I took my son to the art museum yesterday, for the first time in I don’t know how long. It was a free admission day, but you still had to make a reserved time, and having got there a little early, we got a snack and waited outside. As he ate his chocolate cake lollipop, I checked my email on my phone, and saw a note with the subject line”
“The “racist” and “about … implicit racism” word, “character”, is found throughout the Comprehensive Plan.“
Hmmm, I thought, this is new.
First off, some background. Last winter, I was named to my town’s Long Range Planning Committee. Scarborough is a small place by the standards of the people who read this blog, who largely are either from or who have lived in global alpha cities, but we’re large enough to have need of a zoning code and, having experienced periods of unrestricted development that ended poorly, we also have what’s called a Growth Management Ordinance. In Maine, the state requires towns which wish to manage their growth to do so subject to what in statute is called a Comprehensive Plan, which needs to be revised at least once every 15 years. The Long Range Planning Committee was set up by the Town Council to oversee the Comprehensive Plan, its revisions, and its implementation into the Growth Management Ordinance and technical applications in the town’s zoning codes and whatnot.
I joined at the same time as another gentleman – the man who had sent the above-titled email – and both of us have felt alternatively awkward and empowered. Awkward because the Committee had already gone through two years of community engagement, drafting, and debate to craft the 15-year revision to the Comprehensive Plan, and we joined largely at the “okay, we have a rough draft, hopefully the content is already done and we can move to editing” stage; as new members, both of us have been reluctant to force or even bring up potential major changes at this stage, even if we have some views of our own. But we’ve also been empowered: we were brought on board because the town council felt that the Committee really needed a set of less embedded voices, especially now that the Comprehensive Plan will go for approval and the Committee will move away from authorship and into more of an implementation role.
Anyway, at a Town Council meeting on Wednesday – I didn’t listen in because I was overseeing a sleepover for the boy and his friend – someone spoke up regarding, I believe, some objections that had been raised to the potential to develop more affordable housing in town, stated as believing such development should be objected to in order to “preserve town character.” The speaker themselves objected to the use of the term “character”, which was held to be implicitly racist – the idea being that “preserving town character” was a kind of dog whistle, when applied to an almost entirely (although not consciously so) white, middle- to upper-middle class Maine coastal town, to keep Black people out. A member of the Town Council – who incidentally also serves as the Town Council liaison to the Long Range Planning Committee – endorsed the read from the speaker from the public, and noting her experience in real estate, pointed out that words like “character” were and remain common place. In the past, the real estate industry used it explicitly to maintain redlining – the concept that certain areas were eligible for Black or visible minority housing, while others would be maintained only for whites – and more recently to implicitly “steer” buyers one way or another. Another council member more or less said “well, maybe, but the word character does have real meaning, even if that meaning may be hijacked in certain circumstances,” and the council member who is our liaison retorted, in effect, “I’m pretty sure I’m right here but we’re not going to solve this tonight, let’s move on.”
[Peter note: if, in the unlikely event any of the speakers described above actually reads this blog, please note all paraphrasing is mine, and apologies if I missed your intent – feel free to suggest corrections and I’ll gladly make them. In lieu of that, readers can always see the YouTube recordings of Scarborough Town Meetings, this one for April 21, 2021, on the town website. You can also see glamourous footage of the author in his role on the Zoning Board of Appeals. I’m available for motivational speaking events as well.]
My son finished his cake pop as I finished reading the email, but I have to admit, I was distracted while we walked through the galleries, and was paying attention to less the art, as to the racial – and class – backdrop to the art and the museum patrons. Maine is, as I noted, unintentionally non-diverse; plantation settlement didn’t take on here, and so much like the rest of New England, it instead predominantly attracted a certain kind of wingnut English-Scottish-Irish protestant settler who belonged to small religious communities. Also, and my town in particular is in this camp, it attracted those with just enough capital to afford a trip to the new world but not enough to thrive in England. In either case, anyone coming to Maine had find a way to survive in a place with seven month long winters, where even the Native Americans were sparsely populated by choice.
Later, when the great Black migrations out of the formerly slave states took place in the late 19th and early 20th century, to the cities of the North – Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Minneapolis – they didn’t go to Maine because there weren’t jobs here. Maine started its long, inexorable economic decline from seafaring and merchant success to New England’s backwater right after the Civil War, and even if you were fleeing the resurgence of white oppression in the post-war deep South, why would you get on three more train transfers to go to a cold, economically desolate place at the end of the end of the line? Indeed, while Blacks moved north during that period that is called the Second Great Migration, Mainers moved south, in search of jobs and opportunity.
