December 2nd, 2010:

Boston is a city of many villages, squares, corners, and neighborhoods. Within these places, you can find every ethnicity, language, and culture you could imagine. Each has it’s own distinct character and feel to offer the rest of the city. It’s also true that these little villages can be cities unto themselves, starkly divided from the village next door. More often than not, the line that divides these places is drawn racially. I recently came upon cartographer, Eric Fisher’s “Race and Ethnicity” maps (inspired by Bill Rankin’s similarly themed maps) that took a look at our country’s major cities in Racial terms. Below, you will most likely recognize the geography of Boston’s shoreline and a small chunk of Southeastern Massachusetts. What you may not recognize, are the large sections of Red and Blue dots. Each one of those dots represents 25 people. A red dot equates to 25 white people, blue to 25 black people, green-Asian, orange-Latino, grey-other. As you can see, the city is clearly grouped into two distinct areas of blue and red - black and white.

Why is this?

Boston is a city with a long history of racial tolerance, progressive attitudes, and in many ways, a leader in the charge against racism and bigotry. Martin Luther King, Louis Farrakhan, Malcolm X, Fredric Douglas (to name a few) all came through Boston at crucial points in their lives. But juxtaposed against this great tradition, Boston has a dark past filled with tension, violence, and segregation. It is a city that boasts of a hockey and basketball franchise that the first broke their respective color barriers (not to mention first black starting five and coach) while still admitting to host the last baseball team to integrate (and first to pass on Willy Mays). One of the biggest stains that I would add to this list is that we don’t seem to be getting much better at coming together. There is no getting around it, we are a city defined by difference.

I was reminded of this fact when I read a recent Boston Public Health Commission study that reported that 43% of Boston youth trust the Boston Police Department. The most striking thing about this report wasn’t how low or high this number is, but rather, how much this figure fluctuates depending on what neighborhood (blue or red) you live in. As you can see below, Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan (who constitute much of the blue) average to around 33% trust while West Roxbury (the reddest of the red) has an 80% trust rating. Feel free to compare the other high figures (Allston/Brighton, Back Bay, etc) to the color on the map.

So what does this all mean? Why is this important to 20-34 year olds like us?

Well, a lot has been made of the achievement gap in our schools systems, many of which will point to this gap forming along the same lines in that map and in that study, but I think there’s also something to be said of the differences in the experience of young people growing up in this city outside of school. Sure there are obvious differences in environment between red and blue neighborhoods, just watch the news or read a paper - they’ll tell you all about violence and drugs and murders, but I think there’s also something deeper at play here. What does this abundance of or lack of trust for authority figures translate to in terms of attitudes about oneself or one’s hometown? As a member of the generation one notch older than these young people, I think it is a disturbing example and trend (both ways) of where we don’t want to be as a city. Too many have already grown up thinking that this city either owes them something or has nothing for them. A power divide this stark cannot sustain itself.

What will it take to reverse this trend of Red vs Blue?

How can we make our city more… purple?

And more importantly, what are we doing about it?