The Case of the Boston Desegregation Crisis
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1 NARRATIVES OF THE PAST IN COMTEMPORARY URBAN POLITCS: THE CASE OF THE BOSTON DESEGREGATION CRISIS A dissertation presented by Meghan V. Doran to The Department of Sociology and Anthropology In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the field of Sociology Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts June, 2015 2 NARRATIVES OF THE PAST IN COMTEMPORARY URBAN POLITCS: THE CASE OF THE BOSTON DESEGREGATION CRISIS by Meghan V. Doran ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University June, 2015 3 Urban sociologists have increasingly recognized the cultural aspects of urban politics, which are performances rich with symbolic meaning. However, more work needs to be done to integrate the cultural politics of urban politics into our understanding of how power operates in the city. Through this research I explore one thread of the fabric of symbolic meaning as it operates in urban politics: remembering cultural trauma, asking: What role do memories of the past play in contemporary urban politics? To answer this question, I consider how Boston‟s tumultuous and violent school desegregation crisis in the 1970s is remembered and contested in urban politics in the city today. Through engaged ethnography and interviewing I focus on two parallel, overlapping processes: a city-led initiative to change how students are assigned to schools, and a grassroots community project to remember and learn from Boston's Busing/Desegregation crisis. Using an interactionist framework which understands social action to be a product of performances rooted in place, shared pasts, and relationships, I describe the meaning of this particular cultural trauma in the city today and how it is used as a component in enacting power and making change. First I ask how actors in the policy-making process remember and use cultural trauma in the process of policy construction. I argue that past cultural trauma is used as a point of comparison to the present in order to make the case for present policies. Furthermore, actors in the policy-making process rely on cultural discourses to construct their understanding of the relationship between the past a past cultural trauma and the contemporary city. I then ask what role remembering plays as the process of policy making unfolds. I find that in the policy making process remembering and forgetting the past are components of a strategic performance structured to enact, as well as contest, policy. Finally, I broaden the arena to consider the grassroots politics of remembering in contrast to the institutional policy-making context, asking what role grassroots efforts at remembering play in the larger field of urban politics. I find that grassroots organizations use remembering not only as a strategic tool for policy change, but as a 4 source for knowledge production and an opportunity to not just contest dominant narratives but to alter them. Specific to this case, I argue that to understand student assignment reform in Boston – its processes and outcomes – we must understand both the history of the city‟s school desegregation crisis and how this crisis is remembered today. The case of student assignment reform in Boston suggests that public remembering is a critical component of the cultural politics of the city, with real meaning for how the city is constructed and power is enacted. Ultimately I argue that remembering is a place-based performance embedded in power dynamics which can be used to legitimize and challenge policy. 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The mistakes of this work are truly my own, but the strengths of it belong to so many. I‟ve had many great mentors who supported me into and through the process of graduate school, including the late and great Michael E. Stone, Lorna Rivera, Will Holton, Alisa Lincoln, Steven Vallas, and Mark Warren. Without the Humanities Center at Northeastern University this work would still be half formed and half written. The cohort of scholars I worked with there, Tim Creswell, Len Albright, Emily Artiano, James Connolly, Gretchen Heefner, Kathleen Kelly, Burt Spector and Sarena Parekh, opened my eyes to the values of interdisciplinary work and provided so much inspiration and feedback as I wrote. I consider myself lucky to have worked for so many years with such a supportive and sharp committee. Liza Weinstein, Jeffrey Juris, Shelley Kimelberg, and Miren Uriarte provided me considerable feedback, while giving me the space to bring together my many interests into a recognizable whole. Liza Weinstein mentored me through the challenges of balancing career and family, all while being patient and helpful beyond belief in reading draft after draft as I thought, rethought, and then rethought again. A whole community of people truly dedicated to the education, health, and well-being of young people in Boston made this dissertation possible. I hold deep gratitude for those who participated in this research, taking an interest in my work, giving their time, and opening up their inner thought processes for me to look at. There is a community of education activists that welcomed me and formed the backbone of this work. Special thanks to Horace Small for welcoming me in to the family he creates, and all the members of the Boston Busing/Desegregation Project who both supported and challenged me along the way. There is no other learning experience like the one you‟ve given me. Donna Bivens is a true activist- scholar who I am continuously in awe of. Every conversation with Donna brings a fresh way of 6 looking at the world and self. Every time I thought I had a handle on the city and the world, Donna would come up with a new challenge, a gift I cannot thank her enough for. It takes a village and of course my parents and siblings were my first village that helped me get to who and where I am today. I lost my brother during my journey towards this work, but carried him with me the whole way. He was the first writer I ever knew and an unfailing support that I still reach for through memory and story. My mother was my first editor, has always been my biggest booster, and gave a priceless amount of emotional and material support through this process. Brandy Hubbard became my graduate school family and even from across the ocean continues to be there whenever I need. My husband, Makis Antzoulatos, makes life better, plain and simple. He is an inspiring, courageous, and compassionate human being, who has supported me with whole heart. And last, but certainly not least, my daughter, Devlin, has cheered me to the finish line and always cuts straight to the matter of love and justice with an amazing alacrity I only wish I could emulate on these pages. 7 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 5 Table of Contents 7 Introduction 8 Chapter 1: The Boston School Desegregation Crisis as Cultural Trauma 50 Chapter 2: Making Meaning from Cultural Trauma 77 Chapter 3: The Performance of Remembering and Forgetting 113 Chapter 4: Outside of the Policy Making Process – An Alternative Performance 138 Conclusions 170 Appendix A 187 References 189 8 INTRODUCTION The sociological eye searches for patterns – for systems, for hierarchies, for classifications- which help us to make sense of the world. The sociology of place can be tricky in this way – while places certainly have similarities and differences that can help us classify the world, they also have histories, unique paths of development, critical events that shape them and make them distinct from any other place. Urban spaces are no exception to this. Sociologists have in many cases successfully demonstrated that cities are places significant in the social order – places that structure social relationships. There are patterns of differentiation across cities in a global order (Sassen 1991) and there are patterns within cities of social organization, of racial and class stratification, of access to power and decision making (Massey and Denton 1993). But cities also have their particularities that make them different – their own histories, identities, and lived realities. As geographer Doreen Massey (2005) argues, spaces are not just made up of pasts that are buried and done; they are the result of multiple histories that are still being made. What sense are scholars to make of the particularities of cities? One option is to ignore the individual character of a place – looking for the patterns in spite of these peculiarities. Another is to turn towards them – to take seriously the histories of places to understand how life is shaped within them and indeed across cities. This work takes the latter approach, understanding the city as a place that is shaped by national and global forces which makes it comparable to other cities, and at the same time with a unique development which interacts with these larger forces to have its own particular lived realities that need to be understood on their own terms. Ultimately the unique history of a place matters – it shapes the way groups interact, the way social inequality is spread across the landscape, how policy is constructed. One such particularity I believe to have considerable impact in how cities develop is what sociologists have termed a „cultural trauma‟: an event which dramatically disrupts a place – it‟s functioning, it‟s patterns, its identity. On a national scale these traumas are well documented. It 9 is not surprising that the Holocaust or the bombing of Hiroshima, for example, have had major impacts on Germany and Japan – on their peoples, cultures, and on their governance. It is not just that these events have impacted life when they occurred, but that they continue to have an impact through time.