Photo credit: Meredith Zinner
In 1974 a judge attempted to undo the long history of racial segregation in Boston public schools by enacting a mandatory busing system. The retaliation was loud and televised nationwide, so that all of America got to hear the now infamous, ignorant ranting of white Bostonians in their donkey’s bray of dialect. Full of racist fire and brimstone, this was at once a new and very old jeremiad. It was as if all of our history’s ugliness was suppurating from its natal wound.
I grew up in the suburbs just north of Boston, where things were not quite this bad, which is kind of like saying the necrotic tissue surrounding a tumor is not quite as bad as the tumor itself. I speak of Boston as synecdoche, standing in for that colonial experiment known as New England. Here lies the splintered cradle of our deepest American myths — of progress and freedoms always misunderstood...