Seattle Mayor
Bobby Tucker
Question
Black wealth remains near zero due to centuries of systemic anti-Black racism and is on a trajectory to only worsen. In Seattle, white wealth is nearly 20x more than Black wealth. What specific actions will you take to close the Black-white wealth gap?
How much of the Black-white wealth gap will you close while in office?
Who are you working with in the Black community to close it?
How will you support investing federal funding directly and specifically into the Black community in the next two years?
Answer
The specific action I will take is First follow the Money! If there is theft and fraudulent activity, those involved need to be held accountable. This is because the leaders that are in charge now have failed the African American communities.
I and my team will work hard to cut the wealth gap in half between the African American and Caucasian communities.
Black wealth is wealth that always can grow, also stay, but NEVER can be taken away. If we can further the generational wealth as a community, when we CAN close that wealth gap.
Question
There is a crisis in Black health in this region. In King County: Black babies are more 2x more likely to die before their first birthday than white babies; Black birthing people die 3x more than white birthing people; Black residents die of diabetes at 3x the rate of white residents; Nearly half of all Black adults in King County are food insecure; Black adults are 3x more likely to be living in poverty; Black adults are evicted at 6x the rate of white adults; Black people in King County contracted COVID-19 at 3x the rates of whites; and yet Black community received less than 2% of federal relief funding.
This region boasts some of the most sophisticated, renowned hospitals and medical facilities in the world. The disparities in medical treatment received by Black communities are appalling, with COVID-19 serving as just the most recent flashlight into this dark and disturbing reality. What are your specific plans to invest in Black community health?
In the entire Pacific Northwest (OR, WA, ID, MT, WY) there are zero Black community-owned, federally qualified health clinics. What are your specific plans to support base-building Black community-owned clinics? Specifically, the Tubman Center for Health and Freedom (TCHF), Somali Health Board (SHB), Surge Reproductive Justice (SRJ), African American Health Board and more?
Answer
What has happened during COVID-19 is an atrocity. Our communities need to be treated with better care and as mayor, I believe that I will give our people the equity and safety that we need. To do so, I believe that we must provide funding and marketing to support the Tubman Center for Health and Freedom (TCHF), Somali Health Board (SHB), Surge Reproductive Justice (SRJ), African American Health Board, and other base-building Black community-owned clinics. As a black man, I know that it is necessary for us to better the impact that is being had on our men, women, and children.
Seattle is known for being the top-10 best medicated hospitals nationwide. To hear that black women and children are being more affected than any other race is unbearable. That is why I say NO MORE EXCUSES. No more excuses when it comes to COVID-19 coverage, no more excuses for poor medical attention, no more excuses for treating one patient better than the other because of race, gender, age, or insurance. Because when it comes to the black community, my community, I will make sure that we are all treated as one.
Question
Equity means ownership. Thriving Black communities require control and agency over land. We prioritize Black land acquisition as a foundational pillar to our work. As demand for land grows at an unprecedented pace, the rapid gentrification, active divestment from, and exclusion of Blacks from Seattle and King County is important not merely due to the dismantling of historical Black cultural and societal spaces, but also the socio-economic, health, wealth, and education fallout resulting from Blacks being pushed out of the State’s largest economic and cultural engine. What is your specific short and long-term plan to rectify this region’s abysmal Black land ownership rates?
What is your plan to rapidly advance Black home ownership rates?
What is your plan to rapidly advance Black community land acquisition and restore historically Black cultural and societal spaces?
How much will you invest in the: (A) Keiro project - the first entirely Black community led and centered homelessness consortium with wraparound direct services; (B) Red (Black and Green) Barn Ranch - Black liberated farming and youth healing center; (C) Youth Achievement Center - a holistic co-housing complex that is designed to support homeless students, historically underserved students, system-involved youth?
What mechanisms will you put in place to halt gentrification across the state, specifically to stop corporate and private developers from buying up once affordable property and pricing out Black communities and families?
What specific policies will you pass to not only halt gentrification but re-invigorate the Central District as the hub of Black land ownership in Seattle?
Answer
Ownership is crucial and needed in our community, as it is a powerful trait. My team and I are enacting the plan to motivate black ownership of rental properties, homes, restaurants, stores, and businesses. By hosting frequent educational forums discussing generational wealth, financial literacy, and Black land ownership, we are going to be rapidly advancing Black home ownership rates. My team and I are excited to share with the black community of Seattle the knowledge and wisdom for us all to decrease the wealth gap and increase the income, wealth, and financial literacy of the black communities in Seattle.
