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By Anna Rahmanan
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The Voice of Logan competition, organized by the authority that runs Boston Logan International Airport, attracted nearly 6,000 applicants hoping to become the voice greeting travelers over its loudspeakers. Eight finalists were selected for the contest and the winner is scheduled to be announced later this week.
The premise of the shenanigans is charmingly provincial. Somewhere in Massachusetts lives a person whose vowels can make a weary traveler feel like they have arrived in Boston before they've even reached baggage claim—a Bostonian par excellence.
But there is something more interesting going on here than a civic celebration of linguistic vandalism.
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In America's culture wars, identity has become a means of drawing battle lines. Race, religion, sexuality, the contents of a school library, even the question of how hot Sydney Sweeney is and what, precisely, makes her so, can become occasions for deciding whose values should prevail and whose presence is an affront. Belonging is treated as a scarce commodity, as if admitting one more person to the club necessarily means showing someone else the door.
Boston's contest turns this peculiar, oh-so-American arithmetic on its head. It is, admittedly, a competition, with winners and losers, authentic accents and questionable impersonations. Yet the rivalry takes place within a larger affection—contestants compete to embody something their fellow Bostonians can recognize and take pride in, however differently they might look, worship, vote or pronounce the word chowder.
The distinction is subtle, but important and refreshing in our seemingly permanent state of cultural warfare. One kind of identity politics, the culture wars we keep dissecting, asks who must be kept out, while the other gives people something to belong to together. The delightful (finally, a bit of joy) irony is that Boston has managed to make a contest over who sounds most like an insider feel like a celebration of the whole city, even for those who couldn't sound less like one.
Massport CEO Rich Davey described the ambition as finding one of the state's many "diverse, distinct, and deeply proud voices." One finalist, Roxbury resident Samantha Edwards, told GBH that Bostonians are "loving, we're diverse, and I represent all of that."
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There is the curious magic of the whole thing. A shared identity can accommodate enormous differences among the people who claim it. Boston contains Democrats and Republicans, Catholics and atheists. Immigrants and families who have been there for generations. They may have many disagreements, including over what constitutes a proper Boston accent. Yet the contest gives them a common inheritance to recognize, argue over and enjoy.
Compare that with the machinery of America's culture wars, which has become remarkably efficient at turning expressions of identity into contests over whose identity deserves recognition.
Target's 2023 Pride Month controversy, for example, could have been an occasion to celebrate LGBTQ Americans as part of the country's wonderfully unruly human assortment. The whole thing, though, became another test of tribal loyalty. Conservatives organized boycotts, employees faced threats and Target removed some merchandise. The message from the opposing camps seemed to be that celebrating one group's identity necessarily meant offending another's. Yet the merchandise could have been understood as a simple proposition: gay Americans belong in the same national family as the customers who disapprove of Pride Month. Nobody had to buy a rainbow T-shirt, much less wear one, to acknowledge that.
Or take Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker's 2024 commencement speech, which celebrated traditional Catholic family life while drawing criticism for its treatment of women's ambitions and LGBTQ people. The ensuing argument became another referendum on which way of life deserved respect—the devout mother or the career woman, the traditional family or the unconventional one. There was a rather lovely possibility buried beneath the shouting—namely, that motherhood and faith and professional ambition and personal independence could all be sources of dignity and, dare we say it, belonging. A country capacious enough to celebrate a Boston accent ought to manage a little enthusiasm for the different ways its citizens arrange their lives. Or so you would think.
Boston's experiment is considerably easier than some of these examples, since nobody's constitutional rights depend on the pronunciation of Worcester, despite the fact that the Boston accent is associated with ethnicity and particular neighborhoods.
Let’s not forget that many Bostonians speak with entirely different accents, and a competition that mistakes one way of speaking for the only authentic one could reproduce the very exclusions it appears to transcend.
Yet the finalists' varied backgrounds suggest the possibility of a more generous civic identity. People can compete over who best represents Boston while sharing affection for the place they are competing to represent. The contest makes room for rivalry within a larger allegiance. How… simple?
The American flag and Constitution are supposed to accomplish something similar nationally. They offer a shared civic inheritance to people who disagree about God, government, race and nearly everything else. Their meaning is fiercely contested, but their promise is that belonging to America needn't require surrendering every other attachment. America is America.
Perhaps America's trouble is less its abundance of identities than the peculiar habit of defining each in opposition to another. Somewhere along the way, being one thing has come to mean, above all, being emphatically not something else. We have become so preoccupied with who we aren't that we've almost forgotten how much we might still be together.
Boston is about to put one of its accents on an airport loudspeaker, welcoming strangers into a city whose residents can't even agree on how to pronounce its streets. And perhaps we should try and learn a lesson from the whole thing: belonging to one tribe needn't require declaring war on another. Sometimes an identity is simply something to share, preferably with the Rs missing.
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