Self-loathing at Boston Magazine
By adamg - 10/30/07 - 7:26 pm
Adam Reilly notes the incongruity of a Boston Magazine article bemoaning the fact that the South End is filling up with your basic Boston Magazine readers - straight suburban whites who wear khakis as they sip their $11 cocktails.
Comments
There goes the neighborhood
The whites are movin' in
They'll bring their next of kin
it's always great to see
it's always great to see people who grew up in the suburbs and consider themselves hip and chic bash other people for moving into the city so that they too can be hip and chic.
Urban settlers forward!
Didn't the gay community already sweep this sidewalk?
Circle of Life, or Something Like It
So, artists/hipsters are getting displaced in the South End, eh? And who did the artists/hipsters/et. al. displace? I'll give you a hint, they don't tend to read Boston Magazine.
Boston Magazine is bizarre
Every once in a while when the checkout lane is slow... or when I hit a random link... I am confronted with prose such as:
I guess I must not be on the mailing list for the National Coolness Map. And that chance went so quickly, I hardly even noticed it.
The South End, according to those quoted, "has lost its authenticity." What a weird concept, authenticity. Apparently there was something authentic about the South End before, authentically what, nobody seems to specify, and I never noticed.
I mean, I noticed when the Back Bay became too expensive in the 80's, and filled up with expensive little boutiques, so people moved out and spilled over the Pike toward the South End, which used to be really kinda scary, kind of like a suburb of the Combat Zone.
I noticed when the South End got all gay all of a sudden. I noticed when the borders of what was called South End kept growing, and people started inventing new concepts of bordering neighborhoods (SoWa?) I noticed when Northeastern built all that stuff, and kept building it. But that authentic phase? I didn't really notice it. This authenticity must have lived as long as a fruit fly. Not long enough to get a star on the national coolness map, I guess.
Ha ha, you're not on the secret coolness mailing list
Only us cool kids are (smirk).
Another great quote:
You know, lady, if you were living in Southie instead of the South End and saying stuff like that, your hipster poseur of a magazine-writing husband would be excoriating you for your closed, provincial, no doubt racist mind. What a difference a few blocks makes.
Also, as a Roslindale resident, this paragraph confuses and annoys me:
Roslindale? Tensions? First I've heard of it (but I've only been here since '93, so what do I know?). Don't drag my down-home, non-pretentious 'hood into your stupid vapid-people-suck argument! Even our fanciest restaurants (both of them) are not the sort of places people in SUVs drive up to for valet parking (for one thing, there is no valet parking around here - unless you count Vintage way the hell over in Westie).
You must have missed
the Great Baklava battles of '02
Tensions were at a peak between those who pronounced it with a "v" sound and those who pronounced it with a "w" sound. People were going nuts.
And between those who considered it something to eat
and those who considered it something to wear.
OMG, you're right
And let's not forget the skirmishes over whether to call the center of the neighborhood Roslindale Village or Roslindale Square.
God, yeah, I guess my coping mechanism is to just forget all the awful, horrible things that happened when all these yuppies moved into Roslindale (like, er, um, my wife and I).
It ain't about "Cool"
If you think the article was focused on the coolness quotient, then you've missed the point. Its about entitled obnoxious xenophobes who cannot deal with anyone different from themselves. Its about people who move into a part of town that was noted for its diversity and sense of neighborhood who would rather spit at anyone less fortunate than themselves. Its about the fact that any segment of the middle class has been displaced by "luxury" condo's, leaving just the haves and the have nots. Its about the fact that the new South Enders have a selfish and obnoxious attitude about them that is lacking in manners and common decency. An attitude by which they would prefer to whitewash the South End and make it a playground for the blond, bland and boring.
Right
Which gets back to Reilly's original point: That Boston Magazine is bemoaning the movement of its readers into a Boston neighborhood.
Xenophobes?
You'd have to be afraid of foreigners to be a xenophobe. I don't think foreigners have anything to do with it, by any account.
It seems it's about fearful people, all right. Just like you say, obnoxious entitled folks who can't deal with someone who is ... very much like themselves but with more money. It's the folks who moved into the South End to buy 300K condos bitching about the oh so very different folks who are now moving in to buy the same condos for 600K.
Perhaps the new folks are blonder, blander, straighter, and more boring (and certainly richer), but I have a hard time seeing this as really such a big difference. Today's old-timers displaced the people who were there before, all the way back to when it was a slum area. It's true: I bet I probably wouldn't like the newest folks any better than do the previous set of gentrifiers. But there's really not that much difference; they're all part of the same process.
It's all pretty funny from the perspective of anyone who's been around long enough to find "a part of town that was noted for its diversity and sense of neighborhood" an amusing description for the South End. The South End had to change quite a lot very quickly for tht description to fit at all... and now somebody wants to put the brakes on. They want it to be expensive enough to keep out the riffraff (such as yours truly), but not fancy enough that the Uber-Yuppies move in. Oh well; too late.
I think I'm not the only one amused because it seems like a bunch of self-loathing yuppies stomping their feet like toddlers and crying because bigger yuppies are moving in and monopolizing the swingset on what they thought was their special yuppie playground.
