Kevin, as M. Blumenthal notes, your image of Boston as
adjoins Cambridge is extremely distorted if you attempted to
apply it to Boston as a whole, as you seem to know at least
in re Southie, since the Hub is on balance one of the most
aggressively racist/ethnicist cities in the US (less bad now
than, say, ten years ago, apparently, but may you never be in
the Wrong neighborhood in at the wrong time of night)(Irish
youth in an Italian nabe can qualify for this, and vice
verse). My friend Laura has regaled me with all the
delightful anti-Vietnamese epithets she's enjoyed as a
Japanese-American.
Meanwhile, were the Boucherconites Virginians? And if so,
were they, aside from alarmist, from Northern Virginia, where
racial tension is played out on many levels, with DC
majority-"black" and the NoVA 'burbs mixed but full of
resentment for the folks who would re-elect Marion Barry
mayor, at least in part to protest the dictatorship of their
city by the essentially all-"white" Congress, which has
essentially All the power in the city. Arlingtonians are, on
balance, much less self-segregating than neighborhood folk in
Boston and its suburbs as I remember them.
Virginia did secede, and West Virginia seceded from VA to
stick with the Union, but this didn't mean that racism abated
in WV, or Massachusetts, for that matter. It just has
different tones, not radically different aspects. TM
-----Original Message----- From: Kevin Burton Smith
[mailto:
kvnsmith@thrillingdetective.com]
And there's the fact that Parker is from Boston, and race is
a different game there, I think. Granted, I haven't travelled
all over the States, but one of the recurring memories I have
of Boston is the surprising number of inter-racial couples I
saw in the Cambridge/Boston axis -- on subways, street
corners, malls, bars, etc. It was cool, and nobody seemed to
blink an eye (though this wasn't South Boston or somewhere
like that). But at the Bouchercon in D.C. (or at least
Virginia -- part of the South, right?) an innocent and
harmless observation about me being the only white guy on a
bus from New York provoked the worried but apparently sincere
question
"Did they bother you?"
Now, these are quick snaps, but I think it goes a long way to
explaining how we can all be reading the same book, but
somehow all getting different stories and thoughts on Hawk
and his sidekick, the Irish guy.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 15 Nov 2001 EST