The Reverend Eugene Rivers

Pastor of the Azusa Christian Community, in Dorchester, and co-founder of the Ten Point Coalition, a group of black Boston ministers working for social change.

If I had infinite power to transform Boston, the one thing I would change would be the sense of dependency, the lack of a sense of self-reliance in the black community. Connected to that would be a commitment to develop a new, post-civil-rights conceptual framework for the black community in the areas of philosophy, politics, program, and policy.

Why? Because ultimately the issues of race relations and diversity, in the larger society and in Boston in particular, will stand or fall on the leadership that the black community is able to bring to the new conversation on race, which is required as we begin the dawn of the next century. We move forward as the black community and black political leadership transcend the obsolete ideological category of race-relations liberalism and develop a much more strategic and pragmatic vision.

The black church will inadvertently inherit the role of becoming the provisional government of the black community in Boston and across the country. With the decline of the affirmative welfare state, black churches are going to be thrust into leadership roles which will be the equivalent of progressive churches in Third World countries, where there never was a welfare state.

One positive sign is the relationship between the black community and the Boston Police Department. In a city that gave us the busing crisis and the race wars of the '70s and Charles Stuart in the late '80s, the level of cooperation that exists between the black clerical leadership of this city and the Boston Police Department is nothing short of a virtual miracle.

Amazingly, this intellectual-academic capital is the same place where we have some of the poorest public schools. How does one explain the fact that even with Harvard, MIT, and a host of other major academic institutions, we have produced such a mediocre public school system? We've got the best and the brightest, and some of the worst, when it comes to education. They have to be brought together. If there are no free lunches for welfare mothers in Dorchester, there should not be free lunches for Neil Rudenstine and his counterpart at MIT in terms of the public good. I believe that the universities could play a greater role in heightening the quality of education in the city by co-sponsoring, with neighborhoods, academic programs that run year-round. That's one concrete thing they could do.

We must learn to celebrate diversity while understanding the limits of diversity, and recognize that not everyone is politically or constitutionally obligated to like everybody. See, there is a kind of touchy-feely vision in certain liberal circles that everybody should like everybody. Well, one, it's not going to happen. Two, it's not politically necessary. And, three, I can respect difference without necessarily being obligated to endorse it.

<-- Rosabeth Moss Kanter | Bruce Marks -->