Black Lives In Boston Are Not Valued: It's A Pattern

The voices of Black people in Boston are constantly silenced, marginalized, and ignored. Our advocacy for our rights and opportunities makes other people uncomfortable, so they label us as the problem instead of acknowledging and addressing the real problems we identify. Black people are approximately 25% of Boston’s population, but make up more than one-third of COVID-19 cases and deaths in Boston -- and we are still disportionately dying! Most live in communities that have been under-resourced for generations. Black people are often systematically locked into jobs and industries that are low paying, less stable, and limited in upward mobility -- and locked out of opportunity for generations.

Black Boston COVID-19 Coalition (BBCC) has been in the forefront of challenging the Governor, the Mayor, and elected officials on their less than adequate response to COVID-19 in neighborhoods with large concentrations of Black and Latinx people - Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury, and Hyde Park. BBCC has clearly stated demands and offered to have, as Mayor Walsh stated, “a conversation that can produce lasting, systemic change to eliminate all the ways that racism and inequality harm our residents.” BBCC actually went a step further and extended our hand in real partnership for transformational change.

Despite the avalanche of words by the Mayor and other public officials that racism is a public health emergency and that they want to engage with Black communities, they still haven’t! This silent treatment and dismissiveness from government officials is consistent with their ongoing response before and during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is the evidence:

• Testing and Contact Tracing: Since the COVID-19 outbreak in Boston, BBCC has asked city officials to partner with community groups on free, accessible testing. Why? To ensure strategies are appropriate and communities feel safe to take advantage of testing sites. To date, there is not nearly enough testing in our community. The City lacks a coordinated strategy to monitor infection and death rates, and to determine sustainable efforts to reduce new infections and protect our community so that it and the city are safe to reopen.

• Public Gatherings: Gatherings in Cohasset, Chatham, and Boston Harbor in August were met with an immediate public health response -- including mass COVID-19 testing. However, similar gatherings in Black communities were dismissed. BBCC’s press conference highlighted the community outrage. Its members demanded a response that included mass testing, PPE distribution, and public education. However, the Governor, the Mayor, and other elected officials responded by increasing police presence in Black neighborhoods.

• COVID-19 Vaccine Trials: Task forces/committees are being created with no decision-making power to plan, design, implement, and evaluate the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine trials.These structures in Boston and around the country are being used as a cover to push through a vaccine that puts speed and profit over people’s lives.

• Reopening of Schools: There is still no strategy for addressing the pre-COVID-19 racial inequities in Boston Public Schools, which are now worsened by the pandemic. The buildings, including their air filtration systems, are not safe and ready. Families’ access to computers and the internet has not been addressed. There have been no explicit plans to protect Black and Latinx children, who represent the majority of child deaths from COVID-19.

• Contracts to Black Businesses & Disparities in Wealth: Since COVID-19, only one “minority” business has been represented among eighty businesses awarded emergency contracts between March and June. Pre-COVID, out of $664 million of City of Boston contracts, less than .05% was spent with businesses owned by people of color and women. If this is just the local government, who knows what the private sector and nonprofit organizations are spending. And we wonder why there is an average of $8 in Black wealth vs $247,500 in White wealth.

• Community Engagement and Partnership: In addition to testing and vaccine trials, the state’s COVID-19 Community Impact Survey is another example of pretending to engage the community but actually dismissing its voice. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health asked community organizations to disseminate a survey that would capture the “health needs, concerns, inequities, and unintended consequences related to the crisis.” During the informational webinars, community participants voiced concerns about the survey not capturing critical needs and not being culturally and linguistically appropriate. The contracting process to manage this project -- including survey development and community engagement -- was not transparent nor accountable.

This pattern of behavior from local and state public officials shows how racism is impacting Boston’s Black community -- and it’s unacceptable. What we are looking at is how political leaders and public institutions continue to fail our community and deepen alarming racial inequities.

Dr. Atyia Martin and Chioma Nnaji, are members of the Black Boston COVID-19 Coalition. This is the first of a series of commentaries from the BBCC.