THE LOST TRIBE OF INTEGRATION

Seldom in my life have I lived in a neighborhood that was populated by a majority of black people. Dorchester was the first, when I was a kid, and it was so deeply segregated that newcomers to Boston didn’t immediately realize blacks and whites were talking about the same place. Even though the streets run parallel to each other and are separated by less than a mile and a half, Dorchester Avenue—“Dot Ave.,” as it is called—was theirs and Blue Hill Ave. was ours. Anyone referring to Dorchester as “Dot” has a ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent chance of being white.

On the black side of Dorchester—the Blue Hill Ave. side—the only white people we saw were official or semi-official people: cops, firefighters, teachers, bill collectors, meter readers, shop owners, the physicians and dentists working at the free clinic across from Franklin Field. Unlike in neighboring Mattapan, there were no ethnic white holdouts from before the postwar migration, before the Jewish-German-Ukrainian neighborhoods turned black with the legal help from the banks and the real estate industry. The Dorchester of my childhood was black and brown.

There was much to remember: the street hockey where the black kids wanted to be Bobby Orr and the baseball in the vacant lot on the corner of Lucerne and Callender, where the lefthanded black kids wanted to be Yaz, and the pitchers contorted themselves to look like Tiant; the Puerto Ricans across the street from our triple-decker and the Brazilians next door, the ones who drove a Volkswagen Thing and once kicked a soccer ball so hard it nearly broke my hand; the annual Franklin Park Kite Festival; the fire that burned down the house next to ours; the dead-ass vacant lot on Arbutus diagonal from our house the white surveyors would tell us when they came by the city was planning on turning into a swimming pool. (Spoiler alert: it never happened.)

There was also the running, speed produced by fear, trying not to panic. Concentrate on the footsteps. Don’t panic. Panic slowed you down. Panic got you caught. The closer to the Franklin Field projects, the tougher the neighborhood. Floyd Street was the demarcating line, where friends lived and the games were played, but venturing above it, to Stratton and beyond, that was dangerous. It got safer below Floyd. Home was close. Run down Lucerne on to Callender, cut across the vacant lot that used to be the other house that burned down, on to Ashton, into the house, where it was safe. Don’t go past Arbutus on Halloween because the roughnecks were over there. I was probably seven or eight years old the time I went past Arbutus, not heeding the warnings, Icarus flying too close to the sun. An older kid approached me that night, told me how much he liked my costume, and then stole my candy.

Even at that age, a deal was being made with violence, like when my mother and father and sister celebrated the day I stopped running and turned and punched one of my tormenters dead in his fucking face. They cheered when you stopped running because they knew if you did not stop running then, you’d be running for the rest of your life. You’d be running from them. You’d be running in the streets, in the classroom, and in the boardroom, and because you never stood up for yourself and no one would ever fear that you might one day turn and punch them dead in their fucking face. And then they would never stop chasing you. You’d be the mark. Punching back was the only way not to be the mark.

They cheered, because the ones who loved you and knew that they could not protect you every second now knew that you could be trusted to live. You now possessed the requisites to save your own life. They would tell that story with pride—about how you ran and ran, lured them past the front door, into the hallway and then—bam!—well into your adulthood. But you knew the difference: maybe they would stop chasing you, perhaps even be your friend since now you had passed the test and showed you were willing to throw a punch. Or maybe that day of triumph would produce different days of challenge, and maybe on the next challenge you would not win, like the time your older sister, who never lost, who beat anyone who messed with her little brother, lost. Ended up in the hospital. Nothing big, just a tetanus shot after one of the girls jumped her, ripping an earring clean out of her ear. They may have cheered the day I won, and they told the aunts and uncles, but they also recognized their children were now involved in a cycle of fighting, and as they aged, that fighting would graduate from fists to knives and guns, and maybe their kid would be Troy, the kid who lived on the corner of Floyd and Lucerne, got stabbed by Franklin Field when some kids tried to punk him for his summer-job money. He ran home scared, past the fire department on Blue Hill Ave. that could have saved his life, and bled to death on his front porch. They knew it, and that, combined with the growing conviction that receiving a quality education in Boston was becoming an impossibility, was why we left town.

