Robbins: No matter who wins, Boston’s new mayor ushers in change
In late 1980, a white law student in Boston was on the phone with his friend in Washington, D.C., the Black son of a Virginia Baptist minister. The minister’s son was himself in law school, after graduating with an Ivy League degree. “When are you getting up here to visit?” the white student asked his Black friend. “Boston, huh,” mused the friend with a chuckle. “I’m not so sure that’s such a good idea.”
After a federal judge found an ongoing pattern of racial discrimination in the city’s school system in 1974, the court’s plan to remedy the discrimination through busing was met with resistance, including violence, by some in Boston’s white community. An estimated 40 riots took place in Boston between 1974 and 1976. The white rage, exemplified by an anti-desegregation group called Restore Our Alienated Rights, or ROAR, became the distinctly unattractive face of Boston in the consciousness of people of color, in Boston and across the country, for years to come.
As elsewhere, there have been some big changes in Boston. In 1950, approximately 95% of Boston’s residents were white. Now, just over 50% are. Founded in 1630 as a haven for immigrants and blessed ever since with infusions of newcomers whose talent and spirit fueled the city’s growth, Boston has recently seen a surge of immigrants from Africa, Asia and Latin America that has dramatically altered the city’s racial and ethnic composition. When Boston Mayor Marty Walsh was appointed secretary of labor by President Biden earlier this year, the president of Boston’s City Council, Kim Janey, became Beantown’s first Black, and first female, mayor. In September’s primary election, the five major candidates vying to succeed Walsh were all individuals of color – four women and one man.
Tuesday’s general election will determine which of those candidates — City Councilor Michelle Wu or City Councilor Annissa Essaibi George — will become mayor. Two weeks thereafter, one of them will take the helm of a city internationally acclaimed for its intellectual capital, its medical institutions, its universities and, yes, its sports teams. Both women are also the children of immigrants. They each know the stigma and the obstacles of being the “other.” Both have succeeded in corridors of power historically dominated by whites and by men, succeeding through intelligence and grit. Each has busted barriers and defied expectations along the way.
Whoever wins the election, one thing is clear: Boston will never be the same. Janey pointed out that being Boston’s first Black, first female mayor “doesn’t mean that racism magically disappears. It doesn’t mean that sexism magically disappears.” But Janey’s tenure as acting mayor, followed immediately by the mayoralty of another woman of color, does mean for starters that Boston’s children are never going to see their possibilities, their potential, their opportunities in quite the same way again.
And it means more than that. Even before COVID slammed into us, exacerbating the gaps between white communities and those of color, the gaps in Boston were pronounced. The poverty rate among white Bostonians was 11% in 2020. The poverty rate for Blacks was 22%, and for Hispanics and Asian Americans it was 29%. Seventy-one percent of white Bostonians had college degrees; 20% of Blacks and 23% of Hispanics had them. In Boston, the median net worth of a white family was just under $250,000; that of a Black family was all of eight dollars. The distance between the affluent Back Bay section of Boston and largely Black Roxbury is less than 4 miles, but there is a 30-year difference in life expectancy between the two communities.
The good news is that Boston is about to see new leadership by someone who “sees” the inequities without having to be schooled in them. She will have hundreds of millions of dollars in new federal funding provided precisely so that these inequities — in home ownership, in business creation, in education, in transportation and elsewhere — can be attacked. And she will have a City Hall staffed by fresh faces, eager to make big changes.
No doubt about it. It’s an exciting time for Boston.
Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3pXq8PR
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