Brookline Newcomer

White and yellow do not make a rainbow

During the opening ceremony at last week's convention of the American Psychological Association, held downtown at the Hynes Convention Center, I found myself wondering how many of Brookline's six gazillion psychologists were also in attendance. The ceremony's theme, "Many Voices Into One," reflected the convention's focus this year on ethnic diversity. As I sat waiting for Jesse Jackson's keynote address, I wondered whether our local therapists and research psychologists accepted the comforting view that Brookline is an ideal multicultural mixture of people from all around the globe.

Certainly there is evidence for increased Brookline diversity compared to the not-so-distant past. As noted proudly on Brookline's websites, residents come from an astonishing number of countries. Our schools educate children speaking 30 different languages, with bilingual programs for Chinese, Japanese, and Russian speakers. Stores and restaurants offer an exciting array of international foods and goods, turning every walk through our commercial districts into a potential adventure.

On the other hand, after a year of wandering around town I've come to notice that our claim to diversity is disconcertingly incomplete. Noticeably absent from the bilingual programs and Asian restaurants and Russian signs is any significant Hispanic or African-American presence.

At July's Wednesday night concerts in Emerson Park, the sea of white and Asian faces make the two or three African-Americans stand out as a reminder of how few they are.

When I sit in the parks, enchanted by the sounds of Chinese and Hebrew and Japanese and Russian, even sometimes Italian and French, I almost never hear Spanish.

When I sit in a Brookline Village pizza place and three African-American teenagers walk in to eat, I notice that I notice. They sit and have a good time. They are not made to feel unwelcome. But I realize that here, just a few blocks from Roxbury and Jamaica Plain, African-Americans and Hispanics are woefully underrepresented.

Race, culture, and class are inextricably interconnected. African-Americans reflect a racial identity and Hispanics (varying mixtures of black and brown and red and white) an ethnic one, But in both cases, certainly in the American consciousness, race and ethnicity imply economic status. Because to the American mind blacks and Hispanics are poor, their general absence from high-cost Brookline remains unremarkable.

Yet the implication oversimplifies. Not everyone in Brookline has a lot of money. And black professionals gentrifying Roxbury's Fort Hill rather than moving to Brookline are not poor.

As a Jew who has lived in places unlike Brookline, I know something about being a minority. I can only imagine what it's like to be part of a historically poor and oppressed minority still subjected to demeaning stereotypes, unconcerned public officials, and a public tired of stubborn racial problems. So I wonder to what extent Brookline's own institutional culture forms a barrier to those African-Americans and Hispanics who, like others, might indeed want to move to a town known for its good schools, liberal politics, and pleasant lifestyle.

And I wonder why this issue does not seem to be an issue, beyond Arthur Conquest's valuable columns in the TAB.

Why should we care? On simple moral grounds, removing the vestiges of a racist past and present is the right thing to do. It would make more honest our claim to being a progressive and multicultural town and help eradicate the continuing general stereotype that Brookline is a privileged enclave far removed from the surrounding world. Claiming diversity without our two most significant non-white groups is historically and emotionally dishonest even if it may be technically correct.

But this isn't just a call for more do-gooder liberalism. More selfishly, adding some salsa and soul to Brookline's multicultural pot would be good for all of us, and especially good for our children. As noted at the psychologists' convention, even white children do better in multicultural classrooms.

I'm grateful that my daughter's school and playgrounds are filled with enough Asian-Americans so that each individual child becomes just another kid. But it would be better if there were more black and Hispanic children so that each one didn't have the burden of representing an entire group of people. It would be better, indeed, if there were more working class people of all races in town, to better reflect the real world. I would like my daughter to come of age in the next millennium with these issues truly behind her, in a Brookline whose claim to diversity survived the snicker test.