I can see an issue with so explicitly making this an issue for specific ethnic groups common in just the specific neighborhoods in question.
As a pilot program, fine, but if they’re going to do this, they should roll it out to the entire system.
MadMax_ThatsBait.gif
But I'll bite.
First, nowhere in the
City's press release, nor in any of the quotes in the article, does any City official "make this an issue for specific ethnic groups". Neither the article nor the press release once mention "black, African-American, Latino, Hispanic," or "ethnic"; the sole mention of such things comes as the Globe cites LivableStreets in noting the well-known fact that the bus routes in question serve a lot of low-income people of color. The only person in this discussion so far who has "made it an issue for specific ethnic groups" is, well, you.
And even if they
were making this about specific ethnic groups (which, again, they are
not): countless American institutions, from the 1600s up to this very day, public and private,
already "make it about specific ethnic groups", but do so in order to
harm the individuals in those groups. And not just in the South!
In living memory, white Bostonians have violently attacked and assaulted Black people to enforce racial segregation. Look up the
Boston school desegregation crisis, look up
Carson Beach -- and note that in that second article we learn that some white folks in Southie still feel entitled to yell slurs at Black people and tell them to "go back to Roxbury".
Even if you believe that the Civil Rights Movement solved all the problems of segregation, Jim Crow, and slavery (which it did not), that still means that white families in Boston had
three hundred years to build up wealth, during which Black families in Boston (who
have been here from the beginning) were legally, socially, and violently excluded from doing the same. I'm not saying that
all white people in Boston have three centuries' worth of wealth -- but nearly everyone who does is white, and even more modest levels of wealth were explicitly denied to Black Bostonians for centuries.
Something as
simple as home ownership was deliberately and intentionally denied to Black Bostonians; if it weren't for redlining, many more Black millennials in Boston today might own a home, bequeathed by their grandparents. Instead, the median net worth for
non-immigrant Black families in Greater Boston is almost non-existent, or at least otherwise radically less than their white neighbors.
(And let's not even get into the BPD.)
Boston has a long tradition of racial segregation, racial violence, and racial injustice. (And it doesn't matter if we're "not as bad" as other places; bad is still bad.) We have an obligation to stop the acts of ongoing harm and an equal obligation to undo the harm that was caused by centuries of oppressing our own residents.
The law can be tricky with regard to racial justice, especially programs that are geared explicitly toward undoing harm that was done to particular groups. I'm no expert on that.
But from a moral standpoint: if Boston
did decide to eliminate fares on some bus routes that serve majority-minority neighborhoods, intending it as a small form of reparations (which, again, is
not what is happening here), that would fucking be okay.
