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
King County is notoriously regarded as the economic driver of the State; the epicenter of industry and the gateway to the world. However, in the land of plenty, too many struggle to make ends meet. That’s a direct result of policy choices made at all levels of government, but the County can make a significant impact on reducing the Black-White wealth gap by prioritizing investments in communities who have been left out of decades of public spending instead of reinforcing those inequities. We spend more than 70% of the County’s general fund on a legal system that criminalizes poverty instead of funding the programs that lift people out of it. That can, and must, change. In my time in Olympia, I’ve consistently amplified the voices of community advocates making the case for those kinds of investments, and as a result of their advocacy our state’s budget reflects the truth that we cannot cut our way out of this economic crisis. We allocated millions in relief funding for TANF, rental relief to prevent evictions, and began reversing the regressive tax code that overburdens so many struggling families.
By contrast, King County got millions in rental relief funding directly allocated from the federal government. Under the incumbent’s leadership, the County was so far behind getting relief to the renters on the verge of eviction that as of June 16th, Crosscut reported that it had failed to disburse a single dollar of the aid package Congress approved in December 2020. That’s simply unacceptable. As I have throughout my time in the Senate, I would work with trusted community organizations like KCEN and my constituents to ensure that continued economic recovery investments are invested equitably in programs that meet the needs of the Black community. I will also work to provide alternative pathways to homeownership and housing stability for families in communities of color who have been excluded from traditional means to build intergenerational wealth for decades, particularly for communities in unincorporated King County like the one where I was raised.
Finally, we need to put a hard stop on regressive taxation. King County is in the unique position of only having regressive revenue as a tool of raising revenue. We have known this for decades now, and the effort to get this changed has been limited at best. I’ve seen from the legislature the lack of urgency to get this changed and how the Executive’s office that should be leading the charge to get this changed, has left its efforts to lobbyists and insiders. What we need is a full-on public affairs effort to ensure people understand how this impacts communities of need, and how without change the problem will only worsen for our communities that are already left behind. That’s what I’ll do in partnership with the community advocates who have been pushing for progress on this issue, and who deserve to have their voices amplified instead of being forced to fight just to be heard.
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 it has in so many areas of life, the pandemic exposed how our government’s decades of disinvestment from communities of color leads to disastrous health outcomes. These are policy choices that every Executive chooses to continue making or to disrupt the status quo that left so many in the Black community so vulnerable to COVID-19. We should be taking this opportunity to redress that history of neglect and build up institutional public health capacity owned and operated by the Black community so that the next public health crisis doesn’t result in horrifically disproportionate infection and death rates among communities of color. That means using federal relief funding to invest in community-owned clinics like the TCHF, SHB, SRJ, and AAHB so they have the capacity to meet the needs of community members who have a justifiable distrust of White-owned or White-operated public health institutions.
To put it simply, the incumbent has not made those choices. Instead, even after declaring racism a public health crisis last summer, the County’s vaccination rollout made it clear that not enough work was done to ensure communities who had suffered the most from COVID-19 were able to get access to life-saving vaccines from the start. Despite suffering infection and death rates twice that of central Seattle and Bellevue, communities of color in South King County consistently lagged behind those communities in vaccination rates. In order to ensure that inequity does not persist during our next public health crisis, the County needs to take ownership of its shortcomings and recognize that building capacity in already trusted community-based providers is critical to establishing trust that our public health infrastructure cares about and prioritizes Black health.
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?
Answer
Supporting Black control and agency over land requires a twofold approach: first, ensuring that current policies that permit gentrification and displacement are overhauled to protect the community from losing more homes, while also creating and funding programs to promote and support Black homeownership and land acquisition. To combat displacement, I’m on the record supporting the creation of equitable development zones to protect and empower communities at risk of displacement, Non-Solicitation/Cease and Desist Zones to protect communities from unfair pressure to sell their homes, and a tax on home and property “flipping” to slow gentrification.
