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    The Travel Industry’s Reckoning With Race and Inclusion

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    Tourists, particularly Black travelers, are paying close attention to how destinations and travel service providers approach diversity and equity after a year of social justice protests.Between the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought tourism to a near-complete halt for months on end, and last summer’s protests for social justice, the past year has been one of reckoning for the travel industry on issues of race and inclusivity.In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, everybody from hotel operators to luggage makers declared themselves allies of the protesters. At a time when few people were traveling, Instagram posts and pledges to diversify were easy to make. But now, as travel once again picks up, the question of how much travel has really changed has taken on new urgency.“From the very emergence of the Covid pandemic and especially in the wake of uprisings last summer, there’s a question about place,” said Paul Farber, the director of Monument Lab, a Pennsylvania-based public art and history studio that works with cities and states that want to examine, remove or add historic monuments. “What is the relationship of people and places? Where are sites of belonging? Where are sites where historic injustices may be physically or socially marked?”Monument Lab is one of several organizations, groups and individuals trying to change the way travelers of all colors understand America’s racially fraught history. Urging people to engage with history beyond museums and presentations from preservation societies is one approach.In turn, many travelers are paying close attention to whether companies are following through with their promises from last year. Black travelers, in particular, are doubling down on supporting Black-owned businesses. A survey released earlier this year by the consulting firm MMGY Global found that Black travelers, particularly those in the United States, Canada, Britain and Ireland, are keenly interested in how destinations and travel service providers approach diversity and have indicated that it has an influence on their travel decision-making.At Monument Lab, questions about belonging, inclusion and how history memorializes different people were coming up frequently over the past year, Mr. Farber said, particularly from travelers looking to learn about Confederate and other monuments while road tripping.In response, Monument Lab, which examines the meaning of monuments, created an activity guide called Field Trip, which allows people to pause on their trips to learn about specific monuments. On a worksheet, participants are prompted to question who created the monuments, why they were made and what they represent.The statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader, Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader, was removed from Health Sciences Park in Memphis, Tenn. in 2017. Like many other monuments in the United States, it had become a polarizing presence. Yalonda M. James/The Commercial Appeal, via Associated PressIn creating Field Trip, it became clear to Mr. Farber that there is a strong interest from travelers to learn about Black history. This sentiment is echoed by tour operators who offer Civil Rights and other social-justice-oriented tours like those focusing on the contributions of Black Americans, women and figures in the L.G.B.T.Q. community.“There are a lot of white people who for the first time have had a conversation about racial justice and maybe even heard the words ‘systemic racism’ for the first time,” said Rebecca Fisher, founder of Beyond the Bell Tours, a Philadelphia-based operator of social-justice-oriented tours that highlight marginalized communities, people and histories. “People heard the new words and now they want to learn. That doesn’t mean that it is backed up with results, but I am seeing a trend in interest.”On a tour with Beyond the Bell guests might, for example, participants hear about Philadelphia’s President’s House, but they’ll also hear about Ona Judge, an enslaved woman who escaped from George Washington’s home, and about the former president’s efforts to recapture her. One of the company’s most popular tours focuses on gay history in the city.Seeking Black-owned travel businessesBlack travelers, in particular, are increasingly looking for ways to show their support for Black-owned travel businesses.Even as the family road trip has made a comeback in the wake of the coronavirus, that sort of trip hasn’t been a source of unfettered freedom for generations of Black motorists because of Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation in America. And now, after a year in which protests of the police killings of Black people amplified the perils of skin color, Black travelers are seeking out Black travel agents, Black hoteliers and Black-owned short-term rentals in addition to organizing in groups dedicated to Black travelers.In fact, according to the international survey of nearly 4,000 Black leisure travelers by MMGY Global, 54 percent of American respondents said they were more likely to visit a destination if they saw Black representation in travel advertising. In Britain and Ireland, 42 percent echoed that sentiment, and in Canada that number was 40 percent.“Another highly influential factor in the decision-making process is whether the destination is perceived as safe for Black travelers,” the survey noted. “Seventy-one percent of U.S. and Canadian respondents felt safety was extremely or very influential to their decision.”In Facebook groups, Clubhouse chat rooms and across other social media platforms, Black travelers regularly ask one another for recommendations about where to travel, particularly about where others have been where they felt safe and welcome. While these questions are often about foreign destinations, in a year when Americans could largely only travel within the United States, inquiries increasingly arose about where travelers felt safe within the country.“I was just curious on some good and safe locations for a first time solo traveler here in the States,” one woman posted in a group specifically for Black women travelers in June.