ABSTRACT
Where are the overlapping communities? In Boston where I currently live, there are different communities, such as Chinatown, where immigrants from Hong Kong and China live; Roxbury, an AfricanAmerican neighborhood; Beacon Hill, where many state politicians and officials reside, and Jamaica Plain, with its ethnic and class diversity. There are people who live in Boston but seldom go to Chinatown except when they have to accompany their tourist guests. Many Bostonians are reluctant to go to Roxbury or Dorchester because the media have often portrayed these neighborhoods stereotypically as full of drugs and street violence. Some time ago The Boston Globe, a leading local newspaper, reported that some taxi drivers did not want to take passengers to certain neighborhoods. The article created quite a controversy in this city, one of oldest in the United States, where students of different races have been able to study in the same classroom only since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Where is the overlapping between America's chocolate inner cities, where poor people of color struggle to survive, and the vanilla suburbs, where middle-class white people build their homes?
