The Boston Busing Crisis with Matthew Delmont

(upbeat music) Hi all, I'm Lee Stabert and welcome back to explain Boston to me. Let's do our quick refresher. In August 2022, I moved with my family from Philadelphia, my hometown to the Boston area. I've always prided myself on being the person who knows all the hyper-local minutia. I know that Betsy Ross' reputation far outstrips for actual contributions. It's kind of like a branding thing, like they picked her from all of these seamstresses that all made flex. And I know that after every Philly's home win, they play a video of broadcast legend Harry Callis singing "High Hopes" over the last week's curse. To that end, I will be at Parler Sports at least one night this week watching my Philly's in the playoffs and drinking a Poppy's home. If you're trying to recognize me based on my voice, here are a few phrases you might hear me say. That J.T. Riel Muto is a real old-fashioned hunk. Did you know that a guy inside the Philly fanatic is referred to as the fanatic's best friend? I like how baseball players look the same now as they did in the '90s. The hair, the gold chains, the mustaches. I always think this is gonna be fun, but I'm so anxious I might throw up. I hope I'll see you there and, uh, everyone out there, since good underneath yours, the Philly's, you know, it really does not impact your Red Soxies here, no offense. I just hope that you're happy because I'm happy. Because that's part of what makes this relationship work. So I want that kind of deep knowledge in my new home. I want to know why there are so many hydrangeas. And why the small bush we inherited doesn't look nearly as good as all the hydrangeas that our neighbors have. I think like the flowers are too close together. I don't know next year I gotta do some research. And I want to know if it is any small comfort to Red Sox fans that the Yankees also miss the playoffs. So I'm asking for help. I'm finding people to explain these things to me. I'll never be a native, but I just might learn to speak the language. So two weeks ago, when I interviewed Professor Lillie Geismar about the Route 128 suburbs, I mentioned that we'd be digging into the other side of white flight in a few weeks. As in, where were these people coming from? And why were they leaving the city for the greener pastures of office parks and minimum acreage zoning? Part of that was a panic over schools. And part of that was a judges ruling in the mid 1970s that Boston schools had to enact a plan to desegregate. Queue a citywide convulsion of protests and hand-ringing spurred by a new busing initiative that sought to undo decades of underhanded work to keep some schools white and other schools black. To explain this very thorny topic to me, and to talk about how the Boston busing crisis continues to impact the city today, I'm joined by Professor Matthew Delmont, author of a book on this era and an expert in the ways the media and anti-busting activists successfully bent the narrative to their will. We will try to answer some big questions. First of all, why here in particular? And second of all, what does this period of turmoil say about Boston's legacy as the cradle of liberty? - I'm Matt Delmont, I'm a professor of history at Dartmouth College. - And why are you an expert on Boston culture? Why are you the right person I should be talking to? - So I wrote a book a few years ago called Why Bussing Failed? That's a history of school desircation and how busing became such a politically controversial topic particularly in the 1970s. Obviously that book talked about Boston. And so one of my area's expertise is the history of school desircation and how Boston figured so prominently in that history. - And I feel like you spoiled it right in the title, Bussing Failed. So I guess we're gonna talk about how Bussing Failed in Boston. - Well, it's one of the things I was kind of on the fence about how to title that book. 'Cause the Why Bussing Failed in the first few pages of the book, I try to make clear that part of what the book is trying to do is understand why so many people from across the political spectrum came to agree so quickly that Bussing failed. So I started the book with a series of quotes from then Senator Joe Biden, from Richard Nixon, from I think there's Reagan. So from liberals and conservatives all coming to this conclusion that Bussing failed. But they reached that conclusion before any of the, the data was actually in on how Bussing as a policy really worked. And so part of what the book was looking at was how media covered Bussing in such a way that it really favored the perspectives of the white anti-bussing protesters. And once that perspective came to dominate, it was almost impossible for the story to talk about the civil rights of black students, that the people really should have been at the start of the story. And so I, it might have been too clever in choosing why Bussing failed as a, as a title, because I think sometimes people pick it up and think I'm advocating against the use of school buses to desegregate schools and promote racial quality in schools. And hopefully the book tries to, tries to get more complex history than that. Yeah, so when I've been getting ready for this episode, I have been referring to this as the Bussing Bussing crisis. Would you say that's the correct term? How do you talk about sort of this moment in the city? I would say that's the correct term. I think throughout the book I use Bussing in quotation marks, because I want to call attention to the fact that this was a, a particular way to talk about school desegration. And it was a way of talking about school desegration that was really a code word. It was a way that white parents, white politicians, white citizens who were opposed to school integration, they latched on to this term of Bussing as a way to say, we want to maintain white only schools, without ever having to explicitly say, we don't want black kids in our schools. And so I think, about in terms of the Bussing Bussing crisis is good, as long as it's framed as a Bussing crisis in