I really miss my Winter Hill days. A time when I could walk my dog over broken sidewalks on sunny autumn mornings and stop to chat with middle-aged ladies nursing the third Bud Light of the day.

   “Hey, wicked nice weather today,” I’d say to one of them.

   “Yeah, not bad,” she’d admit. “They used to all be wicked nice. You know…before the Spics.” And then she, as many of my neighbors had, would reel a history of how Latino and Black folk came marching over the litter of Somerville’s drunken, Irish-Italian slum and just ruined everything

   “When we saw somebody was movin’ in and then we saw you I was like, Thank God you’re not one of them…”

   That was one of the welcoming lines I got from a woman next door; a neighborhood-conscious lady who’d repeatedly hit us up to cuff her a little drug money or send her spastic kids over to ask what times I’d be out of the house. That’s why we moved from our over-priced apartment in Boston’s happy, caramel and rainbow colored, race-blind South End. It wasn’t just that littering Yuppie jerkoffs had been taking over the pristine brick sidewalks of that decreasingly gay enclave. We needed to be someplace where white junkies could muss up our hair and pat us on the back for not being black.

   Crass, urban-hayseed racism aside, what I miss about Somerville was the overall honesty of my neighbors. Didn’t matter the subject – negative or nice, they didn’t mince words. Here in my new middle-class subdivision in Mansfield

the conversational terrain is nowhere near as clearly laid out. We don’t hear derogatory racial slurs anymore. But the topic of people from other socio-ethnic backgrounds does come up often in fence-side and BBQ chit chat. The town is undergoing a population surge. There a plenty of urban exiles like us seeking better schools and grassier stretches for our kids. But it’s been the construction of subsidized housing that pushes the standard, vapid half-smiles of the locals into darkened frowns.

   “I pay my taxes and now those people are gonna live here. They’re gonna go to our schools too and you know what that means…”    

   “Preachin’ to the choir, man” I chime in. “I grew up in a culturally diverse, blue collar town. My people were nearly decimated; eaten alive by Polacks and French-Canadians.”

   Actually I chime in nothing – sarcasm is terrifyingly unappreciated in the burbs and I haven’t yet been able to get my opinions in line with the local majority. I don’t quite have my head around why suburbanites like to preface everything with I pay my taxes but it seems like a good jumping off point. So I try swerving the topic to the new shopping plaza or Proposition Three-Fucking-A which will destroy the schools anyway by giving teachers pay raises.

   But what truly concerns me isn’t exactly who these people think those people are. Too concerned about appearances to ever use terms like Black or Hispanic, let alone nigger or spic, with anyone but their closest friends they keep their distaste ambiguous with newcomers like me. My assumption is that the prejudice holds for a variety of ethnicities, with the common denominator of being poor. In which case they mean folks like me – coming from broken homes, low incomes and economically depressed towns. And for any neighbors my age who grew up here, a train-stop Bugtussle until relatively recently, they ironically mean themselves. There’s a funny denial with people who’ve lived close to poverty or its threat – once a low income person starts to get a little money the last thing he/she wants is to be anywhere near poor people.

   Anyhow, my real issue is that many of the discussions occur within earshot of my kids. Right now they have no clue as to what the big people are talking about. But in a few years they’ll finally figure out who the grown-ups are referring to as those people. A connection between different people and how to think about them will be forged. I don’t want Jack and Elsie developing any sort of bigotry. But I really don’t want them acquiring the sort of namby-pamby manner of veiling their opinions they’re getting exposed to. I’d love for them to be able to express themselves plainly about anything that’s on their minds. Right now they’re picking up hints that it’s okay to be negative as long as you tip-toe out your ugly ideas in hushed tones and delicate language. It’s like serving hors d’oeuvres off a toilet seat covered with a doily.

   In the meantime I gotta figure out how to keep Jack and Elsie from acquiring the wrong notion as to who those people are. I’d hope my wife and I can keep them from enlisting in an “Us and Them” view of the world and understand that we’re all those people to someone else. I’d like them to think that those people are people they’ll see all their lives – they come in all shapes and colors, have various levels of income, speak diverse languages and they all like to use the phrase “…those people…”.

   Douchebags, that is. The worst race on earth.

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