Through the Wire Lecture Our Common Ground: Race and the Unspoken Issue of Class in Boston and America

Author Michael Patrick MacDonald feels blessed by the perspective he has on the intertwined issues of race & class, a perspective seldom discussed in the popular media. Growing up in Southie's Old Colony housing project during the busing riots, which increased the Balkanization of Boston's poorest white and black neighborhoods, and losing four of his siblings to the effects of poverty, the drug trade, and violence in his fiercely insular South Boston, he bears witness to all of the opportunities that once existed to bring working class people together across the racial divide. In the current Boston, with its even worse divide of wealth and poverty (often along racial lines), he also speaks to what was lost, and how we might work nationally to build multicultural coalitions based on the "common ground" we often stand on: class.