What is wrong with people from Wellesley??? (Boston, Cambridge: fit in, public schools)

[ukwoman]

I am from the UK I just took a trip to Needham to visit my sister and we went shopping in Wellesley Center. I am an african american and when i was walking through Wellesley Center people kept looking at me and my sister like they were disgusted (especially the kids). I felt that it was very rude of the people there to be so overt in their discomfort or anger or whatever the were feeling. I heard that it was mostly a White, Wealthy town but i didn't expect this.

[VerBoston]

How can you tell how people feel about you by observing their "looks" ?
Did anyone communicate to you verbally ?

Did people from anywhere else besides Wellesley make you feel the same way ?

[jayrandom]

Originally Posted by ukwoman

I am from the UK I just took a trip to Needham to visit my sister and we went shopping in Wellesley Center. I am an african american and when i was walking through Wellesley Center people kept looking at me and my sister like they were disgusted (especially the kids). I felt that it was very rude of the people there to be so overt in their discomfort or anger or whatever the were feeling. I heard that it was mostly a White, Wealthy town but i didn't expect this.

Are you African-American or from the UK? Not that it matters, but I'm a bit confused on terminology.

I've managed to avoid Wellesley up to now because I don't like expensive shopping and a town that famously hates Dunkin Donuts (In Wellesley, character counts - The Boston Globe), so I can't for sure give you the answer you're looking for. Could it have been that the people you ran in to were all horribly racist? It's always possible. I do know that Wellesely is fairly liberal so that even if the people there are racist they'd do they're best to hide it in public. I could be wrong, though. Another possible answer is that your kids had more energy than what the people there considered acceptable in public; disliking boisterious kids would also fit in with the stereotype of a wealthy, white suburb. Perhaps, though, it's just that people in Eastern Massachusetts give off an angry vibe that some pick up on and others don't. My wife definitely feels like people around here are much angrier than they should be and has a hard time adjusting to it. That point has been argued a great deal on this board and while the truth of the matter is still open to debate, there is no denying some feel as though the people here are incredibly rude.

Anyway, I'm sorry to hear that the people of Wellesley Center--or more precisely the people in Wellesley Center--were so rude to you. I'd like to say it will be a rare occurance, but depending on what you expect of strangers it may not be (see the thread about people around here being incredibly rude). Again, I don't know the exact cause of their behavior and, unless you run in to them again you won't probably either. Hopefully it doesn't happen again.

[goyguy]

You weren't imagining. There's a lot of ignorance and animosity behind the genteel facades of suburban faces. Most of the communities outside Boston remain "lily White" and like it just fine that way, thank you. Numerous towns affect liberal pretensions by taking part in a program which allows a small number of "minority" children from the city to attend their public schools. But the program has been around for forty years, with a negligible to non-existent number of its alumnae settling in their "host" community if they remain in the area or return after higher education. As a matter of fact, many of these folks reside in Boston and enroll their children in the same program.
It's a sad commentary that "profiling" and prejudice are still as heavily ingrained in American culture as they are. Two notorious incidents in "Swellsley" itself in recent times illustrate this, but I'll spare you the details. Please realize that good and bad people can be found wherever you go.

[Coolhand68]

What's wrong with Wellesley? Picture a town populated by a few thousand Hillary Clinton clones and you have your answer.

[miu]

What was your sister dressed like? And her kids? And how were the kids behaving? I used to work in Wellesley, and I found it to be a very racially accepting place. And I was also friends with the Greek people running a pizza shop, and the people at the Chinese restaurant. I also worked with a beautiful blonde english au pair that was dating a black man. And no one bothered them or ever gave them nasty looks.

And I'm wondering if some of the unfriendly vibes were not due to your race, but rather the narrow snow covered sidewalks. My boyfriend the other day was cross to some kids walking the opposite way. They were just being kids and walking in a clump. When they got to my boyfriend, they didn't change to walk in single file, and one of them ran right into him. My boyfriend then scolded them for not being courteous and for not sharing the sidewalk.

[ogre]

Whether it's a hardness some perceive in the people of eastern MA in gneral, as Jayrandom suggestued, or the narrow, crowded sidewalks MIU alluded to, there are other possible explanations than bigotry. I like to take reputations with a grain of salt, but Wellesley is viewed in the local area as kind of a snooty town. To the degree that there might be truth in this, it's possilbe that a general attitude of snobbery lends itself to an aloofness toward strangers of any race. Maybe you were picking up on that.

By the way, if I'm thinking of the same two notorious incidents Goyguy referred to, they actually happened some time ago. The one which was less recent, which occurred something like 17 or 18 years ago, sounds really bad on the surface, but if you look at the details it was not really so notorious, at least not in a way that would reflect on Wellesley as a whole.

[camer]

I experience the same thing whenever I shop @ Macy's or Bloomingdales @ the Chestnut Hill Mall.
So you might want to avoid shopping there too.

[miu]

I grew up in Concord. I think that the nice suburban towns are friendly to those of all races that act and behave as they do. But I can see that anyone, no matter what the colour of their skin, would be frowned upon if they had an urban style to the way they dressed and acted. They moved to the suburbs to get away from city values. Is it wrong of them to want to feel safe?

And this goes back to a thread in Great Debates asking if Obama being president will encourage more mixing of the races. Well, any black family that looks and acts like the Obamas would be welcome in all the towns I've ever lived in (Concord, Cambridge and Newton), and I know that they would have been welcome in Concord when I was a kid back in the '70's.

By the same token, I'm sure that the residents of Wellesley, Concord and Newton would NOT be thrilled to have someone like Eminem as their neighbor. It's not about skin colour, it's more about how people act imo.

My mom is Chinese and my stepdad is WASP. We've never experienced any negative vibes anywhere we've lived. But my mom speaks English with a slight Aussie accent and my dad sounds like he could be a radio host for NPR. And us kids were very meek and well behaved. I don't think that we'd have been as well recieved if we drove flashy riced out loud import cars and acted like Asians in a Chinatown gang. We moved to the suburbs for a good education and clean lifestyle. As much as my stepdad loved the culture of Boston and Cambridge, he didn't want his kids growing up with urban values or talking street slang. I know that lots of good people come out of the city, but I'm so grateful for having had an uncomplicated "boring" suburban childhood. No one bullied us and we could just focus on our schoolwork and being just kids in a safe clean environment.

[ukwoman]

I was dressed just like everybody else in the town, so was my sister. I wasn't disrupting anyone or anything and my behavior was absolutely fine. I am really not sure why I was getting a bad vibe.