I stop and relax for a bit under a white oak tree in Copley Square. In clear view is the Boston Public Library with its Romanesque arches and bronze figures depicting the arts and sciences. I go inside and take a stroll in the open-air courtyard, quietly reflecting as I walk past the fountain and gaze at the murals and fresh florals. I’m thinking, what a hellhole of a city we live in.

I wander into the “No Kings” march on Boston Common, and police are clustering in one spot off to the side. They look bored. A hundred thousand people are protesting like proper Bostonians, lugging handmade signs including one that says “My Only King is David Ortiz.” No one’s agitating, and there are no arrests. But really, it’s terrifying to imagine the latent threat posed by these teachers, students, faith leaders, retirees, and others. Maybe Boston’s finest should spray around pepper balls and push people to the ground just to be safe.

I step out for some fresh air on Halloween night, and I’m confronted by mobs of teenagers, twenty-somethings, small children, parents, and grandparents, surging past storefronts in Jamaica Plain. A brass band appears out of nowhere, rocking out “The Monster Mash.” I walk by the noodle shop and notice a young couple leaving in a duo costume, matched as Tequila and Lime. I find all this absolutely horrifying.

I am dragged by friends to Dorchester’s Little Saigon, purportedly a bustling scene of culture and cuisine. We pass a Vietnamese community center and a Buddhist temple before arriving at our destination, a Pho place where there’s a line out the door. I peek inside and see patrons at a table laughing together with their purple-haired waitress. When we’re finally seated and served, the Pho Tai is fragrant and flavorful, and I wonder, where are the ICE agents when you need them?

And what’s the deal with these middle schoolers who take the T around town by themselves with their parents’ blessing? They’re like my kids and their friends and co-workers, cutting through the Common late at night and thinking nothing of it, just because they’ve never been threatened or harassed doing so. I think it’s fair to say that there’s an egregious lack of fear in the Boston citizenry.

I hop on my bike for the morning commute, pedaling through JP Center and into the Emerald Necklace. I ride from one park to another, alongside pedestrian paths, stone walls, and ponds, and past community art installations. Off the park trails, I count eight bakeries on my trek to Chestnut Hill and more than a dozen coffee shops, all of which are trafficking in sugary, fatty substances injurious to body and soul. I feel constrained to enter at least one of these establishments, and suddenly I’m consuming several times as many calories as I burn on the route. I now truly believe that the only way to remedy this situation would be to send 40,000 troops to Boston. What about that, Mr. President?

After sitting alone with his restless thoughts on a beach below the foot of the bridge, Springsteen started back to the parking lot. At that moment, a man drove by, with his window open, and yelled out — “Bruce, we need you.”

The week after, Springsteen headlined a national telethon to raise money for the grieving families who lost loved ones when the towers fell on 9/11, and was inspired to begin recording his 12th studio album, “The Rising.” With this 9/11-themed album, released in July 2002, the Boss was back: He was once again at the top of the charts, the band was rocking like it hadn’t since the 1980s, and the music was mournful and uplifting at the same time. The driver who called upon Springsteen at the beach, and seemingly every other fan, got the Bruce they needed.

I have to confess that I wasn’t looking for this Bruce, during the long aftershocks of 9/11.

Read my confession and why I believe we still need Bruce, 20 years later. See the full article.

Music has been therapeutic for people outside hospitals, too, and more than a few of the prescribed tunes were written and sung by the “quiet Beatle,” also known as the spiritual one. Harrison, who died of lung cancer in 2001, continues to pop up on pandemic playlists during a dark winter that indeed “seems like years.” Among his most turned-to works are not only “Here Comes the Sun” but also other creations, including multiple tracks from his signature solo album, “All Things Must Pass.”

See the article about George Harrison’s coronavirus comeback, in NCR … 

“Welcome 2 America,” released on July 30, is the first posthumous album by Prince made up entirely of unreleased material. The 12-song set was retrieved from the singer’s prodigious (and literal) vault of never-released music. Recorded in 2010, the album delivers some of Prince’s catchiest music in decades, while exploring big questions. It is an invigorating fusion of multiple genres, but also of two realms that Prince was not particularly known for mixing — faith and politics.

Read my review of “Welcome 2 America,” and why this album, though a decade old, is right on time.

Still, there are questions. What privileges are we talking about? And what exactly is it that we’d be giving up?