“Where’s a good ‘safe’ place to travel in the States?” asked another woman who was planning a 35th birthday trip with her sister.This type of community gathering, though now online, isn’t new. For decades, African American travelers have looked to one another for guidance on where to travel. The most referenced form was Victor Hugo Green’s Green Book, a guide for Black travelers that was published annually from 1936 to 1966.Last summer, facing an onslaught of messaging from travel companies saying that they supported the Black Lives Matter movement and would be committing to diversifying their ranks and finding other ways to be more inclusive, Kristin Braswell, the owner of CrushGlobal, a company that works with locals around the world to plan trips, decided to make the inclusion of Black businesses central to her work.As a Black woman with a passion for travel, she started making travel guides that focused on supporting Black businesses. Each guide, whether it be to national parks, beach towns or wine country, provides information on businesses owned by Black people as well as guidance about diversity in the area and more.“These road trips and initiatives that speak to people of color in general are important because we’ve been left out of travel narratives,” Ms. Braswell said. “If you’re going to be creating experiences where people are going out into the world, all people should be included in those experiences.”Ms. Braswell added that the bulk of her business comes from Black travelers. These travelers, she said, are looking for Black travel advisers who have the knowledge of places where they are welcomed and can help them plan their trips. Over the past year travelers across racial backgrounds have been increasingly asking for tours and experiences that include Black-owned businesses, she said.Across the country, as people protested against police brutality, travelers demanded to see more travelers who looked like them in advertising; they spoke out against tourism boards that hadn’t been inclusive in the past and formed organizations like the Black Travel Alliance, calling for more Black travel influencers, writers and photographers to be employed.The Alliance and others have been pushing for more Black travelers to be visible and included in the industry and in spaces of leisure travel.Going beyond museumsAt the same time, tour providers like Free Egunfemi Bangura, the founder of Untold RVA, a Richmond-based organization, are offering tours that center on the contributions of Black people. In a city such as Richmond, which was once a capital of the Confederacy, she said that means seeing the value of working outside the established system of preservation societies and museums that are typically run by white leadership.To Ms. Bangura and other activists, artists and tour operators, museums and traditional preservation societies are part of the culture of exclusion that has historically left Black people out and continues to present versions of history that focus on white narratives. Ms. Bangura’s tours take place on the streets of the city as a better way to understand the local history.At a time when state legislatures are pushing for and passing laws that limit what and how much students learn about the contributions of Black and other marginalized people to the country, Ms. Bangura and others said, tours that show their contributions are even more important.“There is a way to take these experiences out of the hands of the traditional preservation community, so you don’t have to go into the walls of a museum,” Ms. Bangura said, adding that another reason institutions like museums aren’t optimal is because some people aren’t keen to visit them. “But think of how often it is that after you come outside of a Black-owned coffee shop, you’re actually able to hear about some of the Black people in that neighborhood or people that fought for Black freedom.”Kalela Williams, the founder of Black History Maven, leads a tour in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward.Whitney IngramAdditionally, although the tourism industry took a hit last year, outdoor activities continued to draw visitors, making outdoor tours like Ms. Bangura’s and Ms. Fisher’s of Beyond the Bell popular. Ms. Bangura said the style of her offerings makes them accessible for all travelers, especially those without access to smartphones for scanning QR codes or those unable to take part in headphone-aided tours.Among the several kinds of tours and experiences Ms. Bangura has created is Black Monument Avenue, a three-block interactive experience in Richmond’s majority-Black Highland Park neighborhood. Visitors can drive through and call a designated phone line with unique access codes to hear songs, poems and messages about each installation. Every August, she runs Gabriel Week, honoring Gabriel Prosser, an enslaved man who led a rebellion in the Richmond area in 1800.“I call him brother General Gabriel,” Ms. Bangura said, adding that in her work, she encourages “people to decolonize their history by making sure that history is being told from the language of the oppressed, not the language of the oppressor.”Walking tours, for those who go on them, also provide a visceral sense of history that differs from the experience of a museum. Even as the National Museum of African American History and Culture has attracted record numbers of visitors to Washington, D.C., tours like Ms. Bangura’s can provide a more local perspective and show visitors exactly where something significant happened.“We can find community in walking together, we can find community in exploring a neighborhood together, and we can find a sense of where we are, we can find a sense of where folks have been and we can find common ground,” said Kalela Williams, the founder of Black History Maven, a Philadelphia company that primarily offers walking tours of the city that focus on Black history.“It’s important to see where things were, how things were working in relation to one another,” she said. “You can see the proximity of folks’ houses and schools and churches. You can imagine how folks would have walked around and navigated and visited each other in a way that you might not in a museum.”THE WORLD IS REOPENING. LET’S GO, SAFELY. Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you’ll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world. More

