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 policies I will push for will be centered in equitable development, meaning public and private investments, programs, and policies in neighborhoods must take into account past history and current conditions to meet the needs of marginalized populations and to reduce disparities so that quality of life outcomes such as access to quality education, living wage employment, healthy environment, affordable housing and transportation, are equitably distributed for the people currently living and working here, as well as for new people moving in. As a Black, Somali woman who came here as a refugee, I know that a cornerstone for building and accumulating wealth comes from home ownership.
My platform is centered around a Just Transition framework. I will focus on building BIPOC communities’ power and resilience by passing policies that promote community stewardship of land and housing, directly addressing the housing-related symptoms of the pandemic crisis; and detering developers and outside investors from taking advantage of vulnerabilities in our communities that increase gentrification. I would work with my colleagues for the creation of state and local moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures as economic recovery will take years to do so, push for the creation of Non-Solicitation/Cease and Desist Zones, as well as Opportunity to Purchase Act for renters and communities.
Closing the Black-white wealth gap will take a collective effort and time, with reparations being an important part to that as well. Realistically, I would like to close it by 50% in my first term. And it’s going to take a lot of work, but it can be done as we partner with community. Again, this will be from supporting Hyper-local and community-driven solutions like community enterprises that build true community power and shared wealth, such as cooperative and employee ownership with supporting Hyper-local and community-driven solutions like community enterprises that build true community power and shared wealth, such as cooperative and employee ownership.
I am closely involved with the Somali community, both in South Seattle and close to my home in unincorporated Renton. During different periods of my life, I was involved with organizations like the East African Community Services, Social Justice Fund Northwest, Communities of Opportunity, A Regional Coalition for Housing, and I was co-founder of Culturally Appropriate and Responsive Education (CARE) Center in Renton.
To ensure that the Black community is receiving the support and investment from federal funding, I will ensure that these stakeholders are at the table.
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
My plan to invest in Black community health is in reasserting King County government’s role in housing and health, and that fundamentally reframes and reimagines that role to be centered on racial equity and opportunity. Housing and evictions are a healthcare criss. Our economic recovery and public health policies and strategies must center housing as a human right for all people living in King County, and particularly communities that have been marginalized and systemically stripped of their housing rights. As I mentioned before, I will push for a New Deal on Housing and Health justice through increasing collective ownership of land by enabling shared equity models of housing such as community land trusts and limited equity cooperatives.
Black folks make up less than 7% of the County’s population but represent 25% of the unhoused. As Seattle has become increasingly unaffordable and gentrification pushes residents, specifically Black families, further and further outside of city limits, it has increased their risk of continued housing instability. We need to ensure that renters have stable homes. I will work with leaders on the city and county level in passing strong renter protections that will guarantee communities can stay housed and together. It’s also important to have flexible and dedicated funding to support residents at risk of evictions and/or need temporary support whether it’s monetary or resources- as it costs 2-3 times more to help an individual from homelessneess to housing then to key them housed in their current homes. Lastly, as a county, we need to do better to support our homeless population- providing them with wraparound services, stopping sweeps, and lowering barriers and requirements for them to access resources- understanding accessibility and flexibility is needed to support this community.
Like I said before, I will ensure that the appropriate stakeholders and representatives are at the table to ensure that not only are they are being heard, but have the power to push for the resources and funds community needs.
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
My short and long-term plan, like I said before, is to push for a New Deal on Housing and Health justice through increasing collective ownership of land by enabling shared equity models of housing such as community land trusts and limited equity cooperatives. This is important for ownership, building wealth and removing land from the speculative market and moving it into community control, while building community power and ensuring permanent affordability.
We must also stop predatory development that has been occurring in South Seattle and South King County. This means supporting projects that do so. It also means a countywide Community Opportunity to purchase policy that gives renters and qualified entities the first right to purchase properties in foreclosure or from owners directly. Our County policies and investments should enable the flourishing of community land trusts and limited equity cooperatives.