So we have almost no American Black people here. Not none, mind you – Mr. Adams, on my paper route as a kid, was head of the local NAACP chapter, and he talked to me once about Blacks in Maine. Some had ended up here as part of Underground Railroad escapes, and a few remained from pre-Revolutionary War times, when some people did have Black slaves as servants, or as permanent help on the farms and lumber stands, before they were emancipated by the revised 1791 Massachusetts state constitution. But when I was a kid delivering his paper, Mr. Adams said there were maybe three or four hundred Black people in the entire state, total. He said his job as NAACP head wasn’t that difficult.
Today we have more Black people, largely because of refugee settlement: for various administrative reasons, Maine has become home to lots of East African refugees, which is fascinating to me. We are also home to a large Vietnamese refugee community, which settled here after the fall of South Vietnam due – famously, although it might be just an urban (or given that it’s Maine, semi-rural) legend – to a bureaucratic error where thousands, intended for Portland, Oregon, were instead given bus tickets to Portland, Maine, and voila, a Southeast Asian community emerged overnight in 1978. So one of the coldest places in the eastern United States now has a large community of former refugees from really hot places. I think Maine gets all the benefits – better food, more diversity, a group of people who remind us to cherish our liberty and good fortune – and they get all the downside – culture clash and climate adjustment chaos – but that’s probably another essay.
In any event, I found it curious that the speaker and our town council liaison read so much racism into the word “character” applied as it was. I think, if Scarborough were in northern Virginia, or Westchester County in New York, or even in suburban Boston, they might have a point. The “character” of a town is defined by many things but perhaps especially by its people, and in real estate double-speak, it’s a great seemingly neutral word to use to refer not to the “character of a towns people” – are they friendly, are they standoffish; are they rural types who live apart in the woods, or are they town-y and like the bustle of the streets and shops – but instead to the actual people and how they self-identify and wish to identify with others: that is, are they Black, white, Asian, Jewish. It’s that dog whistle thing – J. Huffington Pillsbury III will ask “what’s the character of the town,” leaning heavily on “character,” and Jane Realtor will pick up on it and say “Oh Mr. Pillsbury, I think you’ll find Newton to have the kind of character you’ll enjoy – but I’d probably steer you away from Brookline, it’s character is quite distinct,” Newton being for prissy WASPS and Brookline being for upper class Bostonian Jews in the parlance of mid-20th century realtordom. And Professor Gates, looking for a new home after gaining tenure at Harvard in African American Studies, will be told that the character he’ll find in Jamaica Plain will be ideal for him, but Newton and, yes, Brookline probably don’t have the same character that would be to his liking.
In Scarborough, though, Professor Gates never arrived except for a summer rental, which, indeed, is the only reason J. Huffington Pillsbury III would have shown up either. Interestingly, the part of town from which the speaker above lives in used to be covenanted – against Blacks, Jews, and Catholics – but it was the only part of town that I know of that bothered to do so, and it was largely trying to exclude on the basis of class; race and religion simply being rough markers for class. That remains the case today; the perception of people who would in any way get up the gumption to write an email about “preserving the town’s character” are talking about keeping poor people and refugees out, regardless of skin colour or religion. They also don’t want Syrians, or Kosovars, or Aberziajanis, who generally are seen as “white” here in America, just as much as they don’t want people from Hollis who have roots two hundred years deeper than they do in this part of the state but who live in trailers and struggled to get through high school.
But I find even that entertaining, because I’m old enough to remember that Scarborough used to be, basically, where the civilising effects of being close to the city (of Portland) ended, and you emerged into the wilds of rural Maine hickdom. I grew up in Cape Elizabeth, which was where up and coming professionals went to become middle aged and smug, and raised their children to qualify for out-of-state colleges so as to leave Maine entirely. Scarborough, the town next door, was implicitly held up as what we didn’t want to be: strip malls, trailers in the woods, a few summer-only enclaves on the beaches but the town itself being a not-there kind of there. Somehow, in the intervening forty years of exurban growth, the town has imagined a kind of “character” for itself that takes the grasping upward mobility of Cape Elizabeth, combines it with the glamour-by-association of the beach communities, and swirls it with rural “values,” to create a myth of itself as a desireable place in and of itself.