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    Cryptocurrency Seeks the Spotlight, With Spike Lee’s Help

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    The filmmaker’s commercial for a crypto company is one of many recent marketing efforts to make digital cash palatable for newbies.Before Spike Lee accepted cryptocurrency, he turned down Crocs.Years ago, the filmmaker rejected an offer to buy into the Colorado company that makes perforated foam clogs, a decision that caused him to miss out when its stock soared on the strength of the footwear fad.“I wish I would’ve given some money back then,” Mr. Lee said in a recent interview. “Anytime something is new, you’re going to have people who are going to be skeptical. With some of the best ideas, people thought the inventors were crazy.”Now he has taken a leap into another cultural craze, having agreed to direct and star in a television commercial for Coin Cloud, a company that makes kiosks for buying and selling Bitcoin and other virtual currencies. Although cryptocurrency is not widely used for transactions, an increasing number of merchants now accept it as payment.The commercial, which he shot last month, is one of several recent marketing efforts meant to broaden the audience for a form of currency that can intimidate people accustomed to cash and credit cards.Mr. Lee, outfitted nattily in a straw hat and gold-tipped cane while filming part of the commercial on Wall Street, led a diverse cast that included his daughter Satchel, the “Pose” actress Mj Rodriguez and the drag queen Shangela. Other shoot locations included Fort Greene Park and the Chillin’ Bar and Grill in Washington Heights, where breakfast patrons craned to catch a glimpse of the director as he filmed a Coin Cloud machine on the sidewalk.“Old money is not going to pick us up; it pushes us down,” Mr. Lee says in the commercial, which portrays the cryptocurrency system as a more accessible and equitable alternative to traditional, discriminatory financial institutions.“The digital rebellion is here,” he says.Cryptocurrency has also been known to intimidate investors, with its extreme volatility and the overwhelming number of virtual alternatives, known as coins. The marketing of this relatively new money has so far been limited mostly to ads on trade websites and targeted pushes on social media, where aficionados swap meme-fueled in-jokes about coin values rocketing to the moon.The industry is increasingly betting that celebrities can help demystify cryptocurrency for the uninitiated.The actor Alec Baldwin offered crisp definitions of cryptocurrency in a series of online ads for the crypto trading platform eToro, and the National Football League star Tom Brady signed on as a brand ambassador for FTX, a crypto exchange that also has a deal to sponsor Major League Baseball.Alec Baldwin is advertising for the cryptocurrency trading platform eToro.eToroThe actor Neil Patrick Harris recently appeared in a TV commercial for the digital currency kiosk operator CoinFlip. “Now anyone, anywhere, can turn cash into crypto!” he declares.EToro and Coinbase, another exchange, collectively spent $22.8 million on advertising last year, nearly double the $12.4 million they shelled out in 2019, according to the research firm Kantar. In recent months, Coinbase hired the Martin Agency, the advertising company behind GEICO and DoorDash.As Madison Avenue fields more inquiries from cryptocurrency clients, agency executives are feeling pressure to better communicate the investment risks, rather than romanticize the industry.“I get very nervous because I start looking at the way that some of the platforms are specifically targeting younger investors,” said Alex Hesz, the chief strategy officer of the advertising giant DDB Worldwide. In the face of frenzied cryptocurrency trading, ad agencies should push for moderation and diversification, he said. “Maximizing is what’s being encouraged here — the idea that this is an amazing asset, and as much as you want to put in, come on and jump on in, the Bitcoin’s lovely,” Mr. Hesz said. “We would never feel comfortable for an alcohol client, or a high-salt or high-sugar or high-fat client, to encourage that level of unequivocal behavior.”Some celebrity endorsements of cryptocurrencies have run into trouble. In 2017, the Securities and Exchange Commission cautioned that some famous people were hyping the virtual currency sales known as initial coin offerings without disclosing that they had been paid to promote them. The commission has since settled charges against the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr., the music producer DJ Khaled and the actor Steven Seagal.Social media influencers and e-sports stars have also been linked to shady cryptocurrency schemes, accused of pumping up coins just before their value crashes.Coin Cloud’s chief marketing officer, Amondo Redmond, said he hoped Mr. Lee’s stature would help elevate the industry by delivering something “more than just cool creative, but that is really at the forefront of digital currency becoming mainstream.”“It’s more than just adding a celebrity face,” he said.Mr. Lee, who won an Oscar in 2019 in the best adapted screenplay category for “BlacKkKlansman,” has worked on ads for Capital One, Uber and, most famously, Nike. In the 1980s and 1990s, he directed and starred in commercials for Air Jordans, playing his cinematic alter ego Mars Blackmon opposite Michael Jordan.“That was lightning in a bottle,” Mr. Lee said from a flight bound for the Cannes Film Festival, where he is the first Black person to lead the festival jury.He declined to say how much he had been paid for the Coin Cloud commercial, but noted that “if anyone’s known my body of work over the last four decades, you kind of know about the way I see the world, and when they approached me, it fit in line.”As the coronavirus pandemic continues to highlight financial disadvantages for people of color, Mr. Lee hopes to promote cryptocurrency as neutral to race, gender, age and other identifying characteristics.But he was no expert before filming began, and had to take “a crash course” on crypto. He insisted that the commercial include a line urging viewers to do their own research on virtual money.Mr. Lee said he now planned to invest in virtual coins. He said he would not, however, go anywhere near the digital ownership certificates known as nonfungible tokens.“NFTs, I don’t understand that,” he said, laughing. “I’m old school, so sometimes my children have to turn on the TV — all those remotes and stuff.” More