“How does it feel to be a problem?” W. E. B. Du Bois famously wrote in 1902. The migration of blacks from the South has always brought with it a violent response: the riotous year of 1919, and several more following. The postwar migration years came with white flight; oppressive, legal, racially restrictive real estate covenants; blockbusting and redlining that maintained white communities; and the extralegal violence that accompanied school desegregation. The violence, it should be noted, occurred during and following world wars, where black soldiers volunteered to fight for what they wanted to believe was their country, too. Play with the words. Do the mental gymnastics, run from it all. Say it isn’t what it is. Call it heritage not hate in defense of traitorous Confederate symbols in the South or forced busing and self-determination because white people don’t want their kids sharing with black people in the North. Don’t call it racist, but the end result is the same: when black people come, white people go, but before they go, they fight, both with their ballots and with their fists. And when they go they take their wealth with them, leaving behind a community in which financial institutions will not invest. The collusion between white flight and redlining is the foundational blocks of a slum.

“Whether whites are willing to remain in neighborhoods as they become more racially mixed is a second important part of the picture,” reported a 2000 study of Boston housing patterns. “Few whites said they would move if Hispanics or Asians moved into the neighborhood, even after the number of nonwhite neighbors was greater than white neighbors. But over a quarter of respondents said they would try to move if the neighborhood became a third black, and over 40 percent said they would move if blacks became the majority.”¹

The data and the anecdotes combined to create a funnel that brought America to its current, inescapable place: black parents were not sadists or even experimentalists but they knew proximity to whiteness gave their children a greater chance for material success in America, and so, too, did distance from blackness. They knew it in Boston and in Milwaukee, and in all the other places where the presence of their children ignited the white anger. The farther away from blackness, the less their children might be subject to the running, the dilapidated infrastructure, the schoolbooks with the missing pages, the acceptance of substandard services just for being black. Integration was the answer but integration was a myth. In practice, integration was, ironically, the statistical embodiment of Du Bois’s Talented Tenth, where, for the sake of their education, generations of black kids were, by their parents, for their own good, thrown against Zora Neale Hurston’s proverbial white background. A hostile white background. Perhaps there would be a sprinkling of other blacks but never enough to threaten the identity of the fragile white majority that made it clear that one or two families in town would be tolerated but 30 or 40 percent—actual integration, in other words—would not.

And for their good fortune, for the sake of education, these kids would become that first generation of shape-shifters, of code-switchers, of Oreos, the only black kids in their class, who would return to their black communities untrusted and dismissed and ultimately unwelcome, penalized for their parents’ aspirations for them, their authenticity on constant trial. Or they would care enough about their blackness to fight for it, fight their own and anyone else who tried to take it from them—and sometimes still be unwelcome. Or they would leave the black community altogether, embittered by what would feel like indirect banishment—a disinviting to the cookout—and live among whites, eternally untrusted and dismissed but also tolerated, as long as they didn’t question the social order, bring any more like them to town, or ask whites to move even in the slightest toward understanding their black world. They would become a lost tribe.

I was a veteran of both camps. My parents pulled my sister and me out of the Boston public school system while we still lived in the city, extracting us from the violence of busing and enrolled us in the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, or METCO, a small, experimental program founded in 1966 in which white, suburban public schools voluntarily accepted a limited number of inner-city students whose parents would volunteer to send them. It was, ostensibly, a better option than attending inferior local schools or being subjected to the intracity busing that exposed Boston’s white rage. My sister attended school in Newton, I in Waban, a third-grader and a first-grader bused an hour from home. According to this gambit, the black kids would have to wake up at 5 a.m. to go to elementary school and risk isolation in an all-white environment—and recognize the depths of their disadvantage when they saw the expanse of green space and majestic houses and backyard swings of their friends, as opposed to running across vacant lots to escape bullies. But it would all be worth it: this incarnation of the Tenth would have access to better education, better colleges, a better chance for a better life, a chance to be better than their parents, to be better—if they survived. And if they did, what would that survival do to them? Immersed in the white world, what would they become?

In 1977 we left Boston and moved fifty miles south to Plymouth, to “America’s Hometown,” the home of Plymouth Rock, the Mayflower, the Bradfords, the Aldens, and the supposedly benevolent Wampanoag (and later the indomitable Metacomet, but he wasn’t taught in the schools; you had to wait for college and read Howard Zinn for that), and the running stopped. So, too, did the fear of the escalating dangers that one day might be too great to overcome, that would overcome my defenses because deep down I knew I wasn’t really that tough. In Plymouth, at least physically, we were safe.

