Sociologists typically understand the way actors remember and invoke historical events in political debate to be primarily strategic, demonstrating that the past is used to make a case for policy in the present. Yet how actors remember the past also shapes their worldviews and approaches to policy in the first place. While some scholars acknowledge the more foundational role remembering plays in politics, this approach remains underdeveloped at the local level. In this article I examine the role memories of Boston’s school desegregation crisis of the 1970s have played in contemporary school reform processes, specifically in efforts to revise how students are assigned to schools at the city and neighborhood levels. Through interviews with policy-making participants and community advocates, I find that while actors on different sides of the debate draw on common narratives of Boston’s school desegregation crisis, they dispute the relevance of these events to the present. I find that some actors draw on memories of the crisis to assert a mnemonic closure from a racist past, while others, advocating distinct approaches to student assignment, argue for mnemonic bridging of institutional racism from the past to the present. This analysis demonstrates that social remembering is a central component of urban cultural politics, with racial discourses structuring how policy actors understand relationships between the past and the present to arrive at distinct policy conclusions. To suggest these processes are purely strategic masks the discursive power of racial ideologies which inform participants’ understandings of the past and their approach to the distribution of urban resources.

中文翻译：

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城市政治中的种族记忆

社会学家通常将政治辩论中的行动者记忆和援引历史事件的方式理解为主要是战略性的，这表明过去被用来为现在的政策提供理由。然而，演员如何记住过去也首先塑造了他们的世界观和政策方法。虽然一些学者承认记忆在政治中扮演着更基础的角色，但这种方法在地方层面仍然不发达。在这篇文章中，我研究了 1970 年代波士顿学校废除种族隔离危机的记忆在当代学校改革过程中所扮演的角色，特别是在努力修改学生如何分配到城市和社区级别的学校方面。通过与决策参与者和社区倡导者的访谈，我发现虽然辩论的不同方面的参与者都借鉴了波士顿学校废除种族隔离危机的共同叙述，但他们对这些事件与现在的相关性提出了质疑。我发现一些演员利用危机的记忆来断言种族主义过去的记忆结束，而其他人则主张采用不同的学生分配方法，主张将制度种族主义从过去到现在的记忆桥梁。这一分析表明，社会记忆是城市文化政治的核心组成部分，种族话语构建了政策参与者如何理解过去与现在之间的关系以得出不同的政策结论。