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    Black Workers Stopped Making Progress on Pay. Is It Racism?

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    William Spriggs, a professor at Howard University, wrote an open letter last year to his fellow economists. Reacting to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, he began the letter with a question: “Is now a teachable moment for economists?”Slamming what he saw as attempts to deny racial discrimination, Dr. Spriggs argued that economists should stop looking for a reason other than racism — some “omitted variable” — to account for why African Americans are falling further behind in the economy.“Hopefully, this moment will cause economists to reflect and rethink how we study racial disparities,” wrote Dr. Spriggs, who is Black. “Trapped in the dominant conversation, far too often African American economists find themselves having to prove that African Americans are equal.”After a year in which demands for racial justice acquired new resonance, Dr. Spriggs and others are pushing back against a strongly held tenet of economics: that differences in wages largely reflect differences in skill.While African Americans lag behind whites in educational attainment, that disparity has narrowed substantially over the last 40 years. Still, the wage gap hasn’t budged.In 2020, the typical full-time Black worker earned about 20 percent less than a typical full-time white worker. And Black men and women are far less likely than whites to have a job. So the median earnings for Black men in 2019 amounted to only 56 cents for every dollar earned by white men. The gap was wider than it was in 1970.Lost ProgressEarnings of Black men, as a percentage of the earnings of white men, are at the same place they were in the 1960s and 1970s. More

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    Living on the Margins, ‘Surfing’ on the Buses

