The Unbearable Whiteness of Boston

I am writing this introduction in the midst of heartbreak. Marcellus Williams was executed in Missouri. A man with skin like mine, trapped beneath an accusation without forensic evidence and with questionable witnesses, engulfed in the prison industrial complex and its hypocrisies—murdered for an alleged murder. There’s much to say about this story. I certainly can’t speak to innocence or guilt. But I can speak to state-sanctioned murder, a function of a matrix of systems operating with sick intentions. Masking themselves under nice words like justice and equality while exercising racism and white privilege against Black bodies over and over again.

Being a Black man that speaks these truths is exhausting. A state-sanctioned execution makes you lose the will to fight, as does bearing witness to continued miseducation. They are both a function of the deeply embedded racial hierarchies of America. Whether it’s in the St. Louis County Prosecutor’s Office, the quiet, segregated suburbs of Jersey, the mostly Black and Brown hoods of New York City, or the “colorblind” liberal enclaves of Boston, systems function to ensure that whiteness reigns supreme, unchecked and unseen.

This excerpt from From White Folks Who Teach in the Hood allows someone other than me and those who look like me to carry the burden of describing the impacts of racism in America. It describes the reality that we all live under systems designed to exploit and harm. It uncovers the tensions many of us experience when we step into spaces of power—how we navigate our personal reckonings with race, privilege, and systemic oppression and end up feeling powerless.

Justin Cohen’s chapter (excerpted below) offers a story of his truths and revelations, an unraveling of sorts. A seeing and then a warning about the broader systems that create and sustain racial injustice. It names a system (the nonprofit industrial matrix) that sits right next to a more familiar prison industrial complex within a larger system fueled by white supremacist ideology that many see and feel but won’t admit to. It is a piece of the matrix that violently taxes. It took Marcellus in much the same way that it takes children’s spirits—violently, despite protest, in spite of evidence that begs us to look again before we murder AGAIN. The chapter challenges white folks to ask themselves how they reckon with their own complicity. Justin has to do it because white folks need to and because folks who look like me are tired and we all should be too.—Dr. Christopher Emdin

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“The Unbearable Whiteness of Boston” has become my shorthand title for the chapter of my life when I started to reckon with my own race and privilege, but the full story begins in Camden County, New Jersey, where I grew up. The particular town, Voorhees, was named for a nineteenth-century Dutch governor, and its kindergarten was on the grounds of a one-room schoolhouse cum African Methodist Episcopal church that had once been an organizing hub for a network of Philly-based abolitionists. It was the 1980s, I was half Jewish, and I bought mixtapes by West Coast MCs at the Cherry Hill racetrack. As a child, my connection to the city of Boston was intense but distant. My parents had met as undergrads at Boston University, where their young love was so canonically overt that a freelance photographer once spontaneously snapped a street shot of them that ended up on the front page of that year’s Valentine’s Day edition of the Boston Globe.

When that picture was printed, in 1977, my mom was at the beginning of a tumultuous, forty-year teaching career. She was posted at a middle school in Roxbury during the early, darkest years of a decade-long, violent, anti-Black uprising, triggered by court-ordered desegregation, a period that usually is euphemistically called “the busing era.” Her first teaching memories are spliced with images of white families throwing rocks at her Black students.

Despite this concrete evidence that white supremacy wears a Red Sox cap just as often as a white hood, I was raised in the color-blind cocoon that coddled Caucasian kids in the 1980s. My parents moved to Jersey in the early 1980s. Compared to Boston, the South Jersey suburbs at that time contained a cocktail of extraordinary racial and ethnic diversity, along with almost no serious conversations about race. I believed that racism was, mostly, a thing of the past, even though I once watched a white gym teacher call my Black classmate “homeboy” while aggressively slamming him into the bleachers.

My intergenerational connection to public schools, coupled with my obliviousness and unexamined privilege, made me an excellent candidate for recruitment into the white-savior industrial complex. I left Jersey, went to Yale, and decided to work in education policy.

At that point, in the early 2000s, my mom had become so jaded that her only reaction to my decision was, “Seriously, what’s the point?” She had arrived at that glib sincerity through honest means. Her career had dawned in desegregating Boston and hit its twilight at the inception of No Child Left Behind. Her father, a Nebraska farm boy born to Danish immigrants, had also dedicated his life to schools. He climbed the ranks of education expertise in the pre–Teach for America ways—teacher, then principal, then superintendent—and by the time he was in his sixties, Erling Clausen was elected president of the American Association of School Administrators. He cut a big figure, physically and professionally. Five decades before marketing consultants had coined the term “Common Core,” Pop-Pop had written a doctoral dissertation on America’s failure to embrace national standards in a globalizing world. He was the only person I knew who got Christmas cards from the White House every year, which he collected, in addition to Playboy magazines from the 1950s, old shot glasses, and vintage silk neckties, all of which my mom and I would load into boxes when he died in 2002.

