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 current systems that exist to create and maintain wealth are specific designed to benefit white communities and those economic protections that generate intergenerational wealth deserve to exist for Black communities as well. Wealth protection infrastructure needs to be decolonized. Land acquisition, communal land ownership, and other sustainable wealth investments need to be created and overseen by Black visionaries and leaders. Land ownership, and legislative investments to public infrastructure in Black communities will build and protect neighborhoods, local business, and communal space so families can raise their children safely and see their grandchildren live in Seattle. I would aim to cut the Black-white wealth gap by exploring options to extend the Seattle Promise to pay for undergraduate degrees, addressing health inequities, exploring housing modalities that respond to the cultural needs in the Black community, asking for leadership and collaboration from the Black community and resourcing those ideas, land banking with Black-led organizations benefiting and supporting Black-led affordable housing
I have worked with the following Black led organizations and would be honored to work with them in the Mayor’s office.
Decriminalize Seattle
Africatown
Urban League
Byrd Barr Place
Lavender Rights Project
King County Equity Now (attended meetings)
I will build the next generation of leadership through coalition and work with organizations like King County Equity Now who is already doing the work of strengthen our communities, I will also work closely with you all. to ensure material change is made by the Black community and for the Black community. City dollars need to be spent on Black business, and Black neighborhoods, guided by Black community leaders and families. The only way to make our city great is to challenge the Black-white wealth gap and prioritize spending to build back Black economies. I will actively seek out Black-led organizations and ensure that resources are distributed equitably and with the leadership of Black-led organizations.
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 person who works very closely with Indian health care programs, I know the value of having care providers, researchers, and specialists that look like you, think like you, and live like you. Black community health clinics offer holistic care. Community based healthcare is not just safer, it can be a source for healing and reconnection.
Black brilliance and wisdom is necessary to create anti-racist healthcare. We need to invest in Black led preventative care like Black doulas, Black epidemiologists, and other Black specialists who understand the racist ways healthcare has perpetuated harm. Our campaign has sought the expertise of such leaders by hosting a Black doula roundtable and having the endorsement of Dr. Ben Danielson. Our civic, health, and economic services can no longer be dangers to Black bodies, I will be the change that understands different people need different solutions. As Mayor I will ask the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs to make Black community-owned clinics a priority and find ways to use City and Federal dollars to fund new Black clinics and the ongoing efforts. I will also commit to monthly community meetings with stakeholders to address the health equity needs of Black community. Finally, I will work with health clinics and hospitals and remind them that a commitment to equity requires a direct response to the Black community. I will walk alongside the Black community and follow your leadership.
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
A) I have been closely following the Keiro project and am committed to ensuring that Black-led organizations are prioritized in the contracting process. My administration will engage with all stakeholders in this project and find ways to support the Black community. For years I have advocated for Black-led organizations to be leading homelessness work, especially with Black families who are experiencing homelessness. As Mayor I will continue that advocacy.
B) I support the Barn Ranch. As the Executive Director of Chief Seattle Club, I founded a Farm/Healing project called Sovereignty Farm and believe in connecting our communities with the land as a mechanism of healing.
C) The Youth Achievement Center is an exciting opportunity and I look forward to supporting this effort. I would like to help ensure that it is a place for LGBTQ+ youth.
As Mayor I will initiate an anti-gentrification and displacement commission that will help us learn from our past mistakes. This commission will also be tasked with creating new policies that bring our Black community back to Seattle.
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
I know that seeing yourself accurately represented in history, media, and political spaces changes the trajectory of the next generation. Public education should not be the first place children experience racism and racist violence, our schools need to be spaces where celebration, play, and growth happens. Investing in early childhood education that is accessible and affordable is part of public health. Families in our communities should not have to worry about whether their child is in a safe learning environment. This causes stress and inhibits parents from feeling secure at work while they’re away from their children. We must invest in programs across the educational spectrum that meet the needs of students and families, while centering Black educators in that process. We need to expand Universal Pre-K and support community based learning centers. We know that desegregation did not dissolve racism, and in fact it drove out Black educators and white-washed history, creating a school to prison pipeline overseen by white educators and administrators. We pride ourselves in Washington for having local control of schools, however, if Black neighborhoods and communities do not have equal access to funding and autonomy we have failed our students.
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
I will stand with Black community leaders. My work with the Community Police Commission has strengthened my resolve to center the lived experience of those most impacted by biased policing. I will allocate the funds, advance the conversation, and source resources that prioritize the safety of Black community members based on how the community has asked to be safe and respected. It is time we take tangible steps towards bringing back community, joy, and healing. For too long racism and anti-Black institutional structures have not been courageously challenged. I plan on being the voice in the space that reaffirms Black leadership, autonomy, and invests in community rather than leaving people to be swallowed by the system. These changes in police investments that directly impact the Black community need to be realized so our next generation of Seattlites can be safe, and can successfully build community. Investing in ALL Black lives, is an investment for the next 50 years in Seattle.
