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
Civil rights are about equality, a guarantee of fair treatment for all. I believe that the primary engine of institutionalized racial inequality is our system of economic injustice which is deeply embedded in our public institutions. In particular, wealth ensures private education at public school prices, elite attorneys that provide special favorable outcomes in our public courts, and legalized bribery of public officials in the form of campaign contributions. These private privileges are granted by our public institutions to our wealthy elite and are denied to those without wealth. Until we reform these corrupt government practices, we will continue to have economic inequality with poor and minority communities showing lower rates of high school graduation, lower college attendance rates, lower incomes, higher unemployment, higher rates of arrest, higher rates of incarceration, and lower rates of participation and representation in our democracy. As mayor I will press for national reforms and locally I will give all people an ongoing voice in government through resident satisfactions surveys in each interaction with city government including police, making department heads responsible for improving results, and make the departments under the mayor accountable to the people through resident satisfaction surveys with each interaction with government and I plan to invest heavily in equal outcomes in education for all of our children through the department of education and early learning.
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
As a primary care and emergency room doctor serving minorities and the poor for over 30 years, I understand the importance of healthcare and why healthcare is not available in poor communities. The lack of healthcare for poor people is a symptom of a broken social, economic and governmental systems. As a fellow human being, I understand that we all want more for ourselves and our children than a box to stand on while we look over the fence at the action. Real equality means equal outcomes in our schools, our courts, our hospitals, and our government. If elected, I intend to invest in equal outcomes for all, to grow the long legs of true equality, giving each person the power to stand tall in their own authority, running freely on their own two legs and going toe to toe with their peers. Real equality creates a level playing field that lasts a lifetime.
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
All of the people living and working in Seattle who need it deserve affordable housing.Under my leadership, the city of Seattle will develop a public private partnership similar to our public utilities, that will be responsible for providing affordable housing for people who work in our city. Our city needs a public works project of affordable housing available to those who work in our city and make less than 70% of the median household income. Under my leadership, the City of Seattle will build pre-designed and pre-permitted mid-rise units situated all around the city. Residents would live close to their jobs to limit traffic, travel, and our carbon foot-print. These units would provide construction jobs for people who live here as well.
If we want more affordable housing we need to build it, not tear it down, and we need to reward those who provide affordable housing, not punish them.
We must first fix the zoning laws and ordinances. All of us, except some developers, experience our zoning as broken. We must eradicate the dysfunction and corruption of our current zoning laws.
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
Our public education system, our justice system and our democratic process are rigged against all people who are not wealthy, regardless of race. We must have real equality for all. Our system of economic privilege in our systems of education, justice, and governance are the engines of institutionalized racism. Root causes are the wealthy elite get special treatment from our government institutions and our poor get treated poorly. Public primary education is funded through property taxes. Wealthy neighborhood children get "private education on public school prices". Average US public primary schools provide education on par with Uzbekistan and Mongolia. Poor neighborhood children get even worse. Our justice system functions as an adversarial system of rough justice where you hire guns in the form of attorneys to defend your interest. The amount of justice you receive is directly proportional to the number and quality of the attorneys you can hire, with public defenders spread thin and no attorneys to represent non-criminal law for those who are poor. Our system of governance favors the wealthy elite. The wealthy elite choose who will run, who gets airtime, who is in the debates, who is a viable candidate. Then the wealthy elite, through campaign contributions, determine what messages are heard. And then the two party system suppresses minority opinions and values. As mayor I plan to prioritize early learning and early intervention for children who fall behind. Equal outcomes in graduation rate and college acceptance is the proof of equal opportunity.
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
The choice between economic quality for the Black community and police budgets is a false one. We do not have to choose. Defunding the police is a reactive idea that is giving us more of what we don’t want. The city council has already shifted funds from police. Now all of us are victims of rising crime and delayed 911 response times. Defunding the police is a political reaction. This kind of thinking goes that if we don’t have police, we won’t have police abuses. It misses the fact that we have criminals perpetrating civil rights abuses on us , just as we did in the latter days of CHOP. Defunding the police doesn’t lead to fewer civil rights abuses, it leads to more, especially among our poor and most vulnerable. The wealthy are now buying private security. Who will protect our poor and minority neighborhoods? Defunding the police is reactive and irresponsible. We must have constitutional community policing. I will hold our police accountable by immediately terminating any portion of the infamous 2018 police union contract that limits accountability and oversight and make police accountable to the communities they serve.