That I followed Mom and Pop-Pop to work in public schools makes me wonder if the greatest trick white privilege plays is convincing us that we are somehow the inheritors only of our ancestors’ best aspirations and not their worst delusions. As a young white recent Ivy League graduate whose only hardships in life to date were self-inflicted, I found defying Mom’s wishes by taking up that career was a safe form of privileged rebellion, especially in the heady early days of what folks now call, at least cheekily, if not straight derisively, the “education reform era.”

I spent the early years of my career working in schools in New York City and Washington, DC. Tolstoy said that all happy families are the same but unhappy families are unhappy for different reasons, and I found that a similar truism holds for struggling schools in historically excluded communities. I remember talking to a high school senior on the top floor of Anacostia High School in southeast DC, with the US Capitol Building framed behind us in the school’s picture window; he told me he had only left his neighborhood a handful of times. I once gave a presentation to a community meeting about a multimillion-dollar school renovation that ended with one parent asking me whether the renovation included a plan to fix the broken water fountain in the tenth-grade wing. Most days, I tried to fill the gap between reality and aspiration with charisma, but I learned that, historically, charismatic white dudes have made many more promises than they have kept.

Still, the education nonprofit sector was designed for people with my background, and by the early 2010s, I was experiencing career success. While much of my twenties had been an extension of my college experience—I acted like a child; drank too much; made suspect decisions rooted in cursorily examined privilege; and got the benefit of the doubt, consistently, because I was white and cis and male—I reached a modicum of professional achievement before age thirty. However, my maturity was accelerated by rapid career advancement and a complicated, intense, decade-long first marriage.

Before I turned thirty, I was hired to be president of a national nonprofit organization with Boston roots whose mission was to help states and districts improve schools in historically marginalized communities. This role, as an older Black mentor casually remarked, put me “in a position of more authority than any person should reasonably have so early in one’s life.”

His perspective ended up being prophetic.

Boston caught me by surprise. Within months of accepting the job, I realized that there were startlingly few Black people in management or executive positions in any of the education organizations in the city, not to mention the philanthropies. I had spent the first decade of my career in New York and Washington, DC, and while those places still reel from brutal segregation and institutionalized racism, there was notably more racial diversity in nonprofit leadership in those cities than in Boston.

Passive acquiescence is the fuel that feeds white supremacy in the nonprofit industrial complex.

This should not have surprised me, as whiteness in Boston is more refined than it is anywhere else in the United States. One clue is that the city is the cultural center of a place that calls itself, unironically, New England. From the seventeenth century on, the primary tradition that Boston has etched upon the world’s ethnographic landscape is that of the WASP. Being a white Catholic is considered somewhat outside the cultural norm in Boston. Boston is so white…

Okay. You get it.

That Boston is unbelievably white and unusually racist is the sort of casual observation that everyone agrees with, except, of course, white people who live in Boston. White people who live in Boston, the vast majority of whom self-identify as the liberal’s liberal, have sworn a blood oath to make excuses for, ignore, obfuscate, minimize, or take oneself out of this reality. White liberals in greater Boston will buy a house in a town that is 97 percent white, on purpose, and then put a Black Lives Matter sign on the lawn. An older white colleague in Boston once told me, “Boston isn’t racist, it’s tribal,” and then several months later used the N-word in front of a young woman of color, ostensibly to describe what someone else had said, even though uttering the slur appeared to give him pleasure.

This less-than-covert sort of racism is enabled, in large part, by other white men like me. Passive acquiescence is the fuel that feeds white supremacy in the nonprofit industrial complex, which is mostly white led, white financed, and white governed. Meanwhile, the white folks in this professionalized savior sector, myself included, conduct extraordinary mental gymnastics to convince ourselves that this series of arrangements does not imply “white serving.” That racism of all varieties—interpersonal, institutional, systemic—goes unexamined in these spaces is the worst kept secret in America.

My first reaction to Boston’s monochromatic nonprofit sector was to try and “fix it,” which is how privileged white men are trained to respond to challenges of any size. I unironically called people I knew from New York and Washington, DC, and asked them to move … to Boston. One former colleague laughed at me over the phone, saying, “I am an unmarried Black woman in her forties. On what planet do you think me moving to Boston is a good idea?”

Valid point.

