It was back in the’80s when I drove a taxi in Boston for a short time. I worked for someone who owned three cabs, and I would show up for my evening shift at a parking lot next to City Hospital in the South End. There were two other guys, Ed and Tommy, whose shifts started at 4 p.m., and we’d wait around together for the day drivers to show up.
“So did your cousin get that job with the T?” Ed asked, while we were standing around killing time one day.
“No,” Tommy said. “He was the wrong color.”
A 2007 Google Street View of the parking lot where drivers exchanged cabs.
The three of us were White, and we all knew what being the wrong color meant in that context. Tommy was blaming the MBTA’s hiring guidelines for his cousin, who was also White, for not getting the job. In Tommy’s eyes, the job his cousin deserved to get was instead given to a person of color.
Affirmative Action and the White Community
The MBTA had recently implemented a diversity policy that dictated a certain percentage of jobs should go to women and people of color. It was referred to as affirmative action. The term was thrown around a lot back in the ’70s and ’80s, and almost never in a positive way among the White people I knew. Even organized labor fought against the change, as detailed in this legal case.
The way Tommy saw it, his cousin would have gotten the job if the old system of hiring for government jobs hadn’t been changed. Part of that old system was patronage. If you were the one looking for work, you’d turn to a cousin or neighbor or friend whose sister or uncle worked in some agency like the MBTA or the DMV. They’d put in a good word for you, with maybe a case of beer, tickets to a Bruins game or a certain sum of cash thrown in. Then, a week or two later a letter shows up congratulating you on your new position. There might be proficiency tests that you’d have to pass, a union to join and a background check that had to come back clean, but once those were taken care of, someone putting in a good word and a gift could seal the deal.
The History of My People in Boston and Patronage
When I wrote The Chieftains of South Boston, I included the history of how Irish immigrants in Boston were discriminated against by the Protestant Yankee elites. They controlled government at every level. It took generations for the Irish to wrest control of power. When they did, they made sure to take care of their own when it came to patronage at agencies like the police department, fire department, city hall, the state house and so on. “To the victor go the spoils” applies to the worlds of war and politics.
Taking care of their own meant helping not only fellow Irish Americans but other people considered White back then. In my community, that included all kinds of hyphenated Americans, but it did not include the Black community. It also didn’t include women. Irish American culture at that time was heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, an organization that has always struggled with the concept of gender equality.
The Cost of Ignoring History
When a group maintains such systematic control over government institutions for three or four generations, it’s easy for those people to develop a sense of ownership and entitlement, while also being blind to it. The Black community in Boston has never achieved anything close to the institutional power enjoyed by their White neighbors.
I can remember a time back in the ’70s when my reaction to affirmative action was similar to Tommy’s. It didn’t seem fair. I felt like I could be be penalized when applying for a job because of my skin color. It was the feeling of being cheated because I was White.
At the time, I was oblivious to my own people’s history and how it put me in a place that made life a whole lot easier than it was for many others. Learning the history changed everything for me, although it didn’t happen overnight. It took years.