Its not about levels of yuppiedom
You really just don't get it. Its not about yuppies being replaced by even wealthier yuppies. Its about the fact that in the late 90's, my South End neighbors and friends had a sense of bettering the community, or giving back to it. My friends and I delivered food to elderly people in Section 8 housing, depsite the fact that the neighborhood wasn't so safe. We knew our neighbors, artists, bankers, single moms in section 8 housing. With those neighbors, we planted plants along the street in those 1/2 bushels that used to be all over the South End. I knew a group of gay guys who volunteered regularly at a local soup kitchen.
The ones who are moving in now have nothing on their minds except how many $16 basil-appletini's they consumed last night at this week's hotspot or how cute their dog's little Burberry collar is. They might want to better the neighborhood, but only for themselves, i.e., a $300k dogpark. They are AFRAID of people not like themselves - no 7/11's - they attract those poor people, no more city-sanctioned graffiti wall - they might put something offensive on there.
Its strange how some people can be fixated on the money of other people when that's not even close to being the point of something.
So the late 1990s is
So the late 1990s is supposed to be the good old days in Boston? You people kill me.
Oh, Yuppies _with no conscience!_
I get it now. The rich yuppies who moved to the South End in the 90s were yuppies with social consciences. The even richer yuppies moving there now don't have a social conscience. Black and white, just like that; no Jiminy Cricket on their shoulders! The Uber-Yuppie invaders don't even try to assuage their guilt by bringing soup to those of the former residents they haven't yet displaced.
You know, it does sound nice. Everybody plant plants together and whatnot; we do that in Rossie sometimes too. And a basil-appletini sounds really yucky. So don't think I'm busting on you or anything; you sound like a really great neighbor, and I encourage you to flee to Roslindale, where I am sure you would improve the neighborhood.
It's obviously a bummer that the neighborhood isn't staying nice like the people who moved there in the 80s and 90s liked it. I absolututely agree with you there. All I'm saying is that the rich yuppies who moved to the South End in the 90s and the even richer yuppies moving there now in the 00s are part of the same process. Call the 90s a kinder, gentler gentrification if you want. But this concept that there was some kind of age-old "authenticity" to what was really only a brief period in a continuing process of gentrification in the South End is just ridiculous.
The South End is beautiful. I wish I could ever have afforded to live there. Because it's beautiful, with all those nice brick bowfronts and whatnot, and has lots of playgrounds, and the first waves of gentrification have resulted in lots of nice restaurants and shops, it's pretty much the Park Slope of Boston. You're a victim of your own success.
Xenophobia
Some good points, but just wanted to point out that xenophobia refers to fear of "that which is foreign," which doesn't necessarily equate to "foreigners" in the national sense. It's used throughout sociology literature to refer collectively to racism, nationalism, homophobia, religionism, etc.
Sez who?
soci.canterbury.ac.nz/...xenophob.shtml
OK, that's one reference
...now go see if you can find some that define it super-generally as "fear of strangers" and some that take the middle road and use it to mean fear of any demographic difference. It shouldn't be hard.
Fear of any demographic difference?
No, that's not the middle road. That's an unlit dead end somewhere in the poorer district of Sociologyville. It's one of the ways you get to the Great Wish-Wash of Abstraction, where all language becomes useless and indistinct.
Living Language
As opposed to over precise and limited to within-discipline definitions?
I'll use the word 'Xenophobia' within your precise sociologic definition when speaking with sociologists. Else, I will use it as it is colloquially defined and used - just like I use "association" to mean a specific statistical relationship between disease and determinants and cofactors at work, but will use it very differently and more broadly when speaking of that group of parents who hold bake sales for the school.
Except that...
...Gareth just happened to find one article using it in that way. That isn't representative of the sociological community by any means.
I do have an extensive background in sociology/psychology, and I'm *not* insisting it be only used one way. I'm asking that we clarify how we're using it so we're on the same page in our discussions. It's been used across the range of "only people of another nationality" all the way to "anything different," as I outlined earlier.
It's erroneous to state that it's only used "correctly" in referring to fear of foreigners, as Gareth did. The poster was using it in a perfectly accepted manner.
Rewind.. reverse that
The poster was using it in an unusual manner more common to some tendencies within sociological literature, and not typical of either common usage or universal sociological usage. This is the reason I commented on it.
Using the word xenophobia to refer to distrust of, or dislike of, people of different social groups within your own neighborhood is a misuse of the term. The reason it is not just uncommmon but a misuse is that there are perfectly good words for disliking dark people or disliking poor people: racism and classism. Lumping those into xenophobia both reduces the specific meaning of the word xenophobia and distracts from the very real problems of racism and classism.
A phobia is a fear, a strong and irrational fear. It's an anxiety disorder. Dislike or contempt are not the same as irrational fear, although they may be associated. Using a term such as phobia to refer to a simple dislike or political contempt trivializes what may be a real medical or psychological problem.
Likewise, strangers or foreigners are not the same as poor or brown people. An irrational fear of Norwegians would be a form of Xenophobia, but it would not tie in to America's huge problems with racism and classism in the same sense that the Prol-hating Uber-Yuppies who started this whole flap do.
Xenophobia is most commonly (and correctly) used to refer to fear of people who are foreign or strangers. Using it to refer to dislike or distrust of whoever or whatever you wish, like fear of people with hats or Volvos or Mormons, or, in this case, dislike of poor and brown people, reduces the quality of your communication. by making it less precise.