The threat of physical harm, however, was replaced by a different form of violence. For the continued promise of education and safety, we were separated from the black community not only during school hours, as with METCO, but permanently. METCO was replaced by being a minority full time, in school and in the neighborhood, and the potential for physical violence traded for the guarantee of the emotional: sitting in seventh-grade history class watching Roots while your white classmates pretended to be the slave masters and tried you by calling you “Toby.” In Plymouth, white classmates codified their belief of black illegitimacy in their language. Boom boxes were ghetto blasters. R&B or funk was jungle music. It was hearing the common response of “What am I, black?” when asking a white classmate to hand you a piece of paper, for instance, or some other menial task. It was playing street hockey with friends one day and one of their parents asking me if I was the puck. It was remembering an easygoing, biracial kid named Shawn Raymond, who sat day after day and absorbed white kids touching his hair and sticking pencils in his Afro; remembering that playing soccer in the yard of a friend’s house with other kids (including Missy Gregory, a daughter of the legendary black activist Dick Gregory, who was there that day) and hearing that friend’s mother, as she watched us play, say to another adult, “I don’t mind her being friends with them but she better never, ever bring one of them home.” It was recalling white friends, who really, really liked you, saying, “I don’t mind black people, but I hate niggers.”

We had walked directly into hostility. The South Shore, the fifty miles from Boston to Plymouth, had been the intended safe haven, the white-flight destination for the predominately Irish who left the city to escape busing, to escape integration, to escape black people. The whole stretch and its towns—Hingham, Marshfield, Hanover, Kingston, and Plymouth—was nicknamed the “Irish Riviera”—and, inescapably, here they were, in their paradise having to deal yet again with black people. We had fled Boston to get away from corrosive economic conditions. They had left to get away from us.

The smattering of black and Cape Verdean kids eyed one another warily, the Cape Verdeans—Silva and Fernandes, Andrade and Gomes, Barbosa and Lopes—were lighter-skinned and thus did not identify as readily as black and thus believed themselves to be superior in the racial hierarchy to black people. The ones who stuck together usually did so through class, as so many of the blacks and browns lived in public housing. The ones who didn’t, like me, whose parents owned their homes, periodically had to take some hazing from some of the other black and browns—but that was only when they were around the white kids. I knew what they were doing: they were proving they could be just as cruel to black students as their white classmates were. It was, in a sense, a litmus test for them to prove their loyalty to the majority-white surroundings, to prove to the other white students that under the right circumstances we were just niggers, too, even to other niggers. They, too, stood against the hostile white backdrop. They were surviving.

Implicit in this bargain, of course, was that no aspects of whiteness would be challenged. Given the numbers, so many outcomes would be predetermined: the one black boy in class would invariably be paired with the only black girl, whether or not they had anything else in common. If they didn’t, the black boys would date the white girls or date no one at all, but it wasn’t as easily reciprocal for the black girls because the white boys didn’t want to be seen with black girls. One summer, a good friend of mine was being pursued by a Cape Verdean girl. He asked me what to do. I told him to go out with her. “But,” he said quizzically (and quite certainly to the chagrin of all Cape Verdeans who thought they were special), “she’s black.” Whiteness as culture was smothering, alleviated only by the oasis of individual relationships with white people, lifelong friends who saved my life. We outcasts discovered one another. Those whites, too, then, as those before them, and most likely those in the postracial now, paid dearly for their friendships. The white girls, treated mercilessly by the white boys they would not date—but would marry later—were nigger lovers, called so to their faces. Any of the white kids who enjoyed Prince, Michael Jackson, Run-DMC, or LL Cool J a bit too much would be accused of listening to “jungle music.” (Wigger, another derogatory term for the white boys who liked rap or basketball and emulated black culture, came later.) Each step in this dance might have brought this lost tribe of black students closer to the legitimate world, closer to assimilation, to mastering a smooth navigation of the white universe that would later become their life, but it also, step by step, came at a tremendous—and for the kids unequipped for this daily warfare, traumatic—cost. It distanced these aspirational black people (at least the ones who believed in this pathway’s potential) from the nurturing power of a black community, to the point where the foreign, hostile environment was no longer being the only black kid in class in a white world but being black around other black people. The iceberg had again broken off and once more black people were adrift. Outside of individual relationships with white friends, whose bonds were being tested daily both in a local and national sense, black people had no home.

Soon enough the rest of the dominoes fell: cut off from black America but always reminded they were not white, the lost tribe began to believe as white people did, believe in the myth of being self-made. They did not need a collective, historical identity because they knew they no longer had one: never white, but culturally perhaps not black. Identifying as black would always require careful negotiation instead of a simple, unequivocal “yes.” They were less inclined to feel any oneness with the black and brown people around the world or to acknowledge the systemic racism that created their situation, even while often living in the public housing of a predominately white community. Some would believe in the white standards of beauty, forgive whiteness and its crushing racism while resenting the black community for what they saw as its rejection of them, the incessant battering for talking white or sounding white. Of course, white standards of beauty invaded black communities just as destructively, with black people ripping each other apart in their insults of one another for being too light or too dark. Black people using the word black as an insult has always been the most cutting because of its ruthless simplicity. It need not be complicated. You were the despised, even to each other. All it took was that one word to stamp you as ugly.

