Perhaps the most logical way to begin this essay about what a middle-aged, balding, Harvard- and Cornell-educated white man has learned working in a "community of color" considered poor and underserved would be chronologically, commencing on January 24, 1994, the day after a shooting at the Chez Vous Skating Rink (which, though technically in Dorchester, Massachusetts, moved geographically in newspaper accounts to Mattapan since it sits almost on their common border). I began my contract at the ABCD Mattapan Family Service Center on that day, working as a consultant primarily to do the Center's newsletter and other media needs. One of my first "assignments" involved the director, Lillie Searcy, and I attending a press conference held at the police station with Sarah Brady, who used the event to promote her eponymous legislation. (In one of those strange juxtapositions that sometimes accompany events like the shooting, the station house sits diagonally across the street from Chez Vous, reminding me, not for the first time, that the "thin blue line" can sometimes guarantee nothing at all like safety.) The conference had enough magnetism to attract the police commissioner, a caucus of politicians, and sundry community "activists."
However, the chronological approach does not really offer me enough opportunities for digression, for elastic pauses and strike-at-the-moment observations. Impressions, musings, more watercolor than paint-by-number -- this kind of process better serves the reality because I went in to Mattapan with a pretty blank slate and opened myself up for inscriptions.
A few data to set the scene. The Mattapan Family Service Center, an outpost of Action for Boston Community Development, Inc., the largest provider of human services in New England (according to its press kit), offers Head Start, fuel assistance, senior services, surplus food distribution, nutrition outreach, The KLUB (an after-school program for children 11- to 12-years of age funded by the Reebok Foundation), and information and referral; in addition, the Center works with many neighborhood groups (several of which it founded, such as a youth advocacy group and a community development corporation). We joke that I constitute the Center's quota of a middle-aged, balding, Harvard-educated white men (for all I know, I may constitute all of Mattapan's quota in this regard), and several other white people work in the Center, though for reasons I'll discuss later, the color tag means nothing.
Our programs and our sponsorship of many community meetings at the Center has also underlined the fact that the Center is slowly gathering a reputation as a place that people can trust, as a real "Center" in the community, a hub, a nexus, a place where all roads meet. This means that the Center has an important future in the community, even though none of us can yet put vowels and consonants to its coming biography. Like clearing underbrush, we stand hip-deep in debris, working like navvies to haul it off. But there will come a moment when the land will stand cleared, and we will suddenly realize the beauty we have wrought. None of us knows the coming shape; each day teaches it to us.
So that's the set-up -- white man in Mattapan: trademark liberal, curious writer, mostly fearless when it comes to questioning his assumptions.
By working in Mattapan, I have learned that poor urban communities have many "poverties"; some of the poverties are defined by what people lack, some by what is extracted from them, still others by things that stunt or contort growth. These poverties blend to keep the community constantly "at the mercy" (to use a phrase from the writer Alice Munro): of political whims, media sensationalism, social experiments, the need for scapegoats. As a result, communities like Mattapan are always struggling from below zero to reach zero, filling in a blast crater to get enough level ground to build while everyone else is already one, two, ten, a hundred stories ahead of them.
A Poverty of Place and History
As a geographic entity, Mattapan exists -- that much the maps reveal. It resembles a rough triangle wedged into a gap created by Dorchester, Hyde Park, Roslindale, Jamaica Plain, and Roxbury. The official bureaucracy, however, has no standard boundaries for the place. The Boston Redevelopment Authority consistently attaches Franklin Field/Franklin Hill to it, though through custom people associate that area with Dorchester and Roxbury. The BRA also lops off a chunk of its southwestern end, though residents of Belnel Village and Wood Avenue consider themselves residents of Mattapan, not Hyde Park. The Post Office has another map in mind, as do the Census tracts. So even though cartographic constants exist, such as Mattapan Square, Mattapan has trouble defining its edges, its frontier, the zones where it meets the rest of the world. This ambiguity about coördinates reflects a deeper lack of clarity about what makes Mattapan "Mattapan" and especially what kind of future it faces.
This indefinite sense of self comes from the historical origins of the area, which have always emphasized transience. Originally a part of Dorchester, Mattapan stood as a way-station for people who wanted to get out of the central city and into the Blue Hills, and even today, this sense that Mattapan is simply a foyer resonates throughout the community: one nickname for Mattapan is "the southern gateway of Boston," a phrase which implies exit and entrance rather than pausing to consider.
