Abstract
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.
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Notes
I interviewed both members of the citizens panel convened to make a recommendation for a new student assignment policy, and community members who engaged directly with the process in an advocacy role.
According to census data in 1974, 80% on Boston’s population was white, non-Latino, 16.3% was black, and 1.9% was classified as some other race (Asian, etc.). Data on the Latino population puts their numbers at roughly 2.5%, though this is likely an undercount. Black students accounted for nearly 35% of the student body (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 1975). In 2012, Boston’s population was 47% white, non-Hispanic, 18% Hispanic or Latino, 9% Asian, and 24% Black (US Census 2010). Thirteen percent of BPS students were classified as white, 40% as Hispanic, 35% as Black, and 9% as Asian (Boston Public Schools 2014).
I write elsewhere about more extensively about my positionality in relation to this research. Here it is important to note that I was an active participant in this process and indeed had a stake as a parent who would be impacted by student assignment reform and as a community member and activist. I was thus fully embedded in this process and at the time of the interviews reported here had been a participant in the EAC community engagement from its inception. I position this research in the tradition of activist ethnography as described by Hale and others (Hale 2008).
Both Latino and Asian activists, as well as other immigrant groups including Haitians and Cape Verdeans, have expressed feeling excluded from political dialogue in the city, and have worked hard to build their own points of political access rather than being lumped together as people of color with African American groups (Uriarte 1993; Liu et al. 2008). This exclusion was a factor in the school desegregation crisis itself, which may continue to affect how these various communities relate to each other, and to institutional politics in the city. Because my sample is largely black and white, this study speaks more to the black/white binary politics of school desegregation and runs the risk of perpetuating the exclusion of other voices. The black/white politics of how school desegregation is remembered is a critical dynamic about which this study can tell us much. Ultimately, however, more research is needed into these groups’ experiences to paint of fuller picture of the dynamics of remembering in urban politics.
The universe from which this sample was drawn is small and delimited, therefore participants are identified with minimal descriptors throughout in order to protect confidentiality as much as possible. Racial identification is noted where relevant to discussion.
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Acknowledgements
I received valuable feedback on versions of this manuscript from a number of people whom I would like to gratefully acknowledge: Liza Weinstein and the participants in the 2016 writing workshop she assembled at Northeastern; Shelley Kimelberg, Jeffrey Juris, Miren Uriarte; and finally, the two anonymous AJCS reviewers and Editor Phillip Smith. I’d also like to acknowledge Donna Bivens and Horace Small at the Union of Minority Neighborhoods for making this research possible in the first place.
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Doran, M.V. Racial remembering in urban politics. Am J Cult Sociol 7, 29–53 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-017-0051-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-017-0051-9