quotes to make it clear that this was a particular way of understanding an effort that was really about trying to secure the constitutional rights of black students. Right, I mean, urban history, political history is full of these code words like this. I mean, Lily and I talked a little bit about zoning and the idea of multi-family zoning and single-family zoning and how those, what the work that those words do. Exactly, I love Lily Guy's work. We actually were colleagues many years ago at the time I had my colleges. - You mentioned that. - Yeah, so I couldn't be more excited to follow around the podcast and really big fan of her work. But that's exactly right. There are a number of these different political code words that show up in urban history, political history, and a lot of them show up in this history of Bussing. And I think what's so interesting about this history is people at the time understood these code words. They were clever in their political activism. I think sometimes it's easy to write off people who don't share your own political opinions. But I found these often anti-bussing activists really captivating because even though I didn't agree with them puttically, they were very creative in how they leveraged language to advance their particular political positions. So naming groups like parents and taxpayers. It was-- - Moms for liberty. I mean, take this part for an example. - Talking about protecting neighborhood schools, right? Talking about forced business being in position. All those were covered rhetorical devices in terms of phrase that all essentially said the same things that were happening in the South, but without the racial appetites or without the, in many cases, without the intentional violence against black students and schools. And so I think that's why it's so important, I think to look at the media and trying to untangle this history is 'cause they really made good use of the media to advance a very particular and disordered understanding of this topic. - Yeah, so let's sort of go back to the beginning and set the scene because as the whole point of this podcast, I am not from here, so this is not like in my cultural memory at all. So what was the state of Boston public schools in the 50s, 60s, early 70s? You know, can you talk about like the roots of this plan and what the landscape looked like? - Sure, and so I'll start where people usually start, the part that would show up in our history textbooks. So 1974 is the sort of what's called the Boston busing crisis. That's the year that Judge Guarantee orders a school desircation plan that involves busing students across Boston that results in some intense protests and violence in many parts of the city. It receives national news coverage and the television news stations, magazines, newspapers are all on the scene, and report on what's going on in Boston. And one of the things they talk about is what they see is the irony that the so-called cradle of liberty could be exploding with these very racially charged protests, these very racist protests. Probably try to do it in the book and part of what one needs to understand understand this. This history is that the story of school desircation in Boston really starts two decades before 1974. As soon as the Brown versus Board of Education decision sanded down by the Supreme Court in 1954, civil rights activists in Boston and New York, they're looking at their own schools and saying why doesn't this Supreme Court decision apply to us? Why is it only applied to Southern schools? Because what they're seeing is that there is school segregation in Boston. There is education in equality in Boston. The lines aren't quite as sharply drawn as they're on the south where you have the very official desiratial segregation, the Jim Crow segregation. We have white schools and black schools and white drinking fountains and black drinking fountains. Is that quite as sharply drawn as that? But through zoning decisions, through school boundary lines that are drawn and then through intentional policy decisions made by the school board, Boston schools become more racially segregated over the course of the 1950s and 60s in a way that's evident to everyone that's looking. And so that's where it's important to start the story two decades before the start of the Boston-Busting Crisis. Right. There's legal segregation and there's practical segregation. Exactly. And for people often when they talk about segregation in the north, they'll talk about de facto segregation. So segregation by practice or by fact. What historians like Willie Guy's or others have pointed out though is that the factor of segregation was also a kind of a way to mystify the reality of racial segregation, racial discrimination in the North, that we actually are able to dig back through the records and understand how these neighborhoods, how these schools became segregated. In most cases it was intentional. It wasn't just through a random set of decisions by parents, by homeowners. It wasn't just through market forces that you started to have black neighborhoods in Boston and white neighborhoods in Boston or black schools in Boston and white schools in Boston. And so part of the importance of understanding this history is seeing that the kind of segregation that existed in Boston was created through decades of intentional decisions. This is what Judge Garedy's ruling ultimately found and that's why he ordered the school bus in order that he did. And so I think that's, in terms of peeling back the different layers of the story, part of the important part is understanding that the Boston School Committee made intentional choices that led to segregation of Boston schools and led to discrimination against black students in Boston. Was it worse here than other places in the North would you say? That's a good question. I would say Boston in many ways was comparable to other major northern cities, so Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, all had similar versions of this kind of school segregation that emerged with similar negative outcomes