Ayanna Pressley Reveals Bigotry of Low Expectations With Tweet on ‘Black and Latinx Commuters’ Who Evade Fares

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), a member of the squad, highlighted the bigotry of soft expectations with a Saturday evening tweet promoting The Freedom to Move Act, which she introduced with Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) last April.

Black and Latinx commuters are disproportionately criminalized by fare evasion policies.

Congress must pass my #FreedomtoMove Act to grant Black and brown riders the freedom to navigate their community without fear.

— Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (@RepPressley) March 26, 2022

The legislation, as laid out in an explainer from Rep. Pressley’s office, “would provide public transit agencies with the support they need to provide farefree transit and handle their long-overdue system improvements.” {snip}

“Grantees would be required to work in partnership with community advocates and stakeholders to report on how resources will be used to improve the reliability of transit service for low-income and historically underserved communities including ways the grantee will improve connectivity to critical services and reduce commute times,” the explainer reads, going on to spell out specifically how “Grantees are also required to do an evaluation of current fare evasion policies and how they plan to eliminate such policies and end the criminalization of fare evasion.”

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{snip} In the first three months of 2021, costing the MTA in New York City $56 million for that period alone. A report from earlier this year found that the MBTA, in Pressley’s city of Boston, may have lost up to $35 million in a year from fare evasion.

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