Mattapan's history as a way-station for immigrants also contributes to its nebulous character. The place originally started out as a housing development for the working-class Irish in the mid-19th century, then switched to the Jews following the dramatic fire in Chelsea in 1908. Burned out of their tenements, the Jews migrated to Roxbury and Dorchester and then eventually to Mattapan, and before long over 50,000 people lived along "Jew Hill Avenue," the largest congregation of Jews outside New York City.
This stable community, described in Death of An American Jewish Community by Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon, offered so much to its inhabitants that rarely did people have to travel outside Blue Hill Avenue to get what they needed. Then, in the late 1960s, disaster struck. Coming under increasing pressures to respond to the urban problems of that era (Boston had experienced its own riot in 1967), Mayor Kevin White more or less stgrong-armed a consortium of banks called BBURG (Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group) to offer low-cost mortgages to minority families for home ownership. The banks agreed but red-lined the area where they would make the loans, which included the northern section of Mattapan. Real estate speculation and blockbusting almost instantaneously, and quite brutally, converted Mattapan from predominantly Jewish to predominantly African American as those who could sold their properties and moved out. To make matters even more unstable, mortgages were being given to people whose incomes really did not match what they needed to keep up payments and maintain the houses, and the houses themselves had been inflated in price by the speculators. By 1973, the Boston Redevelopment Authority had such great concern about housing abandonment in Mattapan that they instituted a series of plans to make sure that people would not just up and leave.
The Mattapan, then, that people know from the media, the Mattapan predominantly minority and increasingly Caribbean in its population, is only about 25 years old, the latest in a pattern of re-settlements beginning with the Indians' expulsion to make way for the Europeans. I think that the community still suffers from the destabilizing and callous conversion of Jewish Mattapan into minority Mattapan, demonstrated by the fact that Mattapan continues to lack certain elements that communities need to create a connected sense of themselves. Mattapan has no neighborhood council to speak for it downtown, no community newspaper, no community centers that act as social magnets, no Little League baseball teams or Pop Warner football programs, no theatres or bookstores, no Masonic lodges or bowling teams -- in short, it lacks many social pathways by which people mix, share their experiences, learn about different points of view, and consolidate as a social entity. If you ask long-time Boston residents about Mattapan, they will have a divided memory: the Jewish enclave that made Blue Hill Avenue its own compact and distinctive world, and "Da Pan," a dark alley to avoid. People see Mattapan as both nowhere and a place best left alone.
Because of this process of transition and transience, Mattapan, in a sense, does not have a history; instead, it has a discontinuous series of stories written, then erased and re-written, on the same piece of parchment. Shadows of the former texts ghost through the present paragraphs, the way Stars of David stand out on the old Jewish shuls turned into Seventh Day Adventist churches. But there is no core identity that persists through time in the way, say, downtown Boston always has a "freedom trail" no matter how many buildings come up or go down. "Mattapan" is still a place in search of a shared and predictive history, a predicate for any community's ability to name itself accurately.
What does all this mean? Communities that have a history and take the time to preserve and advance it possess a kind of subterranean awareness of themselves as a communal self: the players may change on stage, but the stage itself -- the bedrock factness of the community's historical existence traced through time and documentation -- continues. Mattapan doesn't have this, does not even have the initial stages of it. Instead, Mattapan persists as an entity because of outside, rather than self-generated, forces: the BRA designates it as a planning district, the Post Office zip-codes it, and so on. This explains why Mattapan's boundaries change according to whom one speaks: without a strong historical core diligently preserved, the community lacks an interconnective tissue that binds disparate parts into a self-supporting web. Without that, anyone can define the geography any way one likes.
This lack of a history around which people could organize a social self means that when people speak about the "community," they really do not have a clear idea about what they mean. In the most immediate sense, the "community" simply means everyone who lives in Mattapan. But because Mattapan really doesn't have a "community" in an historical sense, a kind of core consciousness about itself, "community" in Mattapan often means a balancing of interest groups' interests, or it means a kind of addition: all the neighborhood associations plus the social service agencies plus... Mattapan is like one of those thousand-piece puzzles, except that the original picture has been lost and people have yet to figure out how all these things fit together.
