Mayor Martin J. Walsh chose a community agency in Dorchester as the setting to send a message to downtown: You haven’t done enough on race.
Walsh’s annual address to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce Tuesday was delivered, like nearly everything in this plague year, virtually. So it was that he addressed the business community from The Guild, a community services agency in Four Corners.
Partly, Walsh was there to tout his record for addressing COVID: The Guild has been a substantial recipient of money from the Resiliency Fund Walsh launched earlier this year.
But also, he was there to try to connect the wealth and influence of the corporate honchos to the needs of the neighborhoods, and the outpouring of demands for racial justice.
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“This is a place where Black and Brown Bostonians come together to share ideas and grow new businesses,” Walsh said. “At a time when we’re planning our economic recovery, we must continue to foster creativity, encourage innovation, and remove barriers for communities of color to build wealth.”
Certainly, the message was a timely one. Since the death of George Floyd in June, the nation has been in the midst of a reckoning on race and social justice. That movement hasn’t missed Boston, by some measures viewed as one of America’s most racist cities.
This speech came at a pivotal moment for Walsh. A mayoral committee on police reform is due to issue its recommendations any day now. And two women of color, City Councilors Michelle Wu and Andrea Campbell, are running for his job in 2021.
Walsh declared that the city will “break new ground on police transparency and accountability” in reforming the police department. Breaking any ground would be new ground for the BPD, never known as a bastion of transparency or accountability.
Walsh reminded the business leaders that he had spoken to them about systemic racism in 2016, claiming to be the first Boston mayor to make fighting racism a central issue.
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But when the Globe Spotlight Team published a seven-part series on race in 2017, Walsh barely reacted to it publicly, beyond boilerplate statements about doing better.
Since then, many people have developed a more sophisticated grasp of how systemic racism plays out in the life of the city. The pandemic itself has furnished a dramatic lesson in inequality, as Walsh noted. Black and Latino residents make up roughly 42 percent of the city’s population but 63 percent of its COVID cases.
And that’s only one measure of the unequal hand it has dealt communities of color.
Walsh told the Chamber that the conversation he tried to start in 2016 didn’t get far enough, and that the city has to do better this time around. He touted his appointment of the city’s first chief of equity, Karilyn Crockett, as an example of how city government has been “reorganized” to meet the moment.
But a big test of the moment will be whether Walsh can bring the business community on the journey he himself is traveling. Business leaders have shown a willingness to write checks — including $33 million to the Resiliency Fund — but that’s the easiest part of addressing systemic racism. (A second city-run fund, the Boston Racial Equity Fund, is off to a sputtering start.) The hard part will be in embracing change within their organizations, and the willingness to do that, in this bizarre time, is unknown.
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Facing a battle for reelection — I think it’s unlikely he will leave voluntarily — Walsh is out to prove that he can be a leader for this moment. That’s about to be questioned daily. Wu argues that he has done little to nothing about inequality. Campbell, meanwhile, is poised to attack him on police reform and education.
So suddenly this long-delayed conversation about structural racism and inequality has high stakes — for the mayor’s future and the city’s as well.
The business community — core supporters of Walsh — has been content to lead with their checkbooks so far. That won’t be enough now, not for Boston or its mayor.
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at adrian.walker@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @Adrian_Walker.
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Walsh is talking about systemic racism, but can he bring business leaders along? - The Boston Globe
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