In college, at school gatherings and parties, the more insecure members of the lost tribe were obvious, uncomfortable engaging even in majority-black conversational circles, the black boys wary of the other black boys, perhaps fearful of losing their exoticism with the white girls. Perhaps they weren’t so special after all. These black boys had not been integrated. They had been assimilated.

The Swahili word for “lost” is potea, and for the second time these black people again were to be lost, except that this deal of moving fifty miles away from black roots or going to school ninety minutes from home was ostensibly voluntary, all in the name of education, all in the name of proximity to the safer, better world of whiteness. It would not be long before the black people of the lost tribe would commit what James Baldwin would call the ultimate sin of racism: hearing what white people said about them and believing it, believing that being black was the worst thing in the world. Against the white backdrop, no one was spared. Through middle and high school there was a biracial Asian classmate of mine named Matthew Gortz, a wonderfully talented athlete, especially in soccer. Once, during a break in a pickup basketball game, I grew weary and relayed some long-forgotten upsetting racial exchange, and he responded unforgettably: “What about me? I look like a fucking chink.”

THE PRICE OF THE TICKET

This was the bargain. On the East Coast and West, in the Midwest. This was black people at their aspirational best, determined to leave the dead or in jail narratives, the redlined neighborhoods, to the ballplayers and rappers, leaving the rest of black people and the black problems behind. They could act like they made it. They were the new Tenth but also the lost tribe. What, it must be asked, was the purpose of exposing ourselves and our children to so much violence? Was it simply the promise of education, and if so, was it worth it? Or was something loftier, dreamier, even more aspirational and far more dangerous at play? Access to education is one matter. Gaining respect and love, to be seen as an equal—especially by one’s historical oppressor, whose power is rooted in your suppression—is quite different. The American bargain assumes the black, the Chinese, and the Pakistani and Middle Easterner have the opportunity not just to go to Harvard and purchase a Mercedes but to do so with the respect of and in harmony with the very people who once barred them from reading or entering the country or playing Major League Baseball. There is a reckless arrogance to this sentiment, even a pathetic yearning, embraced by Americans of all races, a desire to enwrap an experiment of violence and greed and blood in a fairy-tale, Hollywood screenplay. It was not the only pathway, and indeed the fairy tale has been rejected in several instances, most obviously by many wealthy Mandarin Chinese who arrived in postwar San Francisco. After anti-Chinese real estate covenants were abolished in the late 1940s they purchased real estate beyond Chinatown, in the Richmond and Sunset districts, but did not overly assimilate on a promise of a rainbow before the final credits—they took the tangible benefits of what America offered and flushed the gauzy rest. No friendship, no dream, no mountaintop. Just equity, land, some political power—and some peace in the power of being left alone. They were often ridiculed for not assimilating. Some lived in San Francisco for fifty years and never learned English but they owned what they had and could not be moved. They didn’t need to be friends.

The black story is different. There was no homeland the wealthy fled and no new country to where they brought their money, as was the case with the postrevolutionary Cubans and Mandarins. Black people, with no capital and facing enormous systemic legislative and local restrictions, required a promise that their white countrymen could overcome their common belief that blacks lacked the industriousness to succeed. There is no shortage of irony in calling the enslaved, who worked without wage from dawn to dusk, received no Homestead Act and no GI Bill, lazy. When black aspiration did flourish, as separate as the fingers, white marauders burned its successes, its Black Wall Streets and Rosewoods, to the ground. The black story required cooperation, and no small degree of submission, for the next generation of black youth to actually be, in Maya Angelou’s words, the dream of the slave. There is a mutual romance to it all, the immoral country and its enslaved chattel rehabilitated together by books and brain, opportunity and reform. It is a fantasy.

THE NEAREST SCHOOL IS JUST A FEW BLOCKS AWAY.