Thus, if city planners cannot plan it into being and cartographers cannot draw it into being, what will bring Mattapan into focus? That question gets endlessly debated at the endless meetings that occur in Mattapan each week, meetings held by crime watch groups and neighborhood associations and churches and various politicians, yet no consensus around this exists. As a result, Mattapan stands fuzzy around the edges and unsure about the middle. For the most part people, understandably, worry about their streets and the few streets over and try to make it through each day as intact as possible. Larger questions about place in the world and borders fall irrelevantly to the side. Not that good people of sound heart do not think about these things, only that Mattapan has not yet reached the "critical mass" that will fuse the disparate concerns into a unified effort to build a community.
This is not easy work -- it's creating sociology in a community rather than discovering it, making folkways instead of ferreting out the ones that exist. But it's what Mattapan needs to do. Otherwise, it will continue to exist as a neighborhood without much neighborliness, a collection of human beings accidentally living together in the same zip code, afraid of each other and without a strong sense of tomorrow and no recollection of yesterday.
A Poverty of (Their) Knowledge
You would think that because of the way many pundits, talk show hosts, politicians, reporters, and other opinion-makers speak authoritatively about what poor communities should to do get themselves out of poverty that they have actually spent time in those communities schmoozing around kitchen tables, visiting the elders, investigating the street life, the way Jonathan Kozol did in his recent Amazing Grace. But for the most part they haven't. Instead, they've been content to listen to each other's rehearsed creeds and half-knowledges, in the process building up a powerful stereotype about poverty and its relationship to personality and character that effectively segregates poor people from "the rest of us," presumably hard-working Christian types with light-colored skin. (Michael Katz has been especially eloquent about this in his books on poverty.)
Unfortunately for their certitude, while poor communities do exist, the adjective "poor" illuminates nothing about any particular community beyond what a brief flash of statistics might show. Like Tolstoy's unhappy families, each poor community is poor in its own way, and to understand the particular dynamics of a community's poverty requires anthropology, history, economics, mythology, and, above all, the patience to bathe in the lives of the people there, the "they" or "those people" or "the Other" others sometimes refer to. So I grind my teeth slowly when the George Wills of the world talk about the "pathology of poverty" without any familiarity with the logic underlying the behavior. This "pathology" has reasons underlying it, even if those same commentators refuse to learn what they are. (In fact, the word "pathology" measures their ignorance of what it takes to live under some of the hellish conditions of poverty.)
In short, when people say "Mattapan is a poor community," nothing is explained or demonstrated, even when they say it all the time and say it very loudly. It represents an empty shorthand, a kind of lie, which the people who say it mistake it for an established insight or analysis. To speak the truth about Mattapan requires more than a journalistic once-over; it means sharing dinners with and carefully listening to full-scale human beings explain why their lives are they way they are.
Drowning in the Mainstream
It's a standard part of the stereotype described above that poor communities somehow exist outside the "mainstream," that their cultural values do not intersect with the values held by "the rest of us" because their "pathology" distorts and fogs their sense of right and wrong, appropriate and improper. Thus we get slogans like Daniel Patrick Moynihan's "tangle of pathology," from his The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, where he said
In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.
According to this theology, poverty and poor communities do not happen because too many people have too little money, a condition usually the result of a structure of discrimination. Instead, poverty happens because of faulty genetics (a lá Herrnstein and Murray) or a demonic sociology (Edward Banfield) or the welfare state (Gingrich) or some other exotic point of view that studiously avoids fingering the real culprit: a systematic bias in America's version of corporate capitalism that discriminates against certain classes of people, most notably women and minorities, in ways that make sure they do not have enough money. If Moynihan's pathology exists, it does not cause poverty (at least initially) but is the response to a protocol of bigotry and greed that places millions of people under the grinding humiliation of not having enough money to satisfy their basic needs for a dignified life.
But, at least through my experience in Mattapan, most of the people I've met swim quite strongly in the "mainstream"; in fact, in the face of very daunting conditions, they struggle to maintain a middle-class set of behaviors and expectations for themselves and their children. I see it in how they dress their children, conduct themselves, discuss politics, plan for their futures. I would even go so far as to say that many of the people I've worked with are far more thoroughly "mainstream" in their moral behavior, as ostracized as they are from the dominant culture, than some of that culture's vaunted "good guys," bankers, real estate speculators, politicians, and others whose behavior, as they jockey for wealth and position, constantly betray their lip service to family values or the virtues of self-reliance.
