There’s a juvie on the UMass campus

Good keep armed racist domestic abusers away from our kids.

It's a new one on me, I like it, it's so expressive and can be used so many ways. Would have worked well with the old Kelley Sq. Trying to get up after falling on skis or falling off the toilet when your drunk. Could describe a new way your ex wife's lawyer is trying to squeeze you or an adventure in bed gone amok. Drunk people in a fist fight on a cruise ship. Black Friday at Target. Any route out of Boston at rush hour on a Friday. The list is endless.

Huh? I'm not talking about the people or saying Worcester's a bad city. I fucking love Worcester. I'm saying literally that Worcester has a huge trash problem and there are massive amounts of trash and garbage that's covering the city.

And I'm glad I'm not the only one to see through this thinly veiled cosmetic attempt at "fixing racism" by doing nothing but making it harder on the current residents of Plantation street (by the way are majority POC and who will be forced to bare the brunt of time/fees to change their address).

Thankfully seems like someone on the council board sees through this too: from the Boston globe

>The Worcester City Council is expected to hear the petition at its weekly meeting Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. From there, it will be referred to the Public Works Committee, which oversees local infrastructure related to streets and public buildings.

>George Russell, chair of the Public Works Committee, called UMass’s petition “not well thought out” and “inconsiderate” to the home and business owners along Plantation Street, which stretches more than 4 miles. Changing the name, Russell said, would require hundreds of people to update their drivers’ licenses, passports, mortgages, and more.

>“It’s one thing if it was a small street, and the people who owned property or rented properties all came together,” Russell said. “It’s almost like asking each one of them to move.”

>Russell said he previously spoke to Anderson and suggested creating an honorary name for the section of the road that runs along campus.

>He said he understands the university’s concerns, but noted that there are likely other parts of Worcester’s history that may be offensive to some and said the city has more pressing issues to address.

>“If you look up the word plantation in the dictionary, there’s no reference to slavery,” Russell said. “I don’t know any history of a plantation or plantations [in Worcester].”

>Plantation Street was the first road built on the Quinsigamond Plantation, a village established by European settlers in the 1600s, according to an account of local history by the City of Worcester. The site was destroyed in King Phillip’s War, a bloody conflict between settlers and native tribes including the Nipmuc, and rebuilt as Worcester, according to the Worcester Memorial Auditorium.

>Russell’s district includes the bottom portion of Plantation Street and all of Plantation Terrace.

So this is someone who actually represents the regular people who live on plantation-named roads. Good! Thankfully they are thinking about their constituents and not a corporate entity telling the city what to do at the expense of "the little people".

It honestly makes me sick that there are people who are wanting to do this without regard for how it will affect the lives of those who live on plantation-named roads. Just so a six-figure paid diversity consultant umass hired can add to their resume that "they helped fight racism" by doing the most minimal effort possible. People throw around the term virtue-signalling way too mich nowadays (like the boy who cried wolf)...but THIS...this is an example of exactly what virtue-signalling is and how it does nothing to actually help real societal issues. Again...who are going to be the ones paying fees for name changes?? Notice UMass isn't coming out to say they'll be forking over all that money to the worcester residents affected!! Who...again are majority POC who live on plantation-named roads. Yeah...."let's put a monetary burden on some POC people on the Worcester community so we can feel smug when we drive home to Northborough". Litterally the opposite of how you help a community fight against racism.

I actually do what I preach...I have POC high school students come to my lab at umass to mentor them in 1) what a STEM career can look like, 2) help them see how a STEM career is something they can do, and 3) help them get into more colleges with a lab internship on their CV. Basically give them opportunities that otherwise wouldn’t be afforded to them, unless they cane from rich families with connections. But by and large, I'm the one who does the heavy lifting trying to do outreach into area schools. The diversity initiative at umass is a joke in most ways that can have practical applications to ACTUALLY help out the local community. Basically all they have to offer is red tape and "oh that sounds like a good idea" but don't follow through. They COULD invest all the time and money from this street-naming campaign into expanding the diversity outreach people like me, and a few other labs, are already doing on our own time. Like I'd LOVE to have an admin assistant dedicated to communicating with area guidance counselors and interested research labs to match each other up with interested HS students. But I guess the street nane thing is FAR too important than expanding the "silly" notion of getting HS students in a school-to-STEM pipeline.

