Too many people of color are placed on low-income path
We are writing in response to your May 16 editorial, “The $8 figure that shamed Boston gets an update.” As a leading equity coalition based in communities of color in Greater Boston and led primarily by BIPOC people, we applaud the Globe’s focus on the issue of the racial wealth gap in this editorial and in both opinion pieces and articles (Kimberly Atkins Stohr’s “Solving the Racial Wealth Gap” series for The Emancipator, Opinion; “Fed, business groups to update study that found average Black Boston household had $8 net worth,” Business, May 9). However, we want to call attention to the third leg of the stool of racial wealth. Along with entrepreneurship and homeownership, recent research from the Federal Reserve banks of both Boston and Cleveland shows that as much as 75 percent of the racial wealth gap is due to low income.
More than 90,000 Boston residents in the BIPOC neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, and Hyde Park have some college or more education but often are still tracked into low-wage (even if high-skill) jobs. Of the jobs in Boston paying over $70,000, almost 80 percent go to white people, even while the city is under 45 percent white. Our residents get credentials in tech, STEM, and other skilled fields but still do not get the quality jobs they are trained for.
Building on our work since 2014 connecting hundreds of residents to quality jobs at Encore and other employers, we are expanding our programs that connect our communities to the jobs they deserve and are actively reaching out to partners.
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Marvin Martin
Executive director
Tarshia Green-Williams
Jobs director
Action for Equity
Dorchester
Studies are good, but real work must be done, especially on housing policies
I think it is terrific that the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and its partners are continuing to research the racial wealth divide in Massachusetts (“The $8 figure that shamed Boston gets an update”). This is an issue at the core of inequality in our Commonwealth and in our country. But more than studies are needed.
I think we all know a major source of the wealth gap: the discriminatory practices of our federal government’s housing policies and the resulting lack of homeownership among Black Americans. Those discriminatory policies, including deliberately keeping Black people out of certain neighborhoods through refusals to give federally backed mortgages, have led to the deep residential segregation we see today, and have been well documented.
What is really needed are remedies. How do we compensate Black Americans who were deliberately shut out of the housing market, subjected to Jim Crow laws, and disproportionately incarcerated? In addition to conducting studies, we should be building more affordable housing, helping people cover their rent after the pandemic decimated many communities of color, helping people buy their first homes, helping elders stay in their homes and pass on their wealth to their heirs, increasing wages and protecting more income from wage garnishment, and making myriad other efforts to help people improve their economic lives.
There is so much that needs to be done. Studies are good, and they do help shed light on the issues, but they are not the answer. Let’s have those with power and money work for effective policies, particularly housing policies, that address racial wealth inequities.
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Nadine Cohen
Newton
The author is an attorney who has worked on fair housing and civil rights cases.