But there are darker ways as well in which the people in Mattapan move along in the mainstream, and one can see this especially in the children. Carl Nightengale Husenmoller, in his book On The Edge, an excellent examination of the lives of minority children, describes how these children, far from being alienated from the mainstream dominant culture, are tied to it in some vicious ways. He begins by pointing out that while poor and non-poor communities share some common characteristics, they obviously don't map exactly one on the other: better-off communities usually have amenities (from nice coffee shops to public-spirited historical societies) that poor communities cannot afford to have. This means that poor communities often don't have the kinds of civic buffers that soften the raw and mostly unregulated intrusion of the larger capitalist culture; life, being on the edge, often doesn't afford people the cushion of an active civic infrastructure. Because poor communities, then, tend to be more permeable to forces that better-off communities can deflect, Husenmoller sees the children of these communities (because they have the most impressionable characters) at the mercy of some very strong, and very toxic, influences. These influences certainly bring the children into the mainstream, but they do so in ways which reinforce codes of behavior that ultimately do them harm.
For example, he cites the ways companies exhort children to be zealous consumers. Or, to be more accurate, to associate consumption of specific products -- sneakers, gold, certain liquors, cars -- with the good life, with the successful life. The assault is quite raw and pretty direct: I see it every day I walk through Mattapan Square past the clothing shops and music stores. For the boys, it's an exhortation to be strong and defiant while dressed in "phat" clothes, drinking Old English (a cheap beer sold in 40 oz. bottles) and smoking "blunts" (a cigar from which all the tobacco has been taken and replaced with marijuana, making for a large joint). The girls are called to drape themselves in dozens of braids, wear large earrings (often 3" to 4" in diameter), and do their nails (an expensive process, but popular -- almost two dozen beauty salons and nail parlors exist in Mattapan). They're told that looking good and being good match, and that spending large amounts of money to achieve the union is exactly what they should be doing to affirm their selves.
Husenmoller also explains how the precariousness of their lives makes them very receptive to the notion that violence can get them power and security. To them, violence can cut through the ambiguities in their lives and establish an identity for them in a way that school, home, church, and community cannot. In this respect they fully participate in an American mainstream that values violence as both a treasured national character trait and fertile commercial commodity. The violence they often find in their own lives, like dew on the grass in the morning, is simply the condensation of the violence diffused in the air around them, dispersed through commerce, the media, and the larger national mythology.
So, people in poor communities may not vote a lot, they may be under-represented in Census counts, they may not have a seat at the tables of power, but they most certainly do not exist outside the mainstream. On one level the people I've met in Mattapan desire the exact same outcomes my parents desired for me: a good safe home, a decent chance at success, a community where children are safe and well cared for, and so on -- in short, the middle class values. To be sure, they don't simply want to transfer them wholesale from the dominant culture because that washes away cultural identities. They want the freedom to find appropriate ways to blend these values into the rich matrix of who they are and where they came from, the freedom to be distinct yet not alien. However, no one should mistake their desire to maintain a conspicuous identity as a rejection of mainstream values; they just want to annotate them.
On a deeper, more sinister, level, people in poor communities are also drawn into some of the less desirable aspects of the mainstream, especially the children cajoled and convinced to swallow myths about consumption and violence so that large corporations can extract large sums of money from their pockets. Because their communities often do not have adequate ways to shield them (churches may be the only functioning institutions which can do this, and not everyone goes to church), they absorb dangerously high levels of capitalist toxins, which in turn often disable them from moving into the other part of the mainstream that can affirm their lives and lend them a hand. People in Mattapan, just as we all do, need some kind of moral EPA to help them clean up the polluted part of the stream so that they can have even greater access to the rest of its healing waters.
A Poverty of Amenities
The lack of certain amenities can make living in Mattapan a constant nag. Because Mattapan only has a single hardware store up on Morton Street in northern Mattapan, working on projects at home becomes bothersome. Because it doesn't have a full-fledged copy shop, making photocopies or getting printing work done becomes an annoyance. While none of this is life or death, it does annoy after a while, not only in lost energy or effort but also in a daily subterranean sense that where you live is simply not as good as somewhere else - and that you are not as good as someone else. It also means that Mattapan residents have to work harder to reach a level of stability that better-off places take for granted. In Brookline, people worry about an anti-smoking ban's effect on the local sports bar; in Mattapan, they worry about their kids making it home safe each day. When people worry at that level, very little psychic and emotional energy remains to promote the refinements of life.