for a lot of black students. And so the outcomes that they were pointing to, it's not just that black students were segregated into separate black schools, is that those schools then received fewer resources. They had less experienced teachers. They had older textbooks. They had larger class sizes. All things that worked to the detriment of education opportunities for black students. And so I think one of the things that's important about the Boston stories that it really runs in parallel with the stories that are going on in these other northern Midwestern cities, where you have civil rights activists on the ground in each of those cities who are trying to call attention to the reality of segregation, the reality of racial discrimination in their cities. But in each case, they keep getting pushback because for most white people in the North, they just don't believe that racism in this way can exist in these northern cities. They think that this kind of racism, this kind of school segregation is exclusively a southern story. And so, I think for Boston, it's really a parallel story to these other northern cities. Yeah. So the 1965 racial imbalance act was what was passed. And so then why busing? Because I'm from Philadelphia. You're as you're describing. And as I know, there were similar issues there. But there was never a citywide plan like this who was behind it. Why did they choose this as the way that they were going to tackle this problem and try to comply with this order? So busing is selected as one tool, we could say, in the toolkit or one approach in the arsenal that judges could select to try to force school districts to become more racially integrated. Other approaches would be redribe zoning lines in such a way that it starts to put students in different school districts or citing schools in places that you know they're going to be on the borders of existing neighborhoods in such a way that would promote more racially diverse schools. One of the reasons busing is selected is it can lead to the segregation of schools or we read to change in the racial dynamics of schools most quickly. And so it's why judge Gary would have looked at busing as one possibility. I think importantly, busing had always existed within busing schools. Particularly once you got to the middle school and in high school age, the majority of students in Boston would have ridden buses to get to school in the 19th, 15th and 16th. No one complained about it until it got linked to school desirgation. And so again, that's part of why busing we have to understand as a code word. No one was complaining about the buses as such. What they're complaining about was buses taking them to schools that would not be all white schools anymore or taking black students into these formally all white schools. That's when busing becomes a politically loaded word. Yeah, and how did the system actually work? So if you had a kid who either black and white family and then you're okay, my kid's going to elementary school, how did it actually work in terms of where you where your kid would end up going? Yeah, so like most cities, Boston assigned students based on where they live based on geography. And so if you think about them as kind of concentric circles, typically there were a lot of elementary schools. And those tended to be pretty neighborhood based. And so those would be fairly coastal and tone. And then as you got higher in education, middle school and high school, then they became larger schools so that you could educate more students, have more subjects, different levels of educational kind of classes. And that's why you wanted to have larger high schools. But those were cited more regionally within the city. And so you'd have to travel a greater distance to be able to get to those high schools. And then in a small number of cases, there were enrollment or application only schools for the kind of college preparatory experiences students would pursue. The issue was that most of the neighborhood schools, the elementary schools were located in such a way that they were going to be racially segregated because of the racial segregation that existed at the neighborhood level through intentional real estate decisions. At the middle school level, this is where the Boston School Committee was particularly shady with how they approached the structure of the schools. They had different mixes of grades, whether it was a white school or a black school. For some sort of students, let's say white students, they went to middle school for just seventh and eighth grade and then advanced on the high school. For black students, they went to middle school for seventh, eighth and ninth grade and then advanced on the high school. That essentially created a two pathway system that structured which students would go into which middle schools and which students would go into which high schools. That was one of the things that the court case eventually revealed as one of the intentional policy decisions that the Boston School Committee developed as a way to maintain segregation in Boston. So, okay, so this order comes down. They announced this busing plan. Who were the people who were supporting it and who was pushing the hardest against it? And what was happening? When did it become a crisis? Was it instantaneous the reaction? We don't want to do this. So that reaction is pretty instantaneous that we don't want to do this. And I think on both sides, the pressure had been building up for, again, nearly two decades. On the resistance side, you had a Boston School Committee let at different points by at least they hit so emerges as the most visible figure of what they call the white backlash in Boston. She and other white parents and anti-busting activists who are linked to this group called Roar, Restore, Alienated Rights. They are campaigning throughout the 1960s and 70s that they don't want to have any, what they consider to be forced racial integration. They don't want to have any of this change to the status quo in Boston schools. They're upset before the court case emerges. They're