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    “Hold on! Hold on tight!”It was a hot afternoon in Olinda, a coastal city in northeast Brazil, and Marlon da Silva Santos, the leader of a group called Loucos do Surf, or the Crazy Surfers, was shouting from the rooftop of a speeding bus.I grasped at an edge of the roof with one hand, for balance, and tried to shoot with the other — but the bus passed over a bump in the road, jerking abruptly, and I momentarily lost my balance. I managed to stay on, though my camera nearly flew off from my neck.Marlon dos Santos, at right, spreads his arms as he surfs atop a bus in Olinda.I felt a rush of adrenaline. Traveling at 30 miles per hour along President Kennedy Avenue, I was trying my best to document a group of young Brazilians who were illegally “surfing” on moving city buses.Among the group, maneuvers are classified by their degree of difficulty.We saw flashing police lights ahead and retreated into the bus. It was tense inside; the hot sea air swirled around our bodies. Once we passed the sirens, a cheerful celebration erupted as we winded our way to the beach.Émerson plays in the sea with a group of fellow surfers. Olinda is a popular tourist destination in northeastern Brazil.The surfers were young, mostly between the ages of 12 to 16, and a majority of them were Black. They wore Cyclone shorts, flip-flops, caps and golden chains — a style that’s common among many young people from the peripheries of large Brazilian cities.Their presence on the buses made many passengers uncomfortable.A bus driver threatens Loucos do Surf members after they surfed on the roof. Few drivers interrupt their trips for fear of the group’s response.“Some drivers stop the bus, tell us to get off, pick a fight,” Marlon said. “But most follow their normal route while we’re up there.”“We just want to have fun,” he added as we exited the bus.A bus surfer hangs onto a rear window frame.I first learned of the Loucos do Surf via a video posted to Facebook. In it, Marlon, then 16, was surfing on a high-speed bus, oozing confidence and taking selfies. Within an hour, I was exchanging messages with the surfers and planning my trip to Olinda.A week later, I met them at the Xambá bus terminal. They were skeptical at first: “You aren’t a policeman?” they asked.I showed them my website and my Instagram account and, in just a few hours, joined them on a bus ride.During my weeklong visit with the bus surfers in 2017, I felt happy and free. In a way, they allowed me to revisit my own roots: During my teenage years, growing up in São Paulo, I, too, engaged in certain risky and transgressive behavior — including pixação, a derivation of graffiti popular in parts of BrazilPassersby were often amazed to see the surfers on top of the moving buses.When I met the group, they were skeptical of my motives. “You aren’t a policeman?” they asked.But they soon welcomed my presence.The Loucos do Surf are part of a long tradition of performing death-defying stunts involving public transportation in Brazil.In the 1980s and ’90s, thrill-seeking young Brazilians risked their lives by traveling from downtown Rio de Janeiro to the suburbs on the rooftops of crowded trains. The train surfers, hundreds of whom were seriously injured or killed, became popular in the Brazilian press.After an intense crackdown, the practice’s popularity waned.Some surfers said they were simply chasing thrills. Others said it was a form of protest.A young surfer named Luciano Schmitt told me that the art of bus surfing was partly a response to a lack of cultural and leisure outlets. “The only soccer field we had was demolished.” Instead, he said, he and his friends prefer “bigu” — the local term for bus surfing — and the beach.Some bus surfers said the activity was also a form of protest against the price of public transportation — and, more broadly, against the hardships and financial restrictions imposed on millions of young people struggling on the peripheries of society.At the time, in 2017, Brazil was still recovering from the worst recession ever to hit the country. Youth unemployment rates spiked to nearly 29 percent in 2017, up from around 16 percent in 2014, according to data from the World Bank.In addition to accessing the roof via windows, surfers also use roof hatches.A dominant element of that hardship is the violence that permeates daily life in Black communities on the outskirts of large Brazilian cities — including the neighborhoods of Sol Nascente, part of the city of Recipe, and Alto da Bondade, in Olinda, where the Loucos do Surf group was established.According to Brazil’s Atlas of Violence, a study released in 2020 by the country’s Institute for Applied Economic Research and the Forum of Public Safety, homicides among Black residents increased by 11.5 percent between 2008 and 2018, whereas homicides among non-Black residents fell by 12.9 percent over the same period. Such data points help expose the racial inequalities that have dominated Brazilian society for centuries — and underscore how desensitized many in the country have become to violence within marginalized Black communities.Electrical wires pose serious dangers.Loucos do Surf hasn’t been spared. Marlon — who was known by his fellow surfers as Black Diamond, and who had earned the status of King of Surf for being the group’s most skilled and courageous surfer — was shot at point-blank range and killed near his home in 2018, a year after my visit.After his funeral, members of the group held a memorial. More than 20 young people balanced atop a bus, singing in his honor.Gabriela Batista, a bus surfer and a close friend of Marlon’s, told me via text that the group was once like a family. But their enthusiasm for the pastime, she said, largely ended with his death.Members of the group lie flat to hide from police officers.When I remember Marlon, my thoughts swirl with the circumstances of his life: the violence he endured, the choices he made, the economic disadvantages he faced, the precariousness of his support networks — including Brazil’s underfunded public education system.“School doesn’t attract me,” he once told me. “What the teachers say doesn’t stay with me.” Instead, he said, whenever he was sitting with a book, he felt like he was wasting time that could be spent surfing.And that’s mostly how I remember him now: poised — proudly, deftly, defiantly — atop a hurtling bus.“Is anything better than this?” he once shouted at me while surfing, the salty air slapping against his face, his eyes bright and alive, his voice carried aloft by the wind.Victor Moriyama, a regular contributor to The Times, is a Brazilian photographer based in São Paulo. You can follow his work on Instagram.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. More

