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The First Family Arrives at Martha's Vineyard

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The Vineyard Bites Black and Other Class Tales

Hat tip:The Black Snob

Oak Bluffs Residents Bite Back At Toure's New York Mag Story
Friday, July 24, 2009 at 9:00AM

And they said that wasn't THEIR lives at Martha's Vineyard writer Toure was penning for New York Magazine last month. In the article he talked about black self-segregation and how some residents of Oak Bluffs and Martha's Vineyard wouldn't be interested in the First Family because the Obamas were "off the people" and Michelle Obama was a "ghetto girl." Stay classy, that one.

Well, naturally not everyone in Oak Bluffs was pleased with how Toure portrayed their little hamlet.

More after the jump.

(T)he overwhelming view of a large number of Island residents, seasonal and year-round, black and white, is that the piece, published June 21 under the headline Black and White on Martha’s Vineyard, was desperately unfair and wrong.

Thus Abigail McGrath, of Oak Bluffs, drafted a letter of response to the magazine and circulated it among her Island friends for their signatures.

It was quite a letter.

“My family has lived on the Vineyard for seven generations and I don’t recognize MY Vineyard in the article, Black and White on the Vineyard, written by Mr. Touré,” she began, then went on to condemn its “appalling inaccuracies which misrepresent the Island in a divisive way.”

She went on to bet “a free week in my Oak Bluffs house” that if the author were to interview any of the “heavyweight” blacks mentioned in the piece, “not to mention many whites, residents and visitors, each would question the accuracy of this article.”

And indeed this week when the Gazette contacted some of the people mentioned in the article — and others who were not — they did, in the strongest terms.

Here is the complete article.

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