upset, once the case is being discussed by judge, and then they're very upset once judge, or it comes out that that's the exact time frame in plan for this desirigation. On the other side for Black civil rights activists, they're equally upset because they've been calling for the school board to do something to do anything since the late 1950s, trying in different ways to provide evidence of the school segregation. Trying to work with different political officials at the city and state level to make some advances. They achieve some small victories. They start their own voluntary busing program called Operation Exodus to raise money to charter their own buses to move students from overcrowded schools in Boston out to the suburbs. It's the precursor of the Metco program. They're being resourceful and creative in all these different pathways, but they're still not able to impact the larger structure of Boston schools. They're eager for judge guarantees ruling to finally address this. They're excited about the prospect of the busing plan. When it actually gets crafted and implemented, one of the concerns they have is whether more of the burden is going to be placed on Black students. One of the important things to understand about this history is that busing was really hard for Black students. It was sending students into extremely hostile situations. Look at the footage of the Boston busing crisis or the images. You have these Black students, particularly going into South Boston, where you have hundreds and hundreds of people out in the street using terrible language to attack small children, teenagers and much younger. In some cases, throwing rocks at the buses. These things were not lost on Black parents and the Black students themselves. They were eager to get more fair share of resources within Boston, but were frustrated that it had to come at the expense of their own safety. All that really plays out very quickly in the fall of 1974. Then you have different people caught in different points of the spectrum. You have a lot of white liberals who support the idea of racial integration generally, but aren't necessarily thrilled about their own kids partaking in it. Of course. The class is a white liberalism. The classic story of white liberalism. You have a lot of them either moving to the suburbs or trying to get their students into schools that are not going to be as involved in the busing program. The Boston Globe, I think, is really caught in the middle of the suit. They're trying in some ways to calm the temperature on both sides, but from the Black perspective, they had never been as proactive in addressing the reality of school segregation, racism, and basins they'd want. Then for the anti-busing activists, they see the Boston Globe as being too pro-bussing that they're really not staying out with what they see as the rights of white people in the city. And so it's a really fraught. challenging time period in Boston's history for sure. Hearing you describe that scene of kids coming in and being yelled at and buses getting rock thrown at them, I mean, these are images that I would associate with the South as someone who did not live through this era but is just getting all this from, you know, history classes, et cetera. So it's really kind of mind boggling to think of that happening here, but also not. I mean, not that's right. Well, I think that's the thing. And I think the sort of in thinking about the spirit of your podcast, one of the things that I think this revealed to a lot of people nationally is that Boston has a very racist history and I think it's still a very racist present. I think on the daily show might have been a few years ago now where they were just asking random random black people about what they considered the most racist city in the United States and Boston came out very high on that list. The Boston Boston crisis has a lot to do with that, but there's a very fraught history in Boston with regards to how black people in particular have felt welcomed or not welcomed in the city. And I think part of what was interesting about how the media covered it is that they kept wanting to say it was, was ironic or paradoxical that Boston was having this kind of conflict. But for most black Bostonians, they said, you know, this isn't ironic at all. Like we know this city is messed up. This is just bringing it to visibility for national audiences. Yeah. So you're sort of implying that some of these resentments that were fostered in the 70s remain. I think so. I mean, I should be careful to say. I'm not saying I'm not saying up top. I'm saying like in the DNA that it fostered resentment between the two groups that, you know, maybe some of it's still there or we're going there and was brought up and then backed on and then, you know, et cetera. It's a continuing thing. I think that's right. I should be careful to say I'm from Minneapolis originally. So I'm not a Bostonian. I know the city as a scholar. I lived there for four years in college, but I can't claim to be a Boston resident or a true Bostonian. But as a scholar, the reality is that the Boston Boston crisis of the 70s encapsulated a lot of the racial animosity that had existed in the city. And I think it's set in place a lot of anger, frustration, resentment that didn't go away. But because the emotions that were expressed were so raw, it's hard to put those back in the bottle, so to speak, once they're expressed. You get a lot of people, particularly for black Bostonians, they got a really clear sense of both how deep racism went, but also how shallow the commitments were from a lot of white liberals who claim to support civil rights. But then when actually when push came to shove in the city, weren't really there as allies to stand up. Yeah. So what happens next? So as a cataclysm, everyone's freaking out, how do the next few years play out? How does it even play out like going forward to the future? I don't live in Cambridge. I don't know anything actually about how Boston schools work now at public schools. Yeah. So I'm not an expert on