The truth, though, is that Scarborough doesn’t have any character – at least no unifying character. I’m actually quite grateful to my fellow Long Range Planning Committee member (the town planner calls us Long Rangers, which I think is cute) for highlighting the word and, really, its absurdity when applied to Scarborough as a town. This is a huge place for roughly 23,000 people: 67 square miles. There are parts that are dense and getting denser, and there are parts which are mostly notable for abandoned gravel quarries and bogs. I live in a neighborhood which consists of some homes dating to the 1800s, a solid chunk dating to a development boom when trains and trucks made the farms uneconomical in the 1920s and 1940s, another chunk to a poorly-conceived and even less well built single-family development boom in the 1970s and 1980s, and now to a more or less current explosion of homebuilding targeted at the weary post-pandemic New York and Boston “back to nature” crowd. One beach neighbourhood actively clings to the idea that this is still 1956 and everyone should drive wood-panelled station wagons; another beach community is slowly tearing down 1956 beach houses and trying to look like the Hamptons. The main drag in town would not look out of place in San Bernadino County, if you just swapped out cacti for scrub white pine; meanwhile the old harness racing track is being redeveloped as a faux turn of the 19th century town center, complete with upscale pubs, professional offices, and easy access to the new campus being built for a fintech payments company and a pharmaceutical manufacturing and research facility.
In other words, my town has no character. The idea that we’d “preserve” the character of the town is laughable. But the Comprehensive Plan uses the word “character” 42 times (someone did a word count), despite its lack in the actual fabric of the town. I think that’s symptomatic: the more you repeat a word like that, the more you’re implicitly admitting that you don’t have it. Now, some small neighbourhoods do have a distinctive “character”, in the sense that they have a consistent architecture, for example, or that they are clearly just beach communities and have no businesses. There’s a small area at the end of a point near where I live which is “the harbour” – it’s not particularly architecturally notable, but it is where all the lobster boats land, and from where the shellfish farms do their supply and wholesaling, and where the town’s main boat launch is. On the other side of the turnpike is the vast western areas of town, much of it still post-agricultural, lots of decaying quarries and old chicken coops and abandoned fields slowly giving themselves up back to birch forest. Wandering through each of those areas one feels in a “place”, defined as a part of the surface of the Earth with a single lived human-location ecology is voiced – a place, in that sense, could be said to be somewhere with character. But between those places are confused boundary zones which say nothing until you find the next place, and taken as a whole, no, there is nothing singular about Scarborough. The town has characters, but lacks character itself.
But here, at least, it has nothing to do with race. That concept of “character” – and the kind of person whose character would allow the word to be so warped – is not something that’s particularly wrapped up in the draft 2021 Scarborough Comprehensive Plan. We can find it, though, here in Maine, if we look.
There is a terrifying painting in the Portland Museum of Art that I showed to my son as we alked te galleries, The Drop Sinister – What Shall We Do With It?, painted in 1913 by Harry Wilson Watrous. It shows a seemingly innocent breakfast scene, a woman at table, her golden-haired daughter looking at her, the father – a pastor by his collar – looking at us, holding open a newspaper entitled “The Christian”, a Bible quote painted above the mantle, “And God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness”, a lithograph of Lincoln next to it. The pastor’s skin, though, is just ever so slightly darker than that of his wife, of their daughter, his face’s features just ever so not Anglo-Saxon New Englander. And the title gives it away: the child’s pensive look, the mother’s cold and distant stare, away from her husband, the father’s anguish and despair. He, clearly, is white enough to pass – perhaps even his modest Blackness helps his parishioners assuage their white guilt – but the daughter is unhappy to learn of it, and the wife, well, the wife doesn’t like being reminded of it either.
That painting is a haunting portrayal of the character of a nation which remains built on foundations of racism and is terrified to address it. I stood and looked at it for a few minutes, the email on my mind, while my son asked why there wasn’t more colours. I told him that the artist needed to use colour carefully, because he was really painting about skin colour and how that we let it affect us when we look at others. The painter needed to be very careful, I told him, very careful. He said he liked Jackson Pollack better.
The painting was one of WEB duBois’ favourites, and is widely viewed as the first fine arts representation of a multi-race (or “miscegenated”, in the language of the day) family painting in the American realist tradition. Southern newspapers called for it to be burned; it was scandalous when shown in New York when it was first painted. The artist gave it – his most famous work – to the Portland Museum of Art, along with a number of other pieces, for reasons I can’t find. Maybe because Maine could see it for art, not for politics? I do not know.
In any event, it’s good that my son – who, “racially speaking”, is only half white, but speaking in the spirit of WEB duBois, is all human – is interested in colours as visual spectacle, not as a language of social value, while he still can live in a place where he can see great art and grow into its meaning. I think, actually, it’s quite lucky that I grew up in a place that never really needed to consider race as part of the language of exclusion – even if that only meant that it invented other factors of class, religion, and education to justify its objectification of the others. I’m glad I live in a town which really has no character to unify it, but instead has to think carefully about the documents, ordinances, zoning codes, and personalities that it will use to knit together a new definition over the next fifteen years. It’s entertaining that people here get worked up about a notion that is, really, as yet non-existent. We have a chance to avoid the evolution of the racist “character” that is embodied in the painting by Watrous. I’m optimistic that we’ll take advantage of that chance.