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Martha’s Vineyard demographics — 18 Comments

  1. The film from 1998 of D West’s The Wedding (story set in the 1950s) was rather good, as was Jumping the Broom (a contemporary tale), filmed several years later. The very enjoyable novel by Yale Law’s Stephen Carter (The Emperor of Ocean Park) also takes place, in part, on MV. A local novelist named Jane Chittick suggested, rather amusingly, that the not tiny domicile of the Obamas might have been used as temporary housing and processing for the diverse arrivals on the privileged isle.

  2. The Inkwell was a story about young African-Americans spending the summer on Martha’s Vineyard. I remember almost nothing about it, but it did make clear to me that the Islands weren’t all White. 4% isn’t that much, though, and the people in the clips complaining about the illegals or congratulating themselves on being so welcoming after they left all appeared to be White.

    Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Hamptons weren’t always havens of the rich. That mostly started after WWII. That’s why fishermen, potato farmers, and impoverished artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning could live in the Hamptons back in the Forties. Starting in the Seventies and Eighties they were bought out or priced out. Something similar happened or is happening on the Islands, but there are still year-round islanders who run the shops and do chores for the rich.

    Oak Bluffs, where the Inkwell is, was discovered as a vacation spot by middle class Methodists. It’s similar to Chautauqua in New York, Ocean Grove in New Jersey, or Pacific Grove in California, so there was a lot of middle class housing available there, and perhaps a more welcoming climate than Newport or Saratoga or Bar Harbor would have provided.

  3. Brazilians felt comfortable coming to the Vineyard in large numbers partly because we already had a Portuguese-speaking community descended from Azoreans and Cape Verdeans. The Portuguese-American Club in Oak Bluffs can be a hot spot: I remember attending a Burns’ Nicht Dinner there 4 years ago. Haggis and bagpipes at the PA Club, only in America.
    Oak Bluffs also had the only monument the Confederate dead north of the Mason-Dixon line. The plaques were taken down in 2020 and moved to the Martha’s Vineyard museum.
    Don’t forget the Wampanoag, the “Gay Head Indians” of Herman Melville’s description. They have their reservation at Aquinnah.
    I dispute the assertion that Martha’s Vineyard was not a haven for the rich until after World War II. But what it was is tied up in the story of the old Establishment–especially its Northeastern WASP component–how it rose and fell. To pick an anecdote, Charles Lindbergh–married to the daughter of a Morgan partner–was on the Vineyard when he learned about Pearl Harbor. Or another: we used to sneak onto Katherine Graham’s estate to go fishing. Emily Post was a neighbor, in what would now be considered a modest house.
    What has changed about Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard in the past 20 years is that it used to take some effort to get there, so you went there to get away from it all. Now you can fly in every weekend.
    But the Vineyard has always been a complex place. I joke that the energy industry in the form of the sperm whale business made Edgartown the Tulsa of the 1820-40’s, where Nantucket was the Houston. RH Macy was from Nantucket. The Vineyard had the Luces. We also had Lillian Hellman and James Cagney. Going back farther, the first great Unitarian preacher in Boston and propagandist for the Revolution was Jonathan Mayhew, whose parents were missionaries to the Wampanoag. A complex place, and troublesome.

  4. Only 4% black sounds pretty white to me. Places I’ve heard described as white include Wisconsin (6% black), Seattle (7% black), and Utah (3% black).

    “Whiter than Wisconsin but less white than Utah” sounds like a very accurate description of Martha’s Vineyard. Far whiter than Texas or Florida or any other* Southern state. If we were talking about Utah or Wisconsin the media would definitely being saying it was white.

    *Some people don’t count Texas or Florida in the South.

  5. Frederick:

    Martha’s Vineyard is in Massachusetts, and is not Boston and not urban. For non-Boston non-urban Massachusetts – or any part of New England north of Massachusetts – 4% is pretty high.

  6. @neo: Just saying that the grace you seek for Martha’s Vineyard is denied to Salt Lake City (3% black), Madison, WI. (7% black), Boise (2% black), Seattle (6% black), or Portland, OR (6% black). All of these places are described as inexcusably white by any humanities professor, or indeed by the kind of people who spend time in Martha’s Vineyard.

    If Martha’s Vineyard doesn’t count as a white enclave, nowhere does. And perhaps that’s much the better way to view it. But until the powers that be stop using racial bean counting to justify social meddling, Martha’s Vineyard counts as as a white enclave.

  7. Frederick:

    My point is that, in reality, Martha’s Vineyard has more black people than is typical of non-urban New England in Massachusetts and north of Massachusetts. It actually does have a history of welcoming black people, as long as they can afford it.

  8. “It actually does have a history of welcoming black people, as long as they can afford it.”

    I’ve never been, but my impression, and I think the impression most people have, is not that it is a racist place, but that it is a classist place. Opera singer Leontyne Price would be welcome there, but rapper Cardi B.? Cardi B.’s net worth is almost certainly greater than Ms. Price’s.

    The point I heard most people making about Nantucket tossing out the Venezuelans that DeSantis sent was that many of the residents (especially the part time residents) of Martha’s Vineyard talk a big game about welcoming poor people from third world countries, but they have no desire to live anywhere near poor people from third world countries. It wasn’t a race, or ethnic thing. It was about their being poor.

    Again, never been, but I get the impression most of the people who summer on Martha’s Vineyard pay great expense to avoid interacting with people who cannot pay great expense to summer on Martha’s Vineyard.

  9. The states do it. The federal government does it. The aliens nations started it. 50 Shades of Apartheid. That said, the Vineyard becomes a border property through the democratic/dictatorial model.

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