434
PARTISAN R.EVIEW
gated by race, they have now been resegregated by class. The best-pre–
pared and most resourceful families, white, black, Hispanic, and Oriental,
have fled the public system, leaving it with the least prepared and most
vulnerable students of all races. And if B-BURG began by desegregating
the housing stock of Mattapan and South Dorchester, its long-range re–
sult has been to resegregate the area by both race and class. The once-vi–
brant Jewish neighborhoods have been decimated, replaced by new emi–
grants who have yet to build workable communities there.
This brings us to the third lesson of the B-BURG story. Equality is a
value worth fighting to preserve and enhance. But community is a
countervailing value that makers of public policy ignore at their peril.
This is a tension as old as the nation itself: the notion of community in–
voked by John Winthrop when he set out to found "a city upon a hill"
in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the idea of equality as a natural
right of all mankind, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. The
battle was rejoined a century later in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in
which Lincoln argued that the essence of democratic government was
"the equality of all men" derived from natural law, while Douglas in–
sisted it was "the principle of popular sovereignty," the right of Ameri–
can conu11unities to decide fundamental issues like slavery for themselves.
[n recent years, Boston and other American cities have had to grap–
ple over and over with these competing values. These have been hard
choices: between racial justice and community control, between equality
of educational opportunity and neighborhood schools, between a black
family's right to decent housing at a price it can afford and a Jewish
family's right
to
live out their lives in the community of their fathers.
What makes this struggle rise to the level of genuine tragedy is precisely
that these are not choices between right and wrong, but between com–
peting values: between right and right. In Dorchester and Mattapan fol–
lowing Martin Luther King's death, good intentions and a sense of ur–
gency born in panic produced bad social policy, damaging to Jews and
blacks alike. If we learn anything from this cautionary tale, we should
beware of deceptively easy solutions to the tangled aillictions of our sor–
rowful cities.