Verification for this exists. In 1994 the Attorney General's office issued a report that compared levels of goods and services in Newton, Quincy, and Roxbury/Dorchester/Mattapan. Newton, obviously, represented an upper-income community; Quincy weighed in for the middle-class/working-class; and RDM brought up the rear. While the three areas had considerable overlap -- they all had restaurants, auto repair shops, beauty salons, lawyers -- the differences were found in the number and variety of businesses. For instance, while Newton and Mattapan had a comparable number of restaurants, Newton had more variety in both types of foods and kinds of service, while Mattapan hosted a lot of sub shops and Caribbean eateries not known for their atmosphere.
In the end, Mattapan has an abundance of places like auto repair shops, beauty salons, and liquor stores but lacks adequate legal, health, and financial services as well as commercial variety, with stores clustering toward the low end, such as discount liquidators. The Attorney General's report merely confirmed the portrait everyone knew intuitively: Mattapan is not Newton, Mattapan is low-rent.
Detailing what Mattapan does not have is another way of sketching in the amount of money that does not turn around in Mattapan. No one has yet done a study of income retention in Mattapan, but I would guess that dollars do not stay long, most of them going out in the pockets of property and business owners who do not stay in Mattapan to spend the money they've extracted from Mattapan residents. A lack of variety in storefronts, coupled with very little local ownership of the commercial properties that do exist in Mattapan, translates into a lack of control over the resources that people bring into the community. The proper follow-up to the AG's report would be one that 1) details as exactly as possible the amount of wealth that Mattapan residents control, through incomes, grant money, and so on; 2) graphs where the money goes; and 3) sketches out plans by which more of that money, and therefore more economic power, can stay in the community.
Organizing to Organize
Mattapan, unlike Roxbury and Dorchester, does not have a history of or infrastructure for community organizing. Except for the churches (and they remain mostly insular), Mattapan has no enduring institutions through which people can create informal but powerful networks of knowing -- no social clubs (except for a Legion post in the Square), no theatre groups, no literary societies, no easily accessible community centers, nothing that allows for the kind of casual give and take where information gets passed around and solidarity can fix its roots.
This is not to say that Mattapan doesn't have its folkways and informal gathering places. Brothers Deli in the morning has its regulars who gab over the high cholesterol of sausage and grits smothered in butter. Conway's Lounge, Avenue Tavern, and Club Manhattan (formerly Rolls) have their roster, the churches sometimes sponsor evangelical meetings open to the public, and other organizations might post flyers around the Square. The Haitian community has a network of groups and activities which it uses to serves its members. But it's all somewhat tribal, each enclave ministering to its own members, the information it shares passed around within distinct and guarded boundaries.
And this is not to say that Mattapan does not have its own muster of organized groups. At last count, fifty crime watch groups and two dozen neighborhood organizations (some overlap in their functions) have set up shop throughout the community, dealing with everything from crime on the streets to taking kids bowling on Saturdays. If one modestly assumes at least five to seven members per group, that comes to around 500 people giving up their time to make where they live in a better place. And Mattapan has some veteran survivors, people who have stuck with years-long efforts to get playgrounds repaired and crack houses boarded up. Yet for the most part, everyone stays pretty much in his or her own backyard; these groups make very few efforts to blend their energies and resources and, more important, transform their parochial attitudes into a more trans-Mattapan frame of mind.
Thus, when I say that Mattapan does not have a history of or an infrastructure for community organizing, I mean that it does not have in place any organization, such as the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury or the various neighborhood councils in other sections of the city, with a mission to bind the pluribus of the community into an unum for the purposes of political expression, economic development, and social cohesion. While some people and groups have decided to act collectively, they establish their own contacts with the city and pursue an agenda limited to their latitude and longitude. In many ways, they act like so many lighthouses on distant points without any overseeing Coast Guard to tie them into an effective, coördinated protection system.