In 2016 METCO celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Newspaper stories, radio interviews, and documentaries from the Boston Globe to NPR recalled those first generations of integrationist kids. An article about the METCO program in Concord, that famous Revolutionary War town, began with, “It’s working. And no one is interested in changing a thing.” Another, with the headline “For 50 Years, This Voluntary Busing Program Has Desegregated Schools 1 Family—and 1 District—at a Time,” chronicled a family getting their young child up at 5 a.m. to go to school, as I did forty-five years earlier. It contained a paragraph that read:

The Dillons live in a three-story, early 20th century home in the historic, largely working-class, predominantly black neighborhood of Dorchester in south Boston. His father owns an auto repair shop, and his mother is a grant specialist; both grew up in the neighborhood. The nearest public school is just a few blocks away. But every morning, the Dillons put Collin on a bus that takes him 90 minutes or more out of the city to a public elementary school in the coastal community of Marblehead.

The stories were hopeful. They were frustrating. They invoked the violent roots of the 1960s and 1970s—the riots, the white attacks on black kids trying to attend white schools—that cried out for interracial solutions, the genesis of METCO’s birth. They were personal, now that so many of the former METCO children were adults. They existed at a time of national reconsideration, especially among black families faced with another generation of the same bargain. Among the emotional shrapnel, they had begun a reassessment of the idea that proximity to whiteness is best for black children, unsure a better way existed. The New York Times wrote about the difficulties of black students at the predominately white Ivy League schools. The Atlantic offered a long profile about the perils of minority students at elite private schools.

For all the triumph, an obvious question was not asked: why, after a half century, is METCO still necessary? Fifty years later the black kids in their black communities are still running from the violence, their parents still getting them up at 5 a.m., still with a school nobody wants to go to just a few blocks away, often still underserving the community. As the retrospectives piled up in Boston, the outrage that fifty years later many black parents still believe the best educational opportunity for their six-year-olds is to put them on a bus for a daily three-hour round-trip commute to school—reinforcing the belief that becoming a member of the lost tribe is a necessity—was largely and curiously nonexistent. Less discussed were the structural impediments to black educational opportunity. In 2019 the educational nonprofit EdBuild estimated that predominately white school districts received $23 billion more in educational funding than schools in predominately black districts. In celebrating its anniversary, METCO reported that ten thousand children were on its waiting list.

The Supreme Court did ask the question, and in 2007 concluded that METCO and programs like it around the country weren’t necessary; not because America’s cities had dedicated themselves to improving the local school systems with the type of concerted public works efforts required to create vibrant black communities with education at their center, but because, as the conservative court determined in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, public school systems are forbidden to consider the racial identity of students as a method of promoting integration. Black parents were not entitled to satisfactory local schools and the country’s highest court had determined they were not going to be aided in being aspirational, either. The decision was another example of the post–Brown vs. Board of Education opposition machine in action, an adjunct to the 1974 Milliken decision that excluded suburban public school districts from participating in efforts to desegregate schools, and a forgotten foundation of Ronald Reagan’s political career was a hostility toward desegregation and an aggression toward its destruction. Even the argument that cities have begun investing in public schools, making programs like METCO less relevant, does so relying on the sleight of hand of public charter schools, which siphon money away from existing public systems under the guise of “school choice.” These post-Brown educational covenants all have the same effect of keeping local schools segregated and inferior, which explains why, a half century later, METCO is still necessary. Where there are black communities, there is corruption on the part of the state and private industry to deprive those communities of their potential services and vibrancy. When the black community is vibrant or the land valuable, redevelopment is inevitable. New York City currently offers property tax abatements to spur gentrification. Integration is the only solution and yet the remedies, available to the select few aspirational black families with the resources to take this risk, are always on white terms.

The lost tribe was created not only by aspirational black parents but by the American legal machinery. Full-scale desegregation was prohibited by courts and local schools remained inferior, leaving those black parents with ambition, means, and vision essentially two choices: find one of the handful of predominately black school districts in the country that are thriving or throw their children against the hostile white background. We either lose opportunity or lose ourselves.

It is a reconsideration that has vindicated my Aunt Judy, who during the days of desegregation in Boston never underestimated the emotional violence that came with pulling her kids away from the black community. She attended Jeremiah E. Burke High School in Dorchester with my mother. My mother decided to place her children into the proximity of whiteness. My aunt, her best friend, rejected the upward potential of the lost tribe. The cost was just too high.

“I understood the conversations that were taking place and I knew that the kids were not necessarily getting the education that we received when I was in school,” she told me when I asked her why she and my uncle didn’t move my cousins out of Boston during busing, as my parents had moved us. “But if there were things they weren’t learning, we felt we could teach them at home. But you couldn’t just rinse away the effects of that kind of isolation. We didn’t want to expose our children to it. You might have access to nicer things but you could lose your sense of self, your identity. And if you did, you might not ever regain it.”