how the school districts are structured today. But what I can say is after the Boston Boston crisis in '74, things quiet down a bit by 1976 by '77, the city actually has a chance to try to implement the kind of data to be a reality of busing. I don't want to say it's perfect, but I think the reality is for Boston, for other cities that stuck with these busing plans, they provided students opportunities to experience education that was life-changing in many ways. I think the scholars have done long-term, longitudinal studies have found that integrated school settings have had long-term beneficial outcomes for black students without having detrimental outcomes for white students. I think that was true in Boston as it was in Charlotte and other major cities. But by the 1980s, Boston other schools, once early from quarter-orders, start to walk away from these busing plans. And also, you have enough white flight by that point that because the quarter-order only ever applied to the city boundaries that didn't ever include any of the suburbs, the racial dynamics or demographics of Boston make it nearly impossible to have as robust of racial integration as people were once thinking. I think the thing that's really different today, obviously, is Boston even more so than it was in the 1970s is an incredibly multi-racial city. So the composition of Boston Public Schools today, you have far more Latino students, Asian American students, black students, and so size of a number of white students in a much much more multi-racial school setting. But I think the reality remains, when if one's thinking about issues of educational equality, thinking about issues of racial integration in Boston, it's hard to think about how that works in Boston without thinking about how it might work in the larger metropolitan region because the social-economic realities remain in play in ways that are not so dissimilar from the 1970s. Yeah. It's interesting for me I have a six-year-old. So my experience of the-- I didn't think that much about public school until I had an almost kindergartener, I was sort of aware and I'm interested in broader political issues, but in terms of the actual reality. So we thought we were going to be living in Philadelphia. We were going to send our daughter to our neighborhood school, which is like an up-and-coming school and the adjacent school in Meredith School Cachement is considered a good school. And if you buy a house in that Cachement, it's like $100,000 more. And all of Philadelphia is like that. And if you have an under enrolled school, kids from outside your district can come there. They do some things to provide some mobility. So but it's pretty straightforward. And there's a lot of good school bad school. Move to Cambridge, it's completely different. You get priority at your neighborhood school, but you can apply to any school in the city. They all have different identities and then they will bust you. And they try to equalize, I think, socioeconomically across all the schools. And so parents will always find ways to talk about what are the good schools in the bad schools because they have brain disease and they cannot help it. But my general sense is like all the schools are pretty good and people are pretty happy. I'm sure there are major issues and people are complaining a lot about different things, but it feels utopian to me. I don't know. Yeah, that is positive if that's, if that's how it feels to a lot of people. Yeah. That kind of model of some amount of choice, I think, is one that a lot of school districts have adopted. But I think important, I try to have some mechanism of balancing socioeconomics across the district. I think that's the thing that most school districts have struggled with because I think right, most parents have some sort of brain disease or commitment to a class status quo that leads them to sort of good schools, bad schools. And to seek out, if they can afford it, the good schools and have that built into their housing prices, then that keep a lot of other people out of the district, right? That particular school. Yeah. And the cooling in Cambridge too, it actually liberates people to move because your kick can stay in their school if you move two blocks away into a different school district. I don't know, I'm pretty impressed. I'm sure someone could tell me all the reasons why it doesn't work for people, but I like it. I think some ability to untether schools from zip codes so precisely that your ability to buy a home determines whether your kid has access to a well-resourced, good public education if that's important. And then there's also a lot of experimentation. Like there's a school that's all language immersion and there are schools that one school has uniforms, one school's Montessori. So if you don't think you're not into that, you can just go to another school. Sounds promising. And plus, Massachusetts now is free breakfast and lunch for all the students. They're trying to mean so much of this is tied to money. Cambridge is a very affluent place. It is a place though that I think as much as we are, we are all, and I complain a lot about how expensive it is. I think tries to walk the walk in terms of progressive values. And again, I'm sure it fails in a lot of ways, but it's doing better than some places. I guess big picture question hearing all this is like, is Boston different? And if we're going to talk that maybe Boston is more segregated, has maybe some deeper seated racial tensions. Like, do you have any theories on the origins of that, where that comes from? As opposed to comparing apples to apples in terms of other major metro cities in the north. So I think on the busing case, I think what made Boston different was just the fact that there were so many cameras on the ground ready to cover the story. One of the things I try to show in the book is that if you actually understand the history of it, the first protest against busing happened way back in the late 1950s in New York. That's where you first see the white mothers outside of schools carrying signs that say