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    Black and Hispanic Women Still Behind as Jobs Rebound

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    The labor market recovery is uneven. Teenagers are flooding back into jobs, while those older than 55 are less likely to work than before the pandemic.Black and Hispanic women are lagging furthest in returning to work.Percent change in the number of employed people since before the pandemic, by race, ethnicity and gender More

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    Biden’s Budget Has Racial Equity Efforts Baked In

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    The budget, which was released on Friday, includes tens of billions of dollars worth of programs intended to bolster the fortunes of people of color and other historically underserved groups.WASHINGTON — Six days after his inauguration, President Biden vowed that his administration would see everything through the lens of racial equality, making it “the business of the whole of government.”On Friday, his $6 trillion budget began to make good on that promise.Sprinkled throughout the president’s enormous spending plan are scores of programs amounting to tens of billions of dollars intended to specifically bolster the fortunes of Black people, Asian people, tribal communities and other historically underserved groups in the United States.Mr. Biden is not the first president to spend money on such programs. And civil rights advocates said the budget released on Friday fell short in some critical areas like student loans, where they say even more money is needed to rectify a longstanding lack of fairness and a lopsided burden being carried by minorities.“It’s going in the right direction, but it’s not a perfect document,” said Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., who said he was disappointed that the president’s budget did not call for canceling student loan debt, which falls disproportionately on Black Americans.But he added that his organization was pleased that the president was “continuing to make one of his priorities equity” via the budget.That idea — of focusing special attention on the distribution of taxpayer money across racial groups — has never been approached as methodically as it has this year by Mr. Biden, advocates say. Asked about the president’s equity agenda on Friday, Shalanda Young, the president’s acting budget director, said her department had “built that in” to the overall spending plan by giving “clear directions to our agencies that they are to use that lens as they implement these programs.”“This is not something we should have to call out,” she said. “This is something that should be pervasive in how the government does its business.”Much of the president’s vast budget directs spending that is not explicitly distributed based on race: health care, education, the military, transportation, agriculture, retirement programs and foreign policy, among other areas.But within all of those programs, Mr. Biden’s team has proposed increased spending with the goal of ensuring that people of color and others who are often left behind get a bigger share of the overall pie.Among the budget items, big and small, that are driven by equity:$3 billion to reduce maternal mortality and to end race-based disparities in maternal mortality.$15 billion for “Highways to Neighborhoods,” a program that would reconnect neighborhoods cut off by infrastructure projects developed decades ago.$900 million to fund Tribal efforts to expand affordable housing.$936 million for an Accelerating Environmental and Economic Justice initiative at the Environmental Protection Agency.$110 million for a Thriving Communities initiative, to foster transportation equity through grants to underserved communities.$39 billion for tuition subsidies to low- and middle-income students attending historically Black colleges and universities and those serving other minority groups.Mr. Biden foreshadowed that kind of budgetary decision-making in his first days in office. In a speech announcing his “equity agenda,” the president said he was committed to going further than his predecessors when it came to considering groups that had, in his words, been too often left behind.