My friends and interlocutors are speaking of the now-familiar advantages. These include an assurance that I could approach authorities, including the police, and expect a fair hearing; that I could browse aimlessly in shops without clerks monitoring my every movement; that if I move to a new locale, the neighbors won’t eye me with suspicion; and many other privileges of membership in my race.

These are surely advantages (they’re also the more visible ones, catchable on video). But what would it mean for me to no longer have them? Recalcitrant cops aren’t going to start manhandling me just because they’ve decided to go easy on Blacks. My new neighbors wouldn’t look at me warily, by virtue of having lowered their guard against Black newcomers. Shopkeepers won’t start tailing me after they’ve turned their gaze off patrons of color.

In other words, I can lose all of these privileges, at no cost to myself. They’re easy to renounce (if not necessarily change at the social level). Could the same be said for some other advantages, harder to see and therefore acknowledge? I’m thinking mainly of the pecuniary benefits made possible by systemic racism, or what the Latin American liberation theologians call “structures of sin.” Here’s one little corner of a structure: how my whiteness affects my property taxes. It’s something I scarcely thought about until seeing a Washington Post article under the headline, “Black families pay significantly higher property taxes than white families, new analysis shows.”

I’d have thought Black homeowners pay less in property taxes than their white counterparts, relative to home prices. That’s because the value of their homes tends to appreciate more slowly, in neighborhoods often viewed as less desirable. So, local tax assessments ought to be lower. In fact, Black families pay more, adjusting for market value—13 percent more than white families, according to a new study of 118 million homes nationwide by Indiana University and University of Utah economists. Though the causes are varied, it’s reasonable to conclude that assessors haven’t been particularly worried about overtaxing Black families.

My takeaway: I’ve likely reaped a white-family discount on property taxes, and have done so through 31 years of homeownership, thanks to a heftier burden on Black families. Renouncing this privilege isn’t like giving up an exclusive claim to fair handling by police, which wouldn’t cost me a dime. If Black families pay less in property taxes, white families have to pay more (maintaining the tax base). The solution isn’t free of charge.

And does that even graze the surface of white, middle-class privileges?

According to numerous studies, typical middle-class Black households have barely one-tenth the wealth of their white counterparts. (The pandemic, which has done inordinate harm to Black and Latino workers, won’t make it easier to narrow the gap.) For most Americans, the chief asset is their house, which many Blacks don’t have. Indeed, researchers have traced much of the racial wealth divide to public policies that deliberately excluded Blacks from homeownership.

In his 2017 book The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein recounts a hair-raising history. During the post-World War II housing boom, developers who received federal loan guarantees were barred from selling homes to African Americans in places like Levittown, New York. In 1948, those modest single-family houses in Levittown went for around $8,000 each with no money down; today they can sell for up to a half-million dollars. That translates into substantial equity for generations of white families—and a lost bounty for generations of Blacks.

These are structures of sin that haunt us today, bolstering economic inequality and eating away at social solidarity. In light of the injustices, what sorts of public policies are called for? What transfers of wealth would begin to right these wrongs, and from whom should they primarily come? Rothstein lets his mind play over the possibility of the government buying homes in white suburbs—and reselling them to Blacks for the going price in 1950, adjusted for inflation (around $75,000 today for a typical Levittown home). This is offered as a thought experiment, not as a politically feasible measure.

Who’ll decide which privileges are undone and how that’ll happen? The scale of these questions is more than most of us bargained for, when we started counting our white privileges. And yet, where does a serious conversation about the inequities and remedies go, if not in that direction?

See the article in public radio’s Cognoscenti blog …

I’d have thought Black homeowners pay less in property taxes than their white counterparts, relative to home prices. That’s because the value of their homes tends to appreciate more slowly, in neighborhoods often viewed as less desirable. So, local tax assessments ought to be lower. In fact, Black families pay more, adjusting for market value—13 percent more than white families, according to a new study of 118 million homes nationwide by Indiana University and University of Utah economists. Though the causes are varied, it’s reasonable to conclude that assessors haven’t been particularly worried about overtaxing Black families.

My takeaway: I’ve likely reaped a white-family discount on property taxes, and have done so through 31 years of homeownership, thanks to a heavier burden on Black families. And does that even graze the surface of white, middle-class privileges? Don’t bet on it.

Forthcoming—an opinion piece on what it would mean to really “give up” white privileges.

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