Our state and our country are faced with a racial reckoning today — one that spans all the way from education to criminal justice to health, economic development, transportation, and climate policy. People of color still face systemic discrimination, racist disparities in policing and incarceration, and a yawning racial wealth divide. This is one of the most pressing moral issues of our time, and we need to meet it with much more than reassuring words.

We must put someone in the Governor’s office who’s proven she’ll prioritize it every single day.

Sonia will make promoting racial justice and equity a critical piece of every government policy. As Governor, she will:

• Lead the charge to close the racial wealth divide, including:

  • Making quality preschool and debt-free college a reality for all Massachusetts families, and closing vast funding gaps between K-12 schools in communities of color and their white counterparts.

  • Implementing rigorous goal-setting, tracking, and targeting of resources in the billions of dollars’ worth of spending the state will undertake to deploy federal recovery and infrastructure funding — similar to the Racial Equity Scorecard that Sonia helped design for the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act spending package. Massachusetts has the chance to make significant leaps toward equity with the jobs, contracts, and programming these funds will create.

  • Investing in small business technical assistance grants, which disproportionately serve local entrepreneurs of color, as well as increasing access to capital, and lowering barriers to entry, for people of color and other local entrepreneurs to build businesses in emerging industries like green energy and cannabis.

  • Reinvesting savings from the state’s incarceration system back into Black and brown communities that were disproportionately targeted by the War on Drugs.

  • Instituting strong and transparent diversity metrics for all state contracts, and prioritizing contracts with minority- and women-owned businesses.

  • Increasing pay for childcare workers, who are largely women of color and currently make on average about $30,000 per year — wages that in many cases qualify them for poverty assistance programs.

  • Creating more opportunities for lower- and middle-income families to build generational wealth through homeownership.

• Increase access to both affordable housing and transportation, so Bay Staters of color can spend more time with their families and advancing their careers, and less on the road. She will also support legislation to prevent discriminatory land use decisions that can be used to block the development of affordable housing.

• Ensure that when state policy decisions are made, leaders of color are at decision-making tables as well as “advisory” tables.

As the first Latina and first person of Asian descent elected to the Massachusetts State Senate — and often the only woman of color serving in that body during her tenure — Sonia has been a leader on racial justice issues throughout her career, including:

• Achieving a statutory ban on racial profiling by police, as well as demographic data tracking on all traffic stops, so we can identify and combat racial disparities in law enforcement.

• Closing opportunity gaps in our schools for children of color by winning $1.5 billion in new progressive aid for K-12 schools and passing laws to prohibit the overuse of school expulsion and suspension, and to reform Massachusetts' system for English language education.

• Supporting budget measures to build wealth and small business ownership in communities of color across our state, and fighting for laws to strengthen our state's own procurement with minority-owned businesses.

• Reforming our broken criminal justice system that disproportionately impacts communities of color, including passing police accountability legislation in 2020, and repealing racist mandatory minimum sentences in 2018.

• Securing equity provisions in Massachusetts law governing the new marijuana industry.