I think part of the reason for this lack of fit comes from how the history of fragmentation described above has made Mattapan act like a colonized area, one not so much invaded as simply appended. It works like this: the reality of always being subordinate, constantly asking for "More," like Oliver Twist, from those who own everything, creates subservience, resentment, and indifference, and cripples initiative and good humor (both needed for a sense of perspective and hope). Being imposed on and denied at the same time breeds confusion and fatalism.
The city, starting in 1991, did try to pump some organizing energy into Mattapan through the Greater Mattapan Healthy Boston Coalition. Formed under the aegis of the Office of Safe Neighborhoods (now called the Office of Community Partnerships), the Coalition had as its members people from each of the major segments of the community: churches, hospitals, schools, social services agencies, and so on. It did conduct a community assessment in February 1994, but beyond that it did very little to fulfill its stated mission of pooling Mattapan's talented tenth together and creating an organization that reached across boundaries and brought people together for common endeavors. By the end of 1994 the effort had dissolved.
I attribute this clannishness to the fact that Mattapan is still a community in the process of becoming, in the process of not only forging an identity but, even more rudimentary, preparing itself to begin to forge an identity, the way children assemble bits and pieces of their psyche into a coherent ego as they grow up. Without possessing a coherent sense of self, a kind of destiny (which, as pointed out above, is a result of the tumbled history the area has experienced), then it has no distaff on which to gather the flax of its nature and spin it into the cloth of its being. I think, aside from the incompetence of the project director, this is why Healthy Boston failed: appeals to a greater good come in a vocabulary that, while understood in its dictionary meanings, is not part of the lexicon people use to describe their lives. This coherence will evolve, but Mattapan needs a long era of stability to give it time to bake thoroughly.
In the meantime, however, being a loose confederation of tribes has its drawbacks because it sets up the perfect conditions for feuds among self-styled "community activists" who purport to speak "at large" but who, sub rosa, often advance agendas that either benefit them personally or confine the "community"'s interests to a narrow constituency: the property owners, the business people, members of the Catholic church, and so on. I think specifically here of Lenzer Evans and Stu Rosenberg, who head up the Mattapan Square Commerce Association, a group representing commercial property owners and landlords in Mattapan. They have made it quite clear by their actions they want to stand out as the major "players" in the business community and act as the conduit through which the city speaks to the owners and the owners speak back to the city. They do not especially care about helping the businesses become better businesses, such as a Chamber of Commerce might do through incentive plans, speakers' series, seminars on financing, and so on. Nor do they particularly focus on economic development of the Square, such as looking at ways to increase merchant diversity or upgrade the quality of service and selection already existing.
Instead, they want people to see them as the "go-to" people, the ones whom reporters call when they want a clinching quote or politicians contact when they need an "authentic" voice to ratify their actions. In short, they want celebrity, and they have decided that they can get it by minimalizing the 70-year old Mattapan Board of Trade and using the cloak of the community as a cover for their own plans for personal gain. And they can get away with this because Mattapan has no countervailing force which can tell them to knock it off and stop the divisiveness.
An effort has started, though, that might provide something of an antidote to both the insularity of community groups and the over-sized ambitions of small people. A group of residents, led by the Mattapan Family Service Center, has started the process of forming a community development corporation, the first such successful effort in Mattapan (though others have thought about it, as we've found out). The CDC has the potential of becoming the trans-Mattapan organization the community needs, the center to which people in Mattapan can travel to get information and from which they can move outward to lend their energies to organizing the community. Open to all, it has no interest in comforting the few.
It faces obstacles to its success, of course, as does any large-scale organizing effort. But the people who have formed its core for the moment are in it for the long-haul, willing to weather the crests and troughs in order to see the foundation laid and the framing established. Seen as a journey rather than destination, the CDC has the potential to help the community reach critical mass and catalyze its efforts to know itself and act on that knowledge.
The Poverty of Pigmentation
Inevitably, grantors, as part of the proposal process, want to know about the ethnic make-up of the community (I've still yet to understand why this is relevant). At that point I insert boilerplate drafted from the 1990 Census data, with its standard five official racial groupings, and then go on to the more important narrative section.
