"Black and White on Martha’s Vineyard" by Touré, New York Magazine, June 21, 2009
http://nymag.com/guides/summer/2009/57472/
As liberal as it is, the Vineyard is about as racially integrated as a college dining hall—blacks and whites get along fine, but they generally don’t socialize. “There’s not a lot of overlap between black and white,” says radio executive Skip Finley, who started vacationing in Oak Bluffs in 1954 and has been living there full-time for the past decade. “I don’t think anybody’s insulted by it. I’m certainly not.” It’s an arrangement that springs largely from the self-segregating impulse among black Vineyarders, who have come to the island to connect with each other. “We have people here who are black and upscale and racist,” Finley continues. “They don’t want to be around white folks, and they don’t have to.”Read more: Summer Guide 2009 - The Liberal Politics and Self-Imposed Racial Segregation of Martha’s Vineyard -- New York Magazine http://nymag.com/guides/summer/2009/57472/#ixzz0eDCFDrHS
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Oak Bluffs has become the summer meeting place for scores of what could be called the Only Ones—black professional and social elites who travel in worlds where they’re often the only black person in the room. The Only Ones typically break into fields or companies that admit few blacks, move into neighborhoods where few blacks live, and send their kids to mostly white schools. They are not running from their own—they’re chasing after the best they can get. They aren’t assimilationist; they’re ascensionist.
Several Only Ones say there’s nowhere in America that makes them more proud of black people.
This is particularly true among parents, who talk about the importance of introducing their children to other black upper-class families so they can know they’re not as peculiar as they might feel.
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And while the Only Ones embrace each other, they can be dismissive of other blacks. “If you’re too Southern Baptist, too dark-skinned, too street, you might not be insulted by a white person but you may be insulted by a black person,” says Columbia law professor Patricia Williams. “It resembles the way in Britain race and class are inflected. If you’re a Nigerian prince and you speak the queen’s English, you’re okay, but if you’re an island hoodlum, then there are no bounds to the expression of racism.”
This kind of race-inflected class conflict flared up in the early nineties, when thousands of partying black undergrads moved the traditional Fourth of July party from Virginia Beach (from which they had been ousted) to Martha’s Vineyard’s South Beach. There were wild bacchanals full of public drunkenness, girls strolling around wearing very little, and guys ogling them with camcorders glued to their eyes or snakes wrapped around their necks. ... As another person remembers it: “People had more grills in their mouth than their ride, and it blew up the island.”
A series of community meetings were convened. “No one said ‘Where all these loud niggers coming from?’ But that was the vibe from black and white Vineyarders.”"African American Community Blasts Magazine Article" by Mike Seccombe, Vineyard Gazette, July 17, 2009
http://www.mvgazette.com/article.php?22035
“My family has lived on the Vineyard for seven generations and I don’t recognize MY Vineyard in the article, Black and White on the Vineyard, written by Mr. Touré,” she began, then went on to condemn its “appalling inaccuracies which misrepresent the Island in a divisive way.”
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“The gentiles live in Edgartown, the Jewish population is in Chilmark, the Native Americans are in Aquinnah (Gay Head) and the blacks live in Oak Bluffs,” she wrote.
But the beauty of the place was “that most people who are seasonal visitors or year-round residents have friends of all races and socialize across the board in all activities, enclaves, mainstream and fringe groups.”
That was the essence of most responses: that while the black community, like most people here, tended to be relatively well-educated and well-off, this was a tolerant, integrated and generally unaffected place."Not So Black and White" by Irene Sege, Boston Globe, August 15, 2009
http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/articles/2009/08/15/is_marthas_vineyard_one_place_where_race_isnt_an_issue/?page=full
“Martha’s Vineyard has been a place where African-Americans have been able to come and relax and be acknowledged for all their accomplishments. For me, that’s wonderful,’’ says Rice, 46, an orthodontist-turned-stay-at-home-mom from Manhattan who vacationed in Oak Bluffs as a girl. “It’s a very small-knit community. Obama went to Columbia. A lot of people go to Ivy League schools. Travel in the same circles. Why wouldn’t he come here?’’
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Hunter-Gault, 67, who now lives here half the year, thought she’d discovered what she calls “this paradise for black people’’ when she first visited in 1970. “Even though the civil rights movement opened up opportunities, when you go on vacation you don’t want to fight the civil rights movement,’’ she recalls. “It was a place that was very warm and hospitable. You didn’t think about being black."
