It’s long past time to replace dated monuments to cruelty with ones befitting the society we want to live in today.
In small towns and big cities across our nation, people are marching for justice, paying tribute to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and a growing list of those who have lost their lives at the hands of the police. A multiracial and multiethnic force across this country is fighting for the acknowledgment and elimination of systemic racism.
It’s not enough to say you are against racism and send out a press release, post a statement, or pass a resolution. It’s time to take antiracist action and confront the structures of racism on which our country is built. Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and white supremacy are all foundational legacies that benefit white Americans and disenfranchise Black Americans in all aspects of society from health care to lending to education.
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Some of these structures are intentional and visible. The United Daughters of the Confederacy funded and erected 450 monuments, markers, buildings, and other commemoratives across the country to ensure that physical reminders of white supremacy remain in our collective memory. Others, in cities like Boston, are more subtle and pervasive. Our history of inequity and racism — of widespread redlining, the de facto segregation that led to busing in the ‘70s, and the Charles Stuart racial hoax — is well documented, as is our failure as a community to truly address the underlying structures that support racism and allow it to thrive. Despite our stated ideals, Boston remains by almost every measure — unemployment, income, wealth, homeownership, educational attainment, life expectancy, and more — a city shaped by inequity.
But perhaps — just perhaps — we are on the cusp of taking a long look into our civic mirror and making needed changes. The killings of Black Americans and the stark inequalities unmasked by COVID-19 have pierced our consciousness. As in thousands of communities across this country, residents of Boston and dozens of cities and towns across Massachusetts continue to take to the streets. They are setting us on course to disrupt the status quo and write a new narrative that will dismantle long-accepted social and economic disparities in our society. But for this moment to be more than yet another historical blip on a timeline of race in America, we must treat it as what it is: the beginning of a much longer journey.
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Over the past 18 months, while the process of erecting a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King on Boston Common has progressed, King Boston has been holding teach-ins and community meetings to engage Boston residents of all ages through the teachings and ideas of the Kings and that commemorate their time in Boston. Their words, more than half a century old, ring as powerful and true today as they did in the 1960s.
But ending racism isn’t just about teaching the past. It’s about listening to the present. For racist culture to truly change, we must bring forward the voices of those most affected by it today and activate the power of those voices to create change.
We’re hopeful that the King Center for Economic Justice will be one of those activation points, where residents can learn, share, and shape their own futures. When the King Center for Economic Justice opens later this year in Roxbury, it will convene leaders of Boston nonprofits, philanthropy, and government agencies working on issues of economic justice to collaborate with residents to review policies, programs, and practices that seek to reduce economic disparities. Done right, the Center will represent the best of our past and our highest aspirations for the future. But while the center can be home for important dialogue and work, monuments send messages.
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The Daughters of the Confederacy know that their monuments send a cynical message of white supremacy that will live on as long as we look the other way as a society. It’s long past time to replace these dated monuments to cruelty with ones befitting the society we want to live in today. In a moment of time where COVID-19 has kept us apart, this city needs “The Embrace.” The memorial is slated to be installed at Freedom Plaza on Boston Common, America’s oldest park. It will be a public tribute to our higher ideals in a space specifically set aside for all of us to come together. It will inspire us to work hard to change our narrative while symbolizing a bright future for everyone in our city.
Marie St. Fleur is the outgoing executive director of King Boston. Imari Paris Jeffries is in the incoming executive director of King Boston.
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July 01, 2020 at 11:05PM
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It’s time to take antiracist action - The Boston Globe
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