“We need to open the promise of America to every American,” he said during the speech on Jan. 26. “And that means we need to make the issue of racial equity not just an issue for any one department of government.”That approach has incited anger from conservatives, who accuse the president and his advisers of pursuing a racist agenda against white Americans. Fox News ran a headline accusing Mr. Biden of trying to “Stoke Nationwide Division With ‘Racial Equity’ Push.” And The New York Post published an editorial, titled “In Push for Woke ‘Equity,’ Biden Abandons Equality,” that accused the president of being “un-American.”The budget contains “Highways to Neighborhoods,” which reconnects neighborhoods cut off by historic infrastructure projects, such as Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans.Abdul Aziz for The New York TimesA group called America First Legal, which is run by Stephen Miller and Mark Meadows, two top aides to former President Donald J. Trump, won a preliminary injunction this week from a Texas judge against an effort by Mr. Biden’s Small Business Administration to prioritize grants from its $28.6 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund to businesses owned by minorities or underserved groups.“This order is another powerful strike against the Biden administration’s unconstitutional decision to pick winners and losers based on the color of their skin,” the group said in a statement.The president appears unlikely to back down. In a speech days after his inauguration, he vowed that “every White House component, and every agency will be involved in this work because advancing equity has to be everyone’s job.”Still, for all of Mr. Biden’s forceful rhetoric — he once pledged to no longer allow “a narrow, cramped view of the promise of this nation to fester” — his administration made little effort on Friday to focus attention on that principle or to highlight details about how an equity-driven approach would change the way the government spends its money..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 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(min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}During a news conference to introduce the budget on Friday, Ms. Young and Cecilia Rouse, the chairwoman of the White House’s National Economic Council — both of whom are Black women — did not mention the president’s equity agenda until a reporter asked about it toward the end.And the budget itself does not try to quantify the effect of following the president’s guidance to make decisions based on a sense of racial equity. There is no “equity” section of the budget. Aides did not send out fact sheets to reporters on Friday promoting the “equity spending” in the president’s inaugural budget.That left some of the public relations work to civil rights groups and other advocates, who quickly pointed to examples of spending that would benefit communities who had traditionally been left behind by previous presidents.Sara Chieffo, the chief lobbyist for the League of Conservation Voters, an pro-environment group, pointed to the $936 million Accelerating Environmental and Economic Justice initiative at the Environmental Protection Agency, which is aimed at cleaning up the environment in underserved communities.“The importance of this administration’s proposal to make the largest-ever investment in communities of color and low-income communities who have been subjected to environmental racism for decades cannot be overstated,” Ms. Chieffo said.Marcela Howell, the president of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, praised the president for investing in programs that specifically benefit Black women.“Kudos also go to President Biden for funding important programs to address racial equity and economic security,” she said in a statement, adding that “we applaud the proposed investments in infrastructure and job creation, affordable child care and work force training, education” and more.The Planned Parenthood Federation of America issued a statement thanking Mr. Biden for what the group called “important investments” that it said would help to “address the maternal mortality crisis and its devastating impact in communities of color.” More

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    Banks Fight $4 Billion Debt Relief Plan for Black Farmers

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    Lenders are pressuring the Agriculture Department to give them more money, saying quick repayments will cut into profits.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration’s efforts to provide $4 billion in debt relief to minority farmers is encountering stiff resistance from banks, which are complaining that the government initiative to pay off the loans of borrowers who have faced decades of financial discrimination will cut into their profits and hurt investors. More