Who Will Forgive The Daily Beast for Calling Dorchester ‘Southie’?

IMAGE VIA BROKEN CITY

Will we pardon online publication The Daily Beast for the offense they’ve just handed out to Dorchester?

In an article about Mark Wahlberg’s history of racially motivated thuggery, The Daily Beast wrote the following illuminating sentence:

Wahlberg grew up the youngest of nine children in a broken home in the rough Dorchester section of Massachusetts, otherwise known as ‘Southie.’

The reference has since been changed on the website because, as we learned during the great “SoBo” snafu of 2013, Boston doesn’t take well to having its neighborhoods renamed by New York-based publications. The mistake quickly attracted the attentions of the Twitter snarkeratti.

@universalhub Written from the rough New York section of New York.

— John Ruch (@JohnRuchAtlanta) December 7, 2014

South Boston certainly has better PR than Dorchester these days, apparently giving outsiders the impression that anyone with a Boston accent and a history of racism came from the “Greater Southie Area.”

Nevertheless, Dorchester residents can probably find forgiveness for The Daily Beast somewhere in their hearts. Wahlberg, meanwhile, might have a harder time. In asking the state to erase his crime from his record, he’s dredged up a lot of his history of terrorizing people of color during his youth. So far, neither his victims nor the wider community are ready to forget. It’s a grim story, but hey, it’s a teachable moment of Boston geography for the clueless journalists from Manhattan, also known as Queens.