Black History, White Privilege

MAC’s seminal investigative report,The Way We Go to School: Children Excluded in Boston, revealed that 10,000 or more children were either being systematically excluded from Boston’s public education system or warehoused in classrooms or schools that provided inferior or custodial care, largely due to racist practices.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve highlighted various Black disabled activists and advocates in honor of Black History Month, shining a spotlight on leaders like Vilissa Thompson, Imani Barbarin, Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, and Lois Olsmtead.

But what does Black History Month mean at an organization like MAC? Eighty-three percent of our staff identifies as White. Sixty-nine percent of our board of directors identifies as White. And we know that, even with our best efforts to connect to marginalized communities, MAC resources are most easily accessible to White, middle- and high-income parents who enjoy the most access to the systems in place.

The “diversity gap” in the nonprofit sector is a well-documented phenomenon. Its sting can be especially sharp at an organization like MAC with a commitment to racial justice and inclusion. From our founding in 1969, addressing racial segregation and racial inequity in education have been at the center of MAC’s mission. Born out of the civil rights movement, MAC has been instrumental in advocating for children and youth of color – leading efforts to pass school discipline reform legislation to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline, advocating for the first bilingual education and special education laws in the nation when children who spoke Spanish or other languages at home were routinely excluded from school and children of color were all too frequently assessed with discriminatory IQ tests and thought unable to learn and unworthy of inclusion. It would be disingenuous, however, to celebrate MAC’s racial justice accomplishments without acknowledging that we are at the very beginning of a long process and that we continue to fall short of our goal to promote racial equity in our program choices and in the creation of our internal culture.  

We will further diversity our staff, our board and our leadership, but that, alone, will not be enough. We must create an environment that is inclusive and celebratory of our differences. Recently, MAC staff came together in a series of listening circles to listen and learn from each other about how we could reach our shared goal of better reflecting our core values of racial justice and inclusion as individuals and as an organization.

To work toward that goal, we’ve put in place a few initiatives: our board is in the midst of a board development process that could significantly change its composition; we have created a new hiring and orientation process that puts diversity, equity, and inclusion at the forefront of our efforts, and we are putting together guidance for staff on how to handle microaggressions if and when they occur in the workplace. And we’re introducing evidence-based assessment of our programs to deepen our understanding of the true impact of our advocacy.

We’re thankful for the Black leaders we’ve celebrated who encourage us to ask a difficult and necessary question: Are we holding ourselves accountable to the values we advocate for in our government, our schools, and our communities?