Adding Black culture to the Boston narrative

Sidney Baptista is determined to take Black culture to the running masses, but he started by bringing running culture to his Boston neighborhood

Everyone’s talking about the Boston Marathon right now. Nothing else in the road running world matters this week. The holy grail of couldn’t-even-qualify-for-it marathons is just one of the things the state capital of Massachusetts is known for. What else? The Tea Party. Tom Brady. Harvard University. Larry Bird. Whitey Bulger. Ben Affleck. Boston hardcore punk. People of Irish descent. It’s all incredibly… white.

That’s less than half of Boston’s truth, of course. The city is listed 6th or 56th most diverse city in the USA depending on which metrics the study uses, and while the Boston Irish are the largest single ethnic group in the city, with a conservative estimate of 22.8% of its 675,000 residents, 56% of Bostonians identify as non-white.

One Boston native that’s been working hard to redress the perceptions and the future of Boston is Sidney Baptista. He’s a busy man. Having started Pioneers Run Crew in Dorchester, South Boston back in 2017, he added an apparel brand, PYNRS, in 202…