What is Boston’s black policy? Who funds it?

A “Black Lives Matter” sign along Mass Pike in Boston in March 2022. The authors found that in January 2023, nearly three years after George Floyd’s murder, McKinsey & Company publicly announced $340 billion in support for racial equality. He wrote that he was wondering how much of the money was donated by companies doing business in Massachusetts. (Staff photo by Nancy Lane/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)

I don’t know the answer. That’s a problem. Accepting the Boston Harms Report is an important step forward in the reparations debate. Although some cities have overcome the barrier to issuing reparations, and there is historical precedent in the United States, the barrier remains difficult to overcome. Connecting current disparities to their historical roots helps people understand the need to make change, if not pay reparations.

The Harm report takes Dianne Wilkerson’s Contemporations concept a step further, but the two have very different implementation remedies. The Harm report’s approach is more of a background support for policy documents on disparities in black communities. So I wonder, “What is Boston’s black policy?” And who will fund it?

Many Black people are aware that the state spends $1 billion on goods and services to support newly arrived immigrants. That’s all well and good, but what about the people who already live here? Some may argue that similar amounts should be spent on the commonwealth’s existing black and brown populations, who experience documented disparities. If we had black policies, we could have claimed some of the funding from the American Rescue Plan Act, and our city and state are running record surpluses, some of which are due to black policies. It could have been used for funding.

Boston has been considered a “majority-minority” city since 2000. The black community and its white and Jewish allies, both individuals and businesses, can do anything. We can vote for people in office and out of office, pass bills, and advocate for budget items. Funding the black agenda may be as close as you can get to receiving reparations.

In January 2023, nearly three years after George Floyd’s murder, McKinsey & Company found that companies had announced $340 billion to support racial justice.

I would like to know how much of that money is from companies doing business in Massachusetts, what they promised to spend the money on, and whether they kept their promises. Don’t you want to see groups like the Boston Foundation and his BECMA issue scorecards? Without accountability, most of these commitments are hard to track. McKinsey said some companies issued statements supporting racial justice but did not follow through on financial commitments. Some companies simply counted what they were already doing. Without accountability and transparency, we won’t know what they’ve done or how much they’ve donated. It would have been easier to trace their funds if they had known which parts of Boston’s black policies they were funding.

When looking at the list of areas covered by the hazard report, it includes sections on the environment, energy, climate, past injustices, and how they impact communities of color today. I noticed that it wasn’t. This surprised me, given the Boston Green Ribbon Committee and Embrace Boston’s Our Shared History Report, which covers some of the history of environmental issues.

I noticed that the harm report did not include any of the findings or strategies from Dr. Attia Martin’s “Resilient Boston: An Equitable and Connected City.” It also appeared that the Boston Board of Health’s Boston Health Report 2023 was not included.

During the coronavirus pandemic, news media continued to reference the infamous “Tuskegee syphilis study” to explain why Black people distrust the health care system. What they did not include were vulnerable populations such as ethnic minorities, the poor, soldiers, and prisoners, as documented in the book Skin on Acres: Human Experimentation at Holmesburg Prison. These were countless unethical human experiments carried out in the country. Hospitals have historically been segregated in the North, and Black people continue to experience treatment disparities.

In the “Culture and Symbols” section, we discuss the fact that people want diversity in the arts, but we are not providing the funding needed to ensure that happens, nor are we addressing public policy issues. I could have written more about it. I share some examples in my editorial, “Addressing Bias in Boston’s Creative Economy.”

If we take the harm report and add findings and reports from other studies, we will have the basis for a Black Boston agenda. With the participation of organizations as diverse as the NAACP, Urban League, BECMA, and the Black and Latino Caucus, we can and must create an agenda for Boston’s Black community. If it is a priority for citizens and governments, there appears to be plenty of funding.

Ed Gaskin is executive director of Greater Grove Hall Main Streets and founder of Sunday Celebrations.