I also cannot explain enough how much this street thing is a big PR bandaid on a much larger UMass issue has with POC employees. I feel like it's a big distraction IMO....a big fat red herring. UMMS has an issue with department heads not promoting or hiring women/POC people when their CVs are top notch. Looking at top level leadership positions in departments, there is a lack of both women and POC....and that is definitely not due to a lack of excellence women and POC have on the job. There also is a great deal of ablism through UMMS leadership, that those who aren't neurotypical are not given promotions even though their work output clearly should be recognized. I can tell you in absolute terms that people in the UMMS community are not complaining about the street name. The biggest issues in the community right now are the anti-labor activities and institutionalized rascism internal to the medical center. I feel those issues are trying to be rug swept with this new street name PR campaign.

It's actually coming from the chancellor of the school, Michael Collins...and he's pushing a consultant (umass hired at 6 figures to do a campus analysis on diversity) to push the plantation-slavery narrative to get the street change. This is not something altruistic from Collins because he's concerned about the word "Plantation" at all... It's a PR red herring to do 2 things: distract from the racial inequalities in things such as promotions within UMMS and to help UMMS's brand.

I was asking around at work today what the inside take was regarding UMass's insistence all of a sudden to push Worcester to rename Plantation street. The reality is no one cares about the street name b/c there are far more pertinent things going on within Umass like anti-labor and discriminatory practices within departments.

What I heard was that UMMS is looking to rename the other streets around campus, such a North road and South road that are w/in campus to be more "branded", i.e. like how other research campuses name roads to be "science-y" like "Einstein circuit" or "Curie Way". They want to rename Plantation street to be more branded because the new big building being built will have a Plantation street address. UMMS leadership has been wanting the addresses to their main research buildings to be made more research-centric, like "Discovery Street" or something like that.

It's just corporate BS, like it usually is. The real push is coming from the chancellor that a new street name would help the UMMS brand and get more big donors. They are weaponizing virtue signaling as the excuse to make it about racial connotations, or else the city of worcester would just laugh at their request to change the name of a 4 mile long street. They aren't putting in a request to change the names of north and south roads until the Plantation street situation is figured out, because if they did it now...it would be obvious that UMass’s real MO was selfishly to get a better branding opportunity.

So then your problem is with the history of the region. That has nothing to do with the word "plantation."

More correctly: as a *result* of wars.

It was standard practice in those days to sell any (indigenous) prisoners taken during the wars. Most were shipped out to the Caribbean. They were not, by and large, used as slaves locally -- there were already more than enough indentured servants on hand to do the work.

This also started well before King Philip's War.

It won’t be a vote. That’s not how these changes are made in the city’s charter. It could possibly be a vote if someone starts a citizens petition. Ask the city clerk about that process if you are interested.

It is incredibly annoying for people and businesses with addresses on that street. A friend of mine lived through a change once and he had problems with mail, bills and packages for years.

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>I'm offended by the idea that the medical school has nothing better to do than to pontificate about street names

And what about you? Do you have anything better to do?

>which would cause even more confusion than there normally is when trying to give directions around the unwieldy traffic grid

Everyone has GPS now, I don't imagine anyone would really give a shit if not for the race angle.

>fail to recall that there were and currently are plantations without slavery

Sure dude. All those famous slavery-free plantations.

>These people are just inventing problems.

"Oh no they're renaming a street" is inventing a problem too. Again, if this wasn't done for race-related reasons, you absolutely wouldn't care. If they were renaming a street to honor a local hero or just because it sounded better, nobody on the planet would give a shit.

Yeah this is probably my biggest issue with it. Although I don’t live on that street it is one of Worcester’s longest streets. It’s not at all comparable to the Yawkey way issue in Boston. Because the Red Sox were the primary owners of property on that street in addition to a handful of restaurants and a 7-Eleven. Whereas plantation Street is home to probably well over 1000 residents

Ah, so you did find the part that says it was the English who called it Quinsigamond Plantation.

So...what's your point with this comment and the other comment?

Nice that you've ignored everything I said otherwise so that you could add a snarky comment. To further spell out the glaringly obvious, however, let me repeat my comment with a clarification:

Hardly anyone lives on Central Street, now MLK, Jr., Blvd. There are thousands and thousands of people on Plantation. My apartment complex alone must have hundreds of people. Then there's the other apartment complex, and the people on Plantation Lane and Court, which are also supposed to be changed.

Maybe people just don't like changing street names in general, no? Again: Kilby Street had its name changed because it was perceived to be associated with crime. People didn't like that. People still don't like Crystal Park being called University Park. All of those things are very small compared to a very long street like Plantation.

>Quinsigamond Plantation was part of the Trans Atlantic Slave trade.

Source?

The area was called by the British Quinsigamond Plantation even before the Europeans settled here, and the land was purchased from the Nipmuc. It was abandoned for a first time by 1675, less than three years after 30 Europeans settled there.

Because who does that?