Despite this being an uphill effort, within three years the organization I worked for moved from a staff that was almost 100 percent white to one in which white folks were in the minority. This fleeting moment, during which I got to be part of a truly diverse team that sometimes played a role in hastening extraordinary improvements in schools that had been written off, was one of the most joyous experiences of my life.

Once some modicum of diversity was achieved, though, bigger, more complicated dimensions of institutional racism started to reveal themselves. Creating an inclusive environment at work meant making space for the awful experiences encountered by educators and children at the hands of not just the nonprofit industrial complex and school systems but also the various other institutions that intersect to oppress historically marginalized people. I started speaking about this in more public ways, not because I was an expert, but because as a white nonprofit leader, I constantly found myself in rooms of all white people where nobody else ever mentioned the topic of race.

This reputation—of being the relatively young white guy who would talk about race all the time—did not make me popular with the old guard of corporate philanthropy and institutional grant making in Boston.

Eventually, my stridency caught up with me. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment everything collapsed, but several scenes replay in my head year after year.

Scene 1, spring 2012. It’s just a few weeks after Trayvon Martin is murdered, and I’m sitting in my office, across the table from a colleague, Anthony, who is Black and in his twenties. My mood is sad and detached, his direct and visceral. He says, “It could have been me, in a hoodie, on the streets of Boston.” I look at him, and after thirty years of thinking that somehow, some way, things have gotten better in this country, I realize that he is right, and that I am delusional if I disagree.

Scene 2, spring 2014. We have started an organization-wide book club, and we are discussing Tony Lukas’s Common Ground at a large boardroom table. The book chronicles the anti-Black, white supremacist uprising that people in Boston still quaintly call “the busing fiasco,” and it happens to be the fortieth anniversary of the events in the book. The story follows three people, one of whom is an upper-middle-class white Ivy League–educated technocrat who oversees busing from his privileged perch in the mayor’s office. I try to describe to the rest of the book club the feeling of repeating this person’s mistakes against the backdrop of my own family’s intergenerational participation in a wretched system, and I start sobbing at the table.

Scene 3, summer 2014. Our organization’s founder and board chair, an older white man who is my boss, decides to hold a “lunch and learn” session about the history of redlining and segregation in Boston. During that session, a young Black woman employee asserts that many of the problems that we’ve discussed still exist today and are perpetuated by white folks in the city hoarding privilege. The founder tells her she is wrong. I speak up to agree with her, and he berates both of us in a way that is both unnecessarily cruel and insulting. Later that week, I am moderating a panel about community organizing while he sits in the audience; he stands up, uninvited, in the middle of the discussion, and lectures the whole room about his disagreement with one of the panelists, an older Black man. As the moderator, I ask him to sit down, and after he does, I say to the audience, “In these discussions, racism and privilege are always lurking as subtext, but we should probably acknowledge that, just now, it came to the surface.” I watch him seethe from his seat in the audience while a few audience members audibly agree with my sentiment.

(There’s a simpler version of that last scene wherein my simmering anger and shame leads to a Hollywood moment in which I confront racism in my own organization, causing me to lose my job in a chaotic, public way, but reality is far more complicated than the harsh blowback from faux-heroics.)

In hindsight, I remember that moment in the summer of 2014 as the beginning of the end, not just of my relationship with that particular boss, but of my career as a nonprofit leader. At that point, I was a young executive, juggling ever expanding professional responsibilities within an organization that had recently lost many of its senior leaders due to a combination of philanthropic chicanery and internal strife. The decision to confront my own boss about his perpetuation of white supremacy culture in front of an audience of several hundred people that included state and district chiefs who had hired my organization was self-destructive, yes, but it was not an off-the-cuff, Jerry Maguire moment. It was the consequence of years of anger, rage, and self-hatred growing inside of me. He was the target of my anger, but I was no less complicit in the system. I was in over my head, wrestling with my own whiteness, surviving the final throes of a collapsing marriage, and isolated from my friends and family in a city that reminded me every single damned day of the intergenerational trauma that whiteness and white supremacy exact on all of us.

In short, when I decided to publicly shame the man who signed my checks, I was done, not just with him, but with the version of myself I had been.

Our tension came to a coda the Friday before Thanksgiving later that year, when the old man and I had a final face-to-face confrontation that went . . . poorly. I left the office that day knowing that I would never go back. My soon-to-be ex-wife was so frustrated with the situation that she asked me to leave the house. I slept in the guest bedroom that night, with a bottle of whiskey and a pack of Camel cigarettes. I had no job, my marriage was obviously over, and I had no idea what I was going to do, having burned a whole variety of bridges. At some point in the middle of that night I drunkenly stumbled into our backyard and screamed at the sky to give me a sign about what I ought to do next.