Of course, while I've fulfilled the application's requirements, I really haven't said anything truthful at all about Mattapan's ethnic make-up. Take the designation "black." According to the numbers, Mattapan is overwhelmingly black, at least in terms of skin color. But that "black" covers a lot of territory, from resident African Americans (itself an ambiguous term) to a full roster of Caribbean nationalities, most of whom resist being blended in with each other. And it says nothing at all about the tensions regnant among these groups, especially between American blacks and people of Haitian origin.
So the grantors get their numbers and chromatics but none of the complex and energetic reality that shapes Mattapan. Why is this the case? What is so important about color? Or, more accurately, for what is color a shorthand, an abbreviation, to the people who will read this application? Why is the melanin content of a community's residents even relevant, or at least equal in relevance to their educational achievement or the amount of money they bring home in their paychecks?
The short answer, the conventional answer, is that in America such things as skin color, low income, and poor education tend to occur together, so that to say the word "black" is to say something like "black is the shorthand we will use to simplify the complicated tangle of history, economics, politics, and social custom that has resulted in 12% of the population, for the most part, being denied the benefits of the country's progress and prosperity. When we say 'black,' this is what we mean." This is why grantors want to know the skin color of the community -- it orients them, so to speak, the way the North Star oriented sailors on the open sea. By knowing the skin color, they can presume to know other things as well since, as pointed out above, to say "black" is, like an iceberg, to have 90% of one's meaning below the surface.
By using this shorthand, of course, they end up perpetuating the very discrimination they say they want their foundation to alleviate, if not eliminate, because the shorthand supports the reigning stereotype which says that "black" means this and that about black people and that is all one needs to know to be knowledgeable about the situation. It uses color as a substitute for actual information about human lives, and to that degree is as pernicious as the most racist propaganda spewed by a right-wing hate group. In each case, pigmentation is alchemized into limitation.
One of the cognitive mistakes, then, that American society seems to make about color is to believe that skin color, a purely physical and biological trait, has a transformative power of some sort, that by itself it has changed the way people relate to one another, the way economic forces or legislative action change the shape of social life. This mistake is understandable, if stupid. During the country's early history, to justify slavery people made themselves believe that skin color predicted all sorts of non-biological traits, with "blackness," of course, signifying the kinds of detriments that justified the masters' illicit power. In one way or another, this naming has continued in different guises since the Civil War so that it has become an historical habit to make color carry a biography, a state of being. As I said, this habit is understandable but stupid and should now be discarded because we know it has no truth, regardless of what The Bell Curve says.
But to be honest to the complexity of this situation, in one sense color does carry this power to mold people's lives. So many terrible and nefarious things have been done under the cover of color that, by association, color appears to have the power to warp people's minds. "Because of my color, so many bad things have happened to me" can easily shift into "Color has caused so many bad things for me." From there, the perception becomes a reality, with a corresponding subtle shift in terminology. I have had many conversations about this with people, about how black people have internalized the attributes assigned to their color, just as abused children will internalize the taunts of their parents, until they believe the negations, until they equate themselves with the negations. In this way color has the power to transform, but having ingested the lies does not change the fact that it is not the color that makes the changes but the underlying stereotypes and judgments, created by people who do not have the best interests of black people at heart.
Why do I insist on putting color in its proper cognitive place? Because after working for almost two years in a "community of color," I find that color is irrelevant and a demon distraction. I have not worked with "white" people and "black" people -- I have simply spent my time with people shaped by their different lives and backgrounds. I do not see color in people beyond the visual recording of their skin color -- color, to me, has no biography attached to it. That is a relief and a liberation.
Of course, when I say things like this to my compatriots (we have very open lines of communication), they take me to task, telling me that I've had the white man's luxury of never suffering the indignities of having color limit his life and possibilities. I don't disagree with that -- how could I? I will never, in that deep-to-the-bone sort of way, know the minuscule and major insults they have had to endure because they have more melanin than I have. (I speak only about living in the United States; if I went to another culture, I might very well understand, at least a little, of what they've experienced.) I can't deny I have enjoyed the privileges of color, even if I never sought them out.
I had this pointed out to me very sharply one evening at a meeting I attended. Only a few people showed up: Lillie, myself, and three men. Two of the three men had attended the Million Man March, and the pre-meeting conversation inevitably got around to what it had been like to be there. As I listened to the four of them talk, especially about how good it had felt not to have to worry about looking over one's shoulder and to stand in solidarity with hundreds of one's own kind, I realized that I had no way to participate in the conversation because I had suffered none of the insults and disillusions that had made the March such a powerful clarification for them. The advantages my color had given me had disqualified me, for the moment, from being part of their world. For perhaps the first and only time since I had started working at the Center, I felt dislocated by color, not by their actions but simply by circumstance.