My leadership in housing and community development will strengthen our County’s households through increasing ownership, building wealth, and removing property from the speculative market in favor of community control. King County should ensure that every community has power and that all residents can afford to stay in their homes and communities
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
This issue is personal to me right now considering my three Black children are in school right now. Exclusion and racial injustice have been a defining characteristic of our country and county, which has tremendously undermined the very strength of our democracy. The barriers that have long harmed BIPOC and especially Black and Indigenous people have been allowed to grow more entrenched, and are hurting more people than ever before, including large swaths of white people. It is time to reaffirm Black brilliance and Indigenous sovereignty in our policies and institutions like in our schools. We need to divest from incarceration and criminalization that comes from problematic and failed strategies and punitive policies, that include spending on police, jails and prisons while cutting and slowing investments in our social safety net. This approach has destabilized communities, destroyed families, and ensnared generations of children in the school-to-prison pipeline.
My platform centers restorative healing, which is about repairing the harm caused by trauma and allowing for the genuine transformation of people, relationships and communities by breaking cycles of harm. One of the four cornerstones of my policy platform is to build systems that acknowledge the restoration necessary to repair relationships and create sustainable, regenerative resilience. With our school, this includes investing in neighborhood infrastructure and community-based alternatives to policing. All communities deserve to thrive, and we have a chance to shift our justice and safety system to one of healing, restoration, and community investment that works better for all of us.
We must, as stated previously, support programs like Best Starts for Kids and ensure its programs and services reach our most vulnerable children and families. We also need to reinvest in community schools across the county that provide free healthcare (physical, mental, emotional) and faculty that is needed. This means hiring more Black teachers as well as making sure Black/Ethnic studies is supported as an education curriculum. This means investing in our Black teachers as well with the support they need not just in teaching, but in housing/transportation as well. This means investing and implement a robust anti-racist, racial equity professional development course that is required for all faculty members, not just for our educators. Our schools and systems must be based on abundance and communal self-determination. We have a responsibility to all people in ensuring that all stakeholders can participate and reach their full potential, and we need to recognize that the path to racial and economic healing requires different strategies for different groups.
King County leaders need to center BIPOC people in this moment and harness the energy from the streets by committing to a Racial Equity Governing Agenda.
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
Our current criminal justice system relies on punitive measures to deter or prevent crime and tends to reinforce social structures of inequity. It is imperative that King County Council grapple with the troubled legacy and history of modern day policing and its institutional role in the criminalization, incarceration, and disenfranchisement of millions of Black and Indigenous Americans. I will advocate for preventing crime and reducing recidivism that would make communities safer and more able to thrive economically.
I support King County’s move to address juvenile justice through a public health approach. This requires continued and increased investment in upstream solutions, replacing punitive responses with restorative actions, and creating interventions that support the whole community. This also requires shifting King County investments away from the criminal legal system into local communities, opportunities for youth and young adults, and projects that build a healthy economy.
To advance King County’s commitment to end zero youth incarceration I commit to:
Passing a King County budget that is reflective of racial equity principles and that prioritizes restorative practices and building healthy and thriving communities.
Supporting Best Starts for Kids and ensuring its programs and services reach our most vulnerable children and families.
Working closely with the County’s Zero Youth Detention initiative, ensuring that it has the resources it needs and that its making progress as envisioned by the Road Map to Zero Youth Detention.
Investing in community-created programs like Restorative Community Pathways that develop effective, restorative, and holistic responses to harm.
Opening pathways of engagement with King County District 9 residents to ensure that our community’s voice is heard, that our neighbors are helping co-create solutions to address our unique challenges, and that County investments reach all of us.
The County Council now has the authority and responsibility to develop real pathways for King County community members to engage in this transformative process. Structural reform must happen and we must listen to those who have been most impacted by policing to help drive this reform. Do we need armed officers making traffic stops? Do we want armed officers settling domestic disputes? Do we want armed officers engaging with our children in schools? Do we want armed officers responding to our mental health crises or moving our houseless neighbors? These are questions that we must now answer.
I have lived experience of being criminalized for my own mental health crisis. As a Black, immigrant, Muslim woman - I have been on the receiving end of the criminal justice system as I struggled to cope with my own mental health crisis. This experience helps inform my own vision for what safety can and should be. I am excited to engage with constituents in District 9 about how we can invest more thoughtfully in services and strategies that advance health and well-being, and safe communities. I look forward to taking leadership from the residents and community leaders who are working on a vision of safety that is restorative and a criminal justice system that is truly just.
