Wu wins, becomes first woman of color to get elected mayor of Boston

*STANDING OVATION*

is probably Black.

Found out today that Mike Dukakis was governor twice, once from 1975-1979 and then 1983-1991. Never knew he was governor in the 1970s

...but context matters in terms of whether something is punching up or punching down.

Are we pointing out that she's one of the first who has the perspective of having lived sizable chunks of her life in other cities? Or are we doing the AEG "only people who grew up here should have a say in anything" thing? (Despite this being a city in which about 25% of people were born in another country and another 25% grew up in a different area.)

(And of course race isn't meaningless. People are treated vastly differently on a daily basis because of it. It's well established. There are also cultural patterns and connections that intersect considerably with race. FOH with your colorblind racism.)

People want to lament that when someone like Wu is elected that her gender is trivial and her race “doesn’t confer any special qualifications for the job, so why talk about it?”

But the reason why neither Wu’s gender mor race isn’t trivial is because she has been elected after centuries of Boston culture where both factors would have automatically disqualified her for office, first by law and then in the eyes of biased voters.

Ask yourself “what year would be the first year a Michelle Wu would be a viable candidate for elected office in Boston?”

Well, we know she wouldn’t be viable in the founding of the town in 1630 or at the incorporation of the city in 1822. That covers roughly the first two centuries.

Women did not gain suffrage until 1920, so add another century.

Do you think she would have gotten elected during WWII era or the Korean and Vietnam War eras? There is definitely no way she is breaking through the streak of white Irish Catholic mayors.

After the civil and voting rights fights of the 60s we had the Boston of the 70s and 80s which, if you have a cursory notion of recent Boston history, you know that despite the lack of legal obstacles preventing her from running, the Boston electorate would not give her any chance in hell.

How about the 90s? Now we’re into Menino time; dude was so popular he ran unapposed in one of his elections. And it is very hard to imagine Menino’s more conservative opponents funding an Asian woman over a white male.

Now we’re into the 2000s. Maybe Sam Yoon being elected to city council in 2005 and then running in the mayoral preliminaries in 2009 opened the minds of the Boston electorate for an Asian-American mayor. This was also the decade that Peggy Davis-Mullen was the second-ever finalist for Boston Mayor.

So, despite the myth of a progressive, open-minded Boston generously speaking it has only been the last 20 years that an Asian American woman could qualify as a viable mayoral candidate in the city. Out of 391 years of history, that 20 years amounts to about 5% of the total time.

So sure, people can argue that her race and her gender has nothing to do with her qualifications, but if you really want to do so then have the honesty and courage to acknowledge that throughout 95% and the better part of 4 centuries of Boston’s history those immutable traits were immediate disqualifiers. The barriers that had to fall for Wu to become mayor were by no means trivial.

That's the point. As Adam has pointed out, there's at least 3 other previous mayors who were not born in Boston. So you'd have to go with "first not born in Boston or moved here before age X" (at which point you're veering into wild baseball statistics of "best batting average on rainy Mondays in June against left-handed Libra pitchers").

(and for what it's worth, I imagine if you asked Michelle Wu, she'd say that Boston is her hometown.)

Sure, I can understand the argument about people who plunk down somewhere just to immediately run for office there. But Michelle Wu has lived in the Boston area nearly all of her adult life. Pretty much her entire academic and professional career post-high-school has been here. She's raising her children here. Should she only be allowed to run for office in Chicago, where she has barely lived as an adult? I'm not sure most voters there or anywhere would place a lot of faith in someone whose only experience with a community is having attended public school there 20 years ago, and why should they?

And then does this argument also extend to candidates who have no "home" due to connections to the military, academia, migrant labor, foster care, or life in shelters just aren't people who can run for office? Are we saying we only want people who grew up in one house and who were culturally expected to go to college in town, get a job from a relative's connections, and eventually raise their family in another floor of their parents' three-decker?

(And before anyone gets their panties in a wad, of course there's nothing wrong with that. But since people who live here all their lives are less than half of Boston, why should we say the whole city should be represented by such folks? A quarter of "real" Bostonians are immigrants, and another quarter grew up elsewhere in the US.)

I'm getting sick of you people who are 'from here' complaining

Who's complaining?

Another local here tired of this old parochial crap. I'm as Bostonian as anyone and believe that our fair city has greatly benefited from the addition of people from elsewhere.