Let’s build a people’s platform for Brookline
In my time in town government in Brookline, our most powerful accomplishments have come when people came together across differences to solve problems we saw in our community. I’ve often said that we don’t need to agree on the solution right away in order to collaborate: if we agree there’s a problem that we need to solve, we can get to work and reach a solution together. That approach has driven the work we’ve done together on the Task Force to Reimagine Policing in Brookline, the Small Business Development Committee, and our working group to support the Brookline Housing Authority and its residents.
That’s why I’m taking the same approach to sharing my policy priorities in this campaign. There are quite a few problems we’ll have to solve together when I am your Representative, and I’ve got a lot of ideas for how to solve them. But I also know that our community is at our best when we reach solutions together. That’s why for the next five weeks, I’ll be holding conversations on the five areas where I have heard the most urgency from Brookline residents during my service on the Select Board and my campaign so far: racial justice, the climate crisis, housing, education, and economic justice.
In each of these areas, I’ll lay out how I see the problems in state government and some of my ideas for solving them. Then let’s talk. I’ll host a community conversation about each policy, and I’ll write and share an updated platform to guide my campaign based on how that conversation informs my thinking.
I’m starting with racial justice because it isn’t just one policy area among many — it’s the lens I bring to every policy conversation.
- This lens is grounded in my professional experience on the Select Board, where I led negotiations with a Brookline firefighter who suffered years of racial discrimination in town and helped ban the town from requiring non-disclosure agreements in future settlements for racial or sexual harassment and police misconduct. Racial justice requires acknowledging past harms.
- This lens is grounded in my academic experience as a scholar of racial inequity in education at Boston University. In my scholarship and my service on the Racial Imbalance Advisory Council in the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, I have documented the impact of structural oppression on students. Racial justice requires identifying and dismantling structural racism within large institutions, including our state government.
- This lens is grounded in my lived experience as a person of color. Growing up in the Bronx, I saw asbestos dumped in Black and Brown communities after it was removed from buildings in white communities in New York. This experience directly informs my focus on environmental justice in our response to the climate emergency. Racial justice requires leaders who have been directly impacted by structural racism.
As I see it, these are the three shortcomings of the current approach to racial justice on Beacon Hill. We are reluctant to have tough conversations about past harm. We often fail to see the structural racism in state systems, which means we fail to find solutions to it. And too often, key decisions move forward without people who have been directly impacted by structural racism at the table. I will put racial justice at the top of my agenda, and it will be the lens that I bring to every policy conversation on Beacon Hill. Here are a few of the policies I will prioritize:
Economic Policy and Closing the Racial Wealth Gap: As your Rep, I will prioritize policies that build the economic power of residents of color. Past eras of state and federal policy have deliberately excluded residents of color from our state’s prosperity, and remediating this wrong requires a deliberate focus on the racial wealth gap. I am particularly excited to build on the progress that legislators and advocates like BECMA have made in recent cycles, and will support and fight for legislation to create a public bank, build supplier diversity and equity in public contracting, document and redress wage discrimination on the basis of race, and build a climate response that fully addresses the effects of environmental racism.
Reimagining Public Safety and the Carceral State: As the Chair of the Task Force to Reimagine Policing in Brookline, I’m proud to have led our town in honest and vulnerable conversations about the future of policing. We turn to police for far too many problems when other approaches would work better, and many of these assumptions are baked into current state law — for example, the assumption that police will enforce traffic laws. I plan to continue these conversations as a State Representative. I will prioritize enabling municipalities to pursue non-police response models for issues that would be better served by trained social workers and other unarmed first responders. I will also work to build on the progress in last session’s police reform and accountability law, including by working to end qualified immunity in Massachusetts. On a state level, it is also vital that we rethink our carceral system more broadly. Our system of mass incarceration discriminates on the basis of race and income and makes our state less safe, not safer. In the short term, I will work to end cash bail and secure free access to telephones for people who are incarcerated, enabling people to stay more connected with their communities and networks of support. In the long term, I will work with advocates and colleagues in the legislature to substantially reduce the role of incarceration in our state.
Ongoing Partnership with Groups in Town to Build Racial Justice: My approach to service on the Select Board has been anchored in my belief that we make the most progress on racial justice when we work together to identify and solve the big problems we’re facing. As one example of how this approach has worked in practice, I worked closely with residents in town who were fighting to improve language access in Brookline. We all saw language access as a racial justice issue, and we worked together to pass the language access warrant article, which creates a funded position to oversee language access across town government and requires language access plans from every town department. I’m proud that Brookline for Racial Justice and Equity has endorsed my campaign, and I plan to take the same approach to partnering with them and other residents to pass racial justice legislation as Brookline’s State Rep.
Beyond these specific policies, racial justice is at the core of the other four policy areas we’ll be discussing together. The climate crisis and environmental racism each do disproportionate harm to people of color, and our responses to them must embed racial justice at every stage. Our education and housing systems in Massachusetts each bear the legacies of explicit racial segregation in law — and in my work on the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Racial Imbalance Advisory Council, I have seen how this legacy persists as structural racism in our present systems and structures. We cannot have economic justice without racial justice, since the underpaid workers who keep our state running are disproportionately people of color. My racial justice lens informs my approach to each of these policies, and it will be present in each of the policy conversations we have together in the coming months.
My first policy conversation on racial justice will be held on Monday, March 7th at 6pm via Zoom with Miriam Aschkenasy, Emy Takinami, and Azavia Barsky-Elnour. From my conversations with Brookline residents, I know most of us agree that we need urgent action to dismantle structural racism and build racial justice. That means we have everything we need to sit around a table together and come up with solutions. Let’s get to work.
