never done anything to answer the call for equity in our city? A city where the median net worth of black Bostonians is $8 dollars? bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/12/…
Now Dorchester is where guys like this buy property. And yell at a black woman. For parking her bike. On the street. It's "not her neighborhood" because Boston shares this mans animosity and racism towards her.
It never was her neighborhood. Because Boston has never done enough of anything proving otherwise. And unless it takes issues like this seriously, it never will.
There are typos because this thread got out of hand and I struggled to edit some tweets while writing. Apologies after the fact. Also here's another source to back some of this up. I have more if anyone is interested. medium.com/the-opportunit…
People have rightly pointed out that it's very likely this guy isn't a gentrifier but someone who has lived in Dorchester (or at least Boston) all his life. A fair point. This guy could have been old school racist from the get go. He could have been a bus protestor. I don't know.
That wasn't really my point, although I could have been clearer. He may not be a gentrifier. He may complain about gentrification. But gentrification is still empowering white people like him to act out with this sense of racial dominance in these neighborhoods.