While there was no immediate answer to my heavenly inquiry, the universe started sending unsubtle hints. As I sat up alone that night, I watched the uprising in Ferguson flare up after prosecutors declined to prosecute Darren Wilson for murdering Mike Brown. I drove to New York the next day in a mint-green Fiat with a twenty-pound turkey in the trunk. In November of 2014, New York City was still reeling from the police killing Eric Garner, and during my best friend’s birthday celebration at a Thai place on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, an enormous Black Lives Matter march materialized outside of the restaurant. I apologized to the group, left my bags with them, and joined the protest. I circled back later, for the after-party, at a fusion wing joint called Seoul Chicken, owned by our high school friend.

Because our understanding of each other was so shallow, it was more convenient to maintain lukewarm proximity than to create true kinship.

After Thanksgiving, I returned to Boston and started writing about my personal reckoning with race. I started a blog in which my writing was sincere, sloppy, scattered, and riddled with the sort of holy-shit revelations about racism that caused one friend, a Black woman, to remark that I was “processing the world like a Black adolescent who sees slights around every corner.” I still do not think this was a compliment.

I wrote personal narratives about my upbringing, interviewed Black and Brown leaders in public education, and tried to shock white folks into doing the kind of work that I had only been able to learn through painful personal experience.

Several months after I started blogging, childhood friends on Facebook noticed what I was doing. CB, whose wing joint had been the site of the Black Lives Matter march/birthday-dinner after-party, called me to talk. “How are you gonna write a whole blog about race and not ever talk to me about that thing that happened in high school?” he asked.

I panicked and flashed back to gym class in the 1990s. There I saw CB, pressed up against the bleachers by our gym teacher, the older white man spitting in his face, calling him “homeboy” over and over again. It had been awful, and I wasn’t the one being assaulted.

“How have we never talked about it?” I repeated back to him, knowing that this one particular incident, with its racism so overt, had been the single biggest source of cognitive dissonance about race inside my young white skull. The adults had told us, in the 1980s, that racism was over, and yet I had seen white supremacy, wearing a cheap track suit, beating and berating my Black classmate.

So CB and I finally talked about it. A lot. And it brought us closer. CB had almost been expelled for the incident, which I didn’t know. The gym teacher had lied about what happened, and when the principal asked me to corroborate the teacher’s version of the story, I refused. The whole situation could have been a learning experience for me and other white kids at the school, but the principal, a white woman, asked me to “keep this whole situation to yourself.”

“Wouldn’t it have been great,” I asked him, twenty years later, “if we had been able to learn from that moment?”

“Justin,” he said, “my trauma can be a lot of things, but translating it into a learning experience for my white peers was not a priority as a fourteen-year-old.”

He was, of course, correct.

I have come to believe that this disconnect is the great paradox of racial equity for those of us raised in the era of color blindness: through cosmetic integration, we encountered more opportunities than any generation before us in achieving justice, but because our understanding of each other was so shallow, it was more convenient to maintain lukewarm proximity than to create true kinship.

My approach to school reform up to that point, not to mention public policy in general, had been rooted in a combination of intellectual stimulation about technocratic complexity, coupled with an unabashed curiosity about humanity. It was not, however, rooted in the sort of radical kinship and love that is necessary to transform our culture into something untethered from racial caste.

Just a few days after CB called, I found out that the white Boston city official whose work on busing and desegregation was captured in Common Ground had moved back to Boston after many years of heading up a liberal arts college. I made contact with him through a mutual friend, and he agreed to talk to me. I left out the fact that his decades-old story had triggered my personal meltdown, because that might have been, you know, creepy and weird.

When we got on the phone, the man assumed I wanted to talk about education policy, which he wasn’t eager to discuss. He hadn’t thought much about K–12 education for years, but I didn’t care about all that. I wanted to know how he felt, forty years after his work described in the book, looking back on his role as a privileged white man trying to remedy the inexorable problem of racism in America, which was well beyond the boundaries of any sort of technocracy that he or I was prepared to wield.

“You want to talk about that?” he asked. “Why now, and why me? I left that behind years ago, and I left it a mess.”

“Yes,” I said, “but there aren’t many white men who have even tried hard enough to fail, and I was hoping to talk to one who has.”

He paused for a while, and when he spoke, his tone was different, more secure. “You have to see the whole complexity of the system to really do anything,” he began. He continued: “If you push it in one place, it moves in another. That’s what people get wrong about systemic change, and why I caution most people against trying it; it’s not for everyone. But everyone can—actually must—go talk to ten people in their own community and change how relationships work. If we all did that, that would be the truly radical thing.”