Yet that doesn't invalidate my point that color predicts nothing about who people are, just as hair color or eye color predicts nothing about their characters. Or if it predicts anything about anyone, it does so only in the most generic terms, setting up likelihoods: a person of dark skin color most likely, given our history as a society, has experienced thus and such -- but it tells me nothing in particular, and only the particular can tell me anything useful about a person. Thus, focusing on skin color as emblem, as ideograph, blinds us to the ways we can really get to know one another and get beyond the way color binds us to our misperceptions.
I have taken to asking my fellow staff members and other people with whom I've worked and built a good relationship a question that goes like this: "Would you like to stop being concerned about what it means to be black? Would you like not to have to worry about it?" Some said no, that they feel an immense pride in being black, that the struggles, the history, the pain makes them who they are and that they would not want to give that up. Pressed to answer the question, though, because I hadn't asked them to give up being black, they acknowledge that yes, it would be a relief not to have to worry so much about it, to be able to carry their heritage without having to use it as a shield or a battering ram. Others who said yes agreed with this, saying that it would be nice to simply be an American citizen, not branded by history and not having to live up to or live down someone else's behavioral expectations.
I'm not sure how much to believe them -- after all, it was a white liberal male asking them, and perhaps they just wanted me to feel good about being white and liberal. But even if their responses hold only partial truth, they constitute a truth worth listening to -- how nice it would be, how just it would be, if no one had to battle the gantlet of skin color to get to the starting line. What a relief it would be not to be angry or afraid.
Even as I say this, though, I can hear a strain of naivete in it, the good wishes of a man who's enjoyed his privileges -- we will never see, at least in our lifetime, and most likely the lifetimes of our children's children, an agreed-upon amnesia on the subject of race. (At the least, to think cynically about this, such a moratorium would put a number of people in the pundit and academic business out of work, and their imminent ouster would motivate them to keep the divisiveness operating.) Our country's history and institutions have been so skewed by this bigotry that we've made it difficult for ourselves to imagine what a just and equitable society would look like, how it would function, the benefits of equanimity it would confer on an infected polity.
Difficult, perhaps, but not impossible. We also have traditions in our political debate counter to the mainstream of prejudiced nation-building, that can instruct us how to achieve the ideals we have set for ourselves as a society: the inclusiveness of the Quakers or the Unitarian Universalists, the injured and righteous anger of populism, the social agenda of the labor movement (at least those parts of it not co-opted by corporatism), Martin Luther King's later efforts to turn away from race toward class, even the once popular, once electorally successful socialist parties. In other words, we have institutional and historical memories we can access to take us beyond the Republican/Democrat stalemate or the color line or the Bell Curve mentality toward the summa of our stated ideals for democracy, for liberty, for social justice. Racial prejudice becomes irrelevant to the degree social justice governs our lives, our institutions, our economy, our politics -- and if we don't believe that, or if we feel impotent to make it happen, then we will descend into the world that Tom Grimes describes in his novel City of God, an America fissioned along racial lines, the air toxified beyond repair.
* * * * *
So the white man in Mattapan continues to learn. The exciting prospect is that I won't run out of lessons, which is also dismaying in a way because some of the lessons about violence and deprivation carry a harsh exactitude, if not for me, certainly for the people who live there. (I've taken to clipping out all the news items about violence in Mattapan: shootings, stabbings, child abuse, spouse abuse, and so -- the pile grows each week.) I am never quite sure how much a privileged white man can really learn about the slings and arrows of poverty, that is, feel it as if it is felt first-hand by those around him. But I also don't think that figuring that out is an important struggle; more critical is how I pay attention: trying to make my eyes and ears as transparent as possible, and then speaking as unclouded by preconception as possible. Because in the end learning about Mattapan, while in part it concerns learning about myself, is really about learning how human beings become people, how crowds become communities, how vaporous ideals turn into daily standard operating procedure. In short, it is the work of becoming a citizen and laying bricks for a civil society anchored in justice and possibility.
(January 1996)