BOSTON — In their quest to close the racial wealth divide, Sen. Lydia Edwards and a Boston think tank laid a new tool in front of Statehouse insiders Tuesday to aid in what Edwards called “intentional conversations.”
Reviewing the new Racial Wealth Equity Resource Center offered by Boston Indicators, a branch of The Boston Foundation, Edwards said the statistics it reports gave her pause. Like how, she said, Black people with college diplomas only earn an average of $29,000 more than white people without a high school diploma.
“These kinds of numbers really make me question a lot of things, when you know that those numbers have everything to do with your access to health care, to education, can you get a good education, whether you can afford rent or own a home, that’s what we’re looking at when we think about this gap,” Edwards said.
Peter Ciurczak of Boston Indicators presented the new website to legislative aides and a couple lawmakers on hand in a Statehouse briefing room, and framed the data on the site as information they could use to craft future policies.
He said “real gaps start to emerge” in household median wealth across different racial groups as the result of “the legacy of state-sponsored discrimination, of enslavement, of Jim Crow-era politics, and of outright theft of Black wealth.”
Messages such as, “Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” Edwards said, “aren’t real narratives.”
“For me, this is about dealing with the vestiges of slavery, it’s about dealing with the setbacks we’ve done to women, people of color. These are all intentional conversations, all intentional policy decisions we’ve made as a country for centuries, coming to a head. So we are in the position to see it for what it is, to see America for all of its beauty and for all of its ugly,” the East Boston Democrat said.
Keith Mahoney of The Boston Foundation said homeownership is a “key component” of addressing the issue, along with policies in the areas of stocks, insurance, retirement, and tax policy like the federal child care tax credit which “had a huge impact in alleviating poverty.”
Rep. Sam Montaño asked if there was an estimated price tag on what it would take for government to make a “meaningful step” on closing the gap. She said, “It’s pretty vague, right?”
“On one of my favorite podcasts, The Big Dig, it’s like — at that level, all of that money is magic, right? We don’t know,” Ciurczak replied.