The near absence of diversity at Everett City Hall in 2021 is shocking, painful, and proof of the disingenuous the mayor is about changing the course of racial history here.
The mayor stands against diversity.
He has been a detriment, indeed, a roadblock against diversity for twelve years.
The figures prove this.
The situation warrants a Justice Department investigation and intervention.
Everett City Hall and the nearly all-white city workforce and administration leadership look more like the all-white pre-Nelson Mandela South Africa than a modern American city that is largely non-white.
The racial inequality in this city is an indictment of the mayor’s incapacity and unwillingness to see beyond color.
It is also indicative of the pejorative beliefs he carries about Blacks and browns and immigrants as second-rate people who should not be given a chance to run the city of Everett, let alone to have a role in how the government is managed.
Everett, today, remains a segregated city.
The situation is shameful.
The city government’s workforce is a bastion of segregation and overt racism.
The city’s almost 1,000 employees are less than 5% Black and brown while the city is a minority/majority population. The mayor thought that by creating a diversity position in his office that all would be solved.
He was wrong.
The city claims it can’t find a suitable candidate to head the Diversity office.
That’s a lie.
No Ph.D. or master’s degree in sociology is needed as qualifications to be appointed to such a position.
The city needs a person of ethnicity who can walk the walk and talk the talk of the biggest part of the minority population here.
There is any number of qualified ethnics, Blacks and browns who could lead such an office.
The mayor has no interest in them.
He wants to go outside, to make the hire himself, to assure himself of the obedience of the person he pays.
The mayor is hiring an employment service to find suitable candidates.
This is a waste of precious resources in a city brimming with people capable of changing the all-white color and racial make-up of the city government here without an ounce of negative impact on the city’s destiny.
Instead of wanting to pack the School Committee to rid himself of a highly capable, extremely bright, assertive woman of color – School Superintendent Priya Tahiliani – perhaps he should follow her example.
During her brief time as superintendent, she has made more than a handful of hires that the mayor should be making.
Of course, the mayor wants to get rid of her.
She’s made huge strides in bringing people of color and ethnicity into a school system 82% minority.
With at least a half dozen key hires, she is changing the administrative face of the School Department.
She didn’t have to hire an employment firm to find candidates.
Working against diversity and promoting and maintaining racism in the city government is the mayor’s Achilles’s heel. The Everett city government needs to get in sync with the population.
Discrimination, racism, and misogyny will dominate Everett’s ugly underside until the mayor is replaced.