I’m also a staunch supporter of investing in programs to promote alternative pathways to homeownership for those who have been pushed out of their communities and building capacity among affected communities to provide services for those experiencing homelessness. Too often, transactional politicians prioritize preserving the status quo instead of closely examining whether the same service providers who have received funding throughout the homelessness crisis are actually delivering results when they receive public funding. King County is such a large jurisdiction that it receives millions in direct grants from the federal government to combat the homelessness crisis, and could be a leader nationally in promoting community-based organizations like the Africatown Community Land Trust’s work on the Keiro project. Instead, King County’s own auditor found that Black-led organizations are awarded bids less than any other racial group. Seattle and statewide agencies have consistently found more effective means to promote equity in contracting despite the ban on affirmative action imposed by I-200, and it would not take me 12 years in office to issue an executive order ensuring the County follows those best practices.
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
First of all, we must work with each local school board, municipality, and police department to stop the use of so-called School Resource Officers on our school campuses. Seattle has already done this and we can do it Countywide. They’re unnecessary and primarily serve to perpetuate the school-to-prison pipeline. One of the first bills I worked to pass in Olympia promoted the use of community-based alternatives to divert young people from entering the criminal legal system, and continuing that work to ensure no young person’s life is derailed by incarceration is a top priority of mine.
Although the County has limited direct control over our school systems, I won’t hesitate to use the bully pulpit of the Executive’s office to make King County a national leader in pushing back against the racist dog-whistling that underlies the nationwide trend opposing the inclusion of critical race theory and frank examinations of our country’s history perpetuating systemic racism in school curriculums. Advocating for equity in education isn’t new to me: I was a vocal opponent of disinformation efforts by conservative groups to demonize age-appropriate sex education on the ballot last year, and campaigned in favor of repealing I-200 in 2019 despite personal attacks from conservative groups pushing false narratives that promoting equity in education would lead to fewer opportunities for high-achieving Asian-American students.
Finally, we also have to realize that supporting Black students will require more than what can be accomplished in the classroom. I support KCEN’s call for the County to partner with the City of Seattle in funding a Youth Achievement Center to provide housing, culturally relevant food, freedom educational programming, tutoring services, mentoring classes, trauma counseling, college and career counseling, and other supports to students experiencing homelessness and students from historically underserved communities. My family depended on public assistance to stay housed and fed when I was growing up, and I’ll act with the urgency born of that lived experience to ensure that the County fulfills its moral obligation to students who need the same support that enabled me to succeed.
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.
Last year’s accountability charter amendments demonstrate clearly the public’s demands that policing change at the County Level. What are your specific plans to divest from policing to invest in true public safety for Black communities for the first time in history? What are the tangible steps you will take?
What date will you close the Youth Jail in the first year of your term?
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
73% of the general fund is far too much for the County to be spending on the criminal legal system, full stop. The truth is: a bigger, nearly $250 million youth jail should have never been built and 2025 is too long to wait to shut it down. We’re going to use the county’s $12B budget to invest in communities instead. We’re going to do it because the people most impacted by these policies have been demanding it for decades—and we’re going to stop pretending there isn’t a body of scholarship and jurisprudence to support this vision. I was proud to support the Charter for Justice campaign spearheaded by the community and Councilmember Zahilay, and I will ensure that the organizations responsible for mobilizing the community in support of those reforms are integral to the selection of the next King County Sheriff from day one of that process.
I’ve been working on the issue of diverting youth from our criminal legal system since the first bill I passed in Olympia, which allows our juvenile courts to send young people to youth facilities in our communities instead of incarcerating them. We need to build on that program at the County level, standing up community-based alternatives to incarceration so that we can close and repurpose the Youth Jail as soon as possible.
We can prevent crime in the first place by investing in guaranteeing people’s basic needs are met by funding essential services and scaling up the work of existing trusted organizations operating in communities who have been excluded from public investment for decades. Before the War on Drugs, we used to fund human services at the same rate as the criminal legal system. We must return to that approach of investing in people, not just because we know that it prevents crime, but because it’s the morally just thing to do.
