Sonia launches her campaign for governor - Full Transcript

SpeechJun 23, 2021

I’m Sonia Chang-Díaz. I’m a mom, a former public school teacher, a state senator, a grassroots organizer. I’m tired of waiting for government to live up to our hopes and our families’ needs. That’s why I’m running for Governor of Massachusetts.

I grew up moving between two different worlds as a multiracial child with a single mom growing up in a wealthy white community:

My dad was an immigrant who came to America from Costa Rica with just $50 in his pocket, but a big dream. And with the help from teachers, lunch ladies and librarians, he made it not only to college, he made it to space, and became NASA’s first Latino astronaut.
While my dad pursued his lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut out in Texas, my mom raised me and my sister here in Massachusetts.
My mom was a social worker and a woman of faith. She spent her career helping women and children struggling on the margins of society, and building a community for me and my sister.

One thing about my mom — she knew how to make every penny count. We saw her stretch our grocery budget with powdered milk, and soup nights. And even though she struggled to make do out of little, she still found enough to give in church and to others. My mom took that grit and grace, and cobbled together what privilege she had to move us to Newton, where she knew I could get a 1st-class education.

In high school it was clear my family was different. All the kids around me had cars, took fancy trips to Europe...We didn't have those things but I got the same education that the rest of the kids in our zip code had and for that I’m forever grateful — but I know my story is an exception. And I never forgot that. So when I graduated from college, knowing full well what a difference a high quality education made in my life, I wanted to pay this debt forward. I decided to be a teacher in one of the poorest, least funded school districts in Massachusetts: Lynn.

Every day, I could feel the way the wealth gap impacted my students: never enough paper in the supply closet, kids coming to school without winter coats, low expectations, and too many students on each teacher’s roster. I saw how state and local governments went above and beyond to care for the children of wealthy families, like the ones I grew up with — and how it somehow lost its sense of urgency when it came to children struggling on the margins.

State government was choosing not to see them. Choosing to abandon my students in Lynn.

With my dad the answer to a problem was always, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” So I became an organizer, because what else is there to do when your leaders aren’t listening while your students’ needs grew larger every day? I got out there and organized for voting rights, for progressive change, for more women in office. And still, real change wasn’t happening.

So, in 2008 I decided to run myself. And to the surprise of all the naysayers, I won; I became the first Latina to serve in the Massachusetts State Senate.

For the past 12 years I’ve been fighting like hell for working families.

And as a state senator, I’ve found myself moving between worlds once again, just as I had done all of my life: now representing some of the wealthiest and the poorest households in Massachusetts. Going from fancy boardrooms in the morning to housing development community rooms at night.

In those travels back and forth, I’ve discovered something about the culture on Beacon Hill: It lacks a critical ingredient... urgency.

In Massachusetts, we like to consider ourselves the best, brightest and most progressive. But the truth is that our systems are broken and they are failing hundreds of thousands of families.

We have a government full of powerful people, most especially our governor who are convinced that government can afford to go small. And for some of them, that might be true, because the people that they personally know are doing just fine.

But the status quo doesn't work for everyone.

That’s how today across the Commonwealth:

Students spend years earning their degree, but can’t afford to pay off their student debt.
Grandmas and grandpas are choosing between paying for their insulin and keeping the heat on.
Moms and dads wonder whether their babies will inherit a planet that will sustain them.
Working people who’ve been busting their butts for years, have never seen a raise relative to inflation.
Black and brown kids, and their parents, worry that their next encounter with the police could be their last.

The system is broken. And like any other political system in the world, it will never change unless we stand up and demand more.

Demand more than incremental fixes
Demand more than nibbling around the edges.

Power concedes nothing without demand.

But then there’s the demand: we do have the power to win big for our families and our communities if we organize together.

Here’s how I know:

You might have seen some headlines about the Student Opportunity Act, and about that bill becoming law. And maybe you know how the story ends. But you might not know how it began.

Let me take you back to the beginning, when victory was not assured. Five years ago, Beacon Hill watchers called this set of reforms pie-in-the-sky. The Baker/Polito Administration dismissed it as unrealistic.

At that time, state leaders loved to tout Massachusetts’ reputation as an education leader. But in fact we had among the worst achievement gaps in the nation—literally bottoming out the 50 states in some metrics of the gap between wealthy and poor, and white kids and kids of color.

Around this same time, in 2015, I was the sole person of color on a 21-person commission tasked with updating our state’s aging education funding formula.

Almost everybody on this commission assumed we’d just make a couple of modest recommendations. We’d call it a win. We’d go home.

But I saw an opportunity. A once-in-a-generation opportunity to uphold our Constitutional promise to deliver a quality education to all of our children.

The power brokers on Beacon Hill had a different idea. They wanted to get in and get out with the least expensive recommendations possible. They didn’t want to touch the issue of achievement gaps at all. After months of meetings, and hours and hours’ worth of testimony, presentations, and polite conversation, they said the “side issue” needed what we on Beacon Hill call “further study.”

So the commission was about to adjourn. I knew that if I didn’t speak up, we’d be pretending like we didn’t see another generation’s worth of kids sitting in schools set up for failure.

But I couldn’t pretend. Because I move between worlds every day. Because it was my students who were set up for failure. I knew I'd be damned if I would let that happen on my watch.

So, knowing it would cost me dearly in my relationships on Beacon Hill...

I spoke up. And then I organized. We got a new report. A better, more honest, more ambitious report. A report that became the foundation of the Student Opportunity Act.

For four years, we had to drag Governor Baker to the altar. But from Boston to the South Shore to Leominster to East Hampton —we built a movement to get it done, we made it impossible for Beacon Hill to ignore working families and their kids.

And in 2019, Governor Baker gritted his teeth and signed that bill into law at one of the most under-resourced schools in my district. A law that will pump 1.5 billion — with a B — new dollars into our school systems redefining the way our state funds education and accomplishes the work of equity for generations to come.

That’s what can happen when we elect people who are willing to challenge the status quo — even when it’s uncomfortable.

Bold, transformative, change is possible. We just need to stand together, see each other’s fights as our own, and stop putting people in charge who are more concerned with holding onto power than doing something with it.

I know this kind of transformational change is possible because I’ve lived it.

You can see it in the coalition of urban and suburban parents, BIPOC kids, workers, researchers, and business leaders that won the Student Opportunity Act.

In the outside-in organizing that made true criminal justice reform possible in 2018.

And in the police reform that protestors called us to last year.

In Massachusetts’ historic transgender equal rights law.

The list goes on.

The problem is: These kinds of wins are still the exception rather than the rule.

I’m tired of being the exception. We have to make audacity the rule.

In a state with more millionaires than 46 other states, Massachusetts can pass a millionaires’ wealth tax.

As the wealth divide grows across our state, we can overcome it by building economic security across generations.

Massachusetts should lead on voting rights and health equity.

Massachusetts should lead the way in greening our energy use and build a 21st Century transit system.

We can close the racial wealth divide, restore the middle class and make sure our kids’ economic fortunes look better, not worse than their parents’.

This world is within our reach. Don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t.

As we emerge from this pandemic, we have a choice: we can go back to the status quo, or we can run towards problems with the urgency and determination needed to solve them.

There’s no mystical perfect time, no magical politician who will wave a wand and get it all done. The time is now, and we are, indeed, the ones we’ve been waiting for.

I’m running for governor to build the commonwealth we all want our kids to grow up in, and that I know, in my bones, is possible. I’m asking you to come make it with me.