busing creates busing or what neighborhood schools. I think part of why there's so much media coverage in '74 is that it had been nearly two decades of white parents all across the country opposing these busing orders. So there was a real focus on Boston. And then again, the news commentators engraved it to Boston because they thought it was ironic that the cradle of liberty was exploding in this way. I think there's a parallel reality where the cameras are never on the ground in Boston. The protests are still there, but they could just happen at the start of school. And then, honestly, I think people would have figured it out. But part of trying to change the status quo is you have to be able to stick with it for a long haul, right? And that means that you're going to have to weather some people's anger and frustrations and then make it clear that this is where we're going and trying to say that this is what's best for the city and for the region. I think Boston would have been better served had there never been a news camera there that could just done this on their own. In terms of what's different about the-- >> You're saying ban the media. >> Exactly. I'm saying no media. >> State sponsor media, let's, you know. >> I think it's true in some ways today too. I think media's commitments are sometimes run at cross purposes to what is good for cities or good for civic life. But I mean, that is media wants to capture things that are going to make good news. footage, right? It's a, if it bleeds, it leads with the sort of television thing back in the day. That's why they were so eager to be there in Boston, because they knew shit was gonna pop off, right? And it did. And they got their footage. And now it's in every newsreel and documentary forever. -Yeah. -And I think today, media wants to stick with stories for a week and then move on to the next thing, as opposed to understanding structural issues that take a long time to understand, then a long time to try to fix and resolve. And so thinking about Boston, how it compares other northern cities. I think one thing that's weird about Boston is just it's a, it's a kind of small city with all these little pockets of people who are separated and like have a strong neighborhood identities. I think that's different in some ways. But I mean Philadelphia is a very neighborhood oriented city as well. I think maybe what's, I'm gonna try out an idea. Maybe what's different, or what's in some ways unique about Boston is that it's tried to do both things. It's tried to to present itself as the critical liberty as a place where freedom has taken root. It has obviously a very strong abolitionist tradition. That history is true. It's tried to have that without ever really addressing the reality of racism in the city. I don't think Boston's unique in that way, but I think it's tried to play up the freedom aspect so, so much that it, it tries to, to weightwash or ignore the reality of racism. So maybe in that respect, it's, it is like a microcosm of the US and like how the US wants to, in terms of US, you want to have it both ways. Right. I mean, it's always the irony that gets you. Like when Jimmy Fallon is found to be an asshole, it's a bigger deal because his brand is being nice. You know, David Letterman's an asshole. He's an asshole. This is this whole thing. But St. John's Boston, it's like if our brand is, you know, we're progressive, we quality, yada yada, and then this is revealed, you know, people kind of have more fun with that, I think. And it's right. Okay, last question I always ask, do you have any Philadelphia questions for me? It does not need to be a busing. It could be about the Eagles. I, it could be anything. It could be about cheese sticks. I should, I should have a Philadelphia question, because I'd spent two summers in Philadelphia doing research on my first book, which is about American bands, then. So we could talk about Philadelphia whole other time. What's a good question? Totally random one. Is water ice the same as Italian ice or is there some, is there some qualitative difference? I think they're pretty much the same. Like, redos, which is the big chain, in Philadelphia, it says, redos water ice and all the signs, but when they are like in Maryland, it says, redos Italian ice. But I will say, like Italian ice sometimes is like scraperer. It's like you're scraping it. Water ice is spoonfulable. It's like, it's like somewhere between like almost like a slurpee, but like a little more spoon than straw. Okay. If that makes sense. That makes sense. But I don't know if you think of Italian ice as like the spoonable or if you think of it as the scrapeable. I think of it as the scrapeable. Okay. No, it's not that. It is definitely not that. Okay. And it's, it's like one of the best things ever. And the big thing is just like, it's just ubiquitous there. I just wish it was ubiquitous here, because what could be more, what could be better in a summer day? You could start a Cambridge water ice important. Could be a podcaster slash water ice maven. There you go. And I spent half my time just telling people what it was. It's a bit of water ice. I don't get it. Yeah. One of the most oddly named foods of all time, which is probably like it so much. Yeah. That's it for this episode of Explain Boston to me. Thank you so much to Matt for chatting with me. I'd love to talk with someone who lived through the busing crisis or who was a Boston public school student at the time. If you'd like to share that side of the story, hit me up on Instagram at explain Boston to me or email me. Explain Boston to me at gmail.com. You can also use those channels to share any thoughts on this episode or ideas for topics I should add to my growing list. Write in review us on Apple Podcast and subscribe so you never miss an episode. The key art is by Melissa McFeeters. The bed music is by Dylan Gottlieb. Until next time, I'll just be over here thinking about the time that the Philly Fanatic made fun of my sub-father for reading The New York Times during a spring training game. What a legend. [Music]