Seattle is known for its diversity, but even I have noticed that more and more Black Americans are moving south. This is what I call modern day redlining in Seattle. Seattle is the home for many, so when we see more buildings and gentrification on what used to be black homes, we have to ask ourselves “what CAN we do to make sure the black community feels safe and wanted in their environment.” where we can start is by giving more funding to the relief program, we need to go down to the community like areas in new holy and rainer see what they need the most. Is it food quantity and quality? Is the pipeline in our community clean enough? Is the rate driving them away? I am willing to be more hands on than any other mayor because we are being told too many promises and not more results.
Question
The public education system is anti-Black. It uses harsh discipline policies that push Black students out of schools at disproportionate rates; denies Black students the right to learn about their culture and whitewashes the curriculum to exclude Black peoples' history, contributions, and accomplishments. It pushes Black teachers out of schools in Seattle-King County, and across the country, and spends entirely more money on imprisoning Black youth than on educating and healing them. How will you support pro-Black education?
How will you create and maintain Black community schools?
How will you establish and maintain restorative justice practices in schools to end the school-to-prison pipeline?
What will you do to ensure Black teachers are hired, that current educators receive anti-racist professional development, that schools implement Black studies curricula?
What will you do to ensure the Black community has control of schools that serve Black kids as well as education resources and levy funds that are meant for but rarely make it to Black youth?
Answer
When it comes to education and schools people love the term “good or bad school” but we have to look deeper into why a school, especially the students, consider it “good or bad”. So when “bad” students in “bad school'' do “bad things” they deserve worse punishment? And we are supposed to believe that it just so happens that the “bad” student in the “bad” school doing “bad” things is black? No, these are excuses to be racist and discriminatory to young black students. I will not sit there as the students of Seattle are being held back in their education because they are black! No child in Seattle should be punished more because of racial, gender, or age. No more excuses, I will not stop until every school in Seattle treats every student with the respect that they so do deserve.
My team and I are excited to bring higher pay for educators in our school and especially work to recruit more black teachers in our schools. We will be working to raise pay for teachers not just in Seattle, but federally because education is critical for the betterment of our society. We are going to create a more diverse group of teachers around our city and by raising the wages for teachers, more people will want to attend our schools, students and teachers alike. The quality of education in Seattle when I am Mayor will be unprecedented because my team and I really care about how the education system has previously impacted our communities and we are making the CHANGE Seattle needs.
Question
Already experiencing COVID-19’s economic fallout, conditions for Seattle’s Black community have worsened. Against that backdrop, KCEN and many others in the Black community mobilized to divest from policing and demanded correlating investment in pro-Black public safety solutions that work for us, for the first time in Seattle's history. This movement was driven by Black community and specifically called and continues to call for a reckoning with anti-Black racism (i.e., not a general “racial” reckoning, or a “BIPOC” movement).
Emboldened by the overwhelming support of thousands and thousands of community members, the Seattle City Council briefly upheld their pledge to divest from a percentage of the Seattle Police Department (SPD)'s bloated annual budget and invest modestly in Black communities. It should not have taken such prolonged, sustained community efforts for this change but we acknowledge the small percentage of divestment as a break from decades of votes to expand violent, anti-Black policing.
The work of reshaping this region into one that values all Black lives—and moves away from funding racist policing and towards resourcing true public safety—is overdue and not for non-Black folks, unaccountable gatekeepers or non-rooted folks to dictate. We advocated strongly for monies from the police budget to be invested directly into the Black community and are unmoved on that stance.
What percent of SPD’s budget will you divest from and invest specifically in Black community-led and -centered organizations? What date will you close the Youth Jail in the first year of your term?
Will you join the veto-proof majority of the city council who pledged to defund SPD by half and what will you do to accelerate that commitment becoming a reality?
What specific steps will you take to shift investments from the criminal punishment system towards human services that are controlled, led and center Black community?
Answer
Our community needs to know that the Seattle police department cares about its citizens. There should be no excuse to not be funding the Black community-led and -centered organizations, as these groups are pivotal to changing the paradigm of the systemic oppression of the black community. 20% of the SPD budget will not be seen as being taken away from the police department, but actually reinforcing the Black community-led and -centered organizations for the purpose of showing genuine solidarity with the black community and decreasing crime rates around the city in all communities. The black community is not the only community that has crime, but by providing these assets, the city is demonstrating how we need to aid the black community to bring the resources and funding to positively guide our young black men and women.
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Xtian Gunther
