Thin skin hard to heal
Thursday afternoon, hours before Senator John F. Kerry took to the podium at the FleetCenter, a sleek black Ford Expedition cruised down Melnea Cass Boulevard, on a mission to redeem a city's reputation.
Its principal occupants were Mayor Thomas M. Menino and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. They were on an odd excursion. Menino was giving Jackson a guided tour of Roxbury. Jackson had agreed to go in penance for an innocuous comment that a tabloid newspaper attempted to inflate into a minor scandal.
The tour was strange for several reasons. First, Jackson's comments about Boston, which allegedly knocked the city on racial grounds, had been blown wildly out of proportion. Besides that, Jackson has visited Boston numerous times and has been to Roxbury often. So it wasn't as if he really needed an introduction.
But in this decisive week for the city's image he had struck the ultimate exposed nerve by implicitly invoking race, and Menino was in no mood to put up with it. Thus was born a meaningless tour, climaxing in a press conference at the Grove Hall Mecca Mall, where Jackson was clearly supposed to eat his words, but didn't.
Despite the claim of the Boston Herald that Jackson had ''ripped" Boston and ignited a furor, he had in fact done neither. He said there was a gap between the haves and the have-nots, between the city and its suburbs, that the city on a hill should work harder to breach. Hardly the stuff of revolution. That wasn't enough to stop Menino from sniping back at him in the same article.
''John Edwards talks about 'Two Americas' and it's an uplifting message of hope," an annoyed Jackson said earlier on Thursday. ''I say the same thing and it's a front-page scandal in the Boston Herald."
The Rev. Eugene F. Rivers, not everyone's idea of a great social healer, took the opportunity of Jackson's comment to point out that Jackson had never ''come to me, or any of the black clergy that work on the streets of Boston," to air his concerns. Right, reverend, it's all about you, always. State Representative Marie St. Fleur weighed in as well.
It's not a big stretch to say there is an economic gap between any city and its suburbs -- and in fact, Menino has repeatedly said the same thing, in discussing the unfairness of using MCAS to compare Boston schools with suburban ones. Jackson suggested the city could be a model for an ''urban agenda" -- which is pretty fuzzy, but I don't hear the fighting words there either.
The tour was a bit stiff. Menino pointed out the landmarks of Roxbury's revival on his watch, which apparently include the Hampton Inn and Suites at Crosstown, the city's first black-owned hotel, the renovation of Orchard Gardens, a new school, and the northern end of Blue Hill Avenue.
Jackson seemed bored by much of this. He was more interested in noting that federal dollars had made many of the projects being pointed out possible, dollars that had largely dried up under Bush. He was in campaign mode. He posed for pictures with residents of Orchard Gardens, met the press in Grove Hall, and prayed with teenage basketball players in a nearby youth center, leading them in his signature ''I Am Somebody!" chant. With that, he climbed into the back of a waiting car and disappeared.
The Democratic National Convention was supposed to be a turning point in the way America views Boston, and maybe it was. But it offered an interesting lesson in the way Boston views itself, too: defensively. Had Jackson made the same comment in New York, I doubt he would have ended up tooling around Harlem in a government SUV, with Mayor Bloomberg pointing out the
Certainly, the racist rap Boston is stuck with has become tiresome, in the eyes of just about everybody. Still, one wonders if it would go away faster if Bostonians didn't try so hard to force the issue.
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.
