Writing of the city’s reaction to the Red Sox World Series win in The Boston Globe on Sunday, Gish Jen, the otherwise rightly well-regarded Cambridge author, touched the third rail of Boston politics by invoking the Chechen boogeymen with anything less than pitchfork-wielding invective. Curiously, she used the baseball celebration to look back upon Boston’s poor racial history (certainly a worthy topic of discussion), reflecting on the fact that the Sox were the last team to integrate and Celtic legend Bill Russell’s struggles with race relations in the city. Then, for reasons unclear to anyone who read the piece, she made the leap to asking if this ignominious past might have had anything to do with the disenfranchisement of the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing. “Did we fail the Tsarnaevs somehow?” she asked. As you might imagine, this was not particularly well-received. More
