Category Archives: Voices

Voices

Wired for Connection: Adapting in the Coronavirus Era

by Liz Covey, LMHC

I saw a friend recently that I haven’t seen in months, this being COVID times. She has started a new job — a move she’d wanted for a long time. I asked what it was like to “onboard” during this bizarre time in our history — when meeting all of her co-workers and learning all the ins and outs of a new workplace takes place 100 percent online. “It’s actually great” she said, adding, “especially since I made a friend.” 

“That’s wonderful!” I replied. Then, without a thought to how this might sound — a sure sign I’m spending more time in my head lately than in social gatherings — I asked her: “How do you really know you are friends, with everything being so different now? I mean, you can’t go to lunch or chat on your way to the meeting or get a drink after work … ”

Continue reading Wired for Connection: Adapting in the Coronavirus Era →
Voices

OPINION: The Next 100 Years of Suffragist Activism

by Sharon Maeda

One hundred years after women in the United States won the right to vote, now is not the time to sit back on the laurels of our foremothers. Today, the rights of all voters — the bedrock of a democratic society — are still at stake. 

Continue reading OPINION: The Next 100 Years of Suffragist Activism →
Voices

OPINION: How to Take Action on Black Women’s Equal Pay Day

“I have been paid less than a white female colleague, in a job where I was tasked with even more work. I had to learn to advocate for myself and address the issue with my supervisors head-on. Self-advocacy has become a mechanism of survival for so many Black women in the workforce, because American companies, nonprofits, and institutions systematically undervalue our work.”‘

by Hamdi Mohamed

(This article was originally published on The Fold and has been reprinted with permission)

America. The land of opportunity, the land where dreams come true—just not for so many who look like me.

According to statistics from Equal Pay Today, 80 percent of Black women are the sole or main breadwinner in their households. And yet, they are paid only $0.61 for every $1 a white non-Hispanic man is paid. Continue reading OPINION: How to Take Action on Black Women’s Equal Pay Day →

Voices

OPINION: The Importance of Nuance in Confronting Racism

We asked two community members to weigh in on Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best announcing her retirement from SPD. Their two viewpoints follow.

by George Griffin III

Carmen Best is a friend. Good people. Classy, strong. She deserved better. 

After everyone gets through scapegoating the Seattle City Council and Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests for her resignation, maybe we should take a good hard look at Seattle’s years of inactivity when People of Color and other people said the department needed some serious reform and restructuring. This lack of attention to the concerns of People of Color and allies contributed to the Seattle Police Department ultimately being placed under the current consent decree after an investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 2012. Do we need to be reminded how, when Best was interim chief in 2018, she was disrespected and passed over by the current mayor in the initial interview process and how she only got the job after communities of color and allies spoke up? Many prominent people were quiet at that time because they didn’t want to criticize their friend, the new mayor.

Continue reading OPINION: The Importance of Nuance in Confronting Racism →
Voices

POETRY: Incidentally—I Don’t Just Write About Bodies, I Have a Body Too.

by Neve Kamilah Mazique-Bianco

You want my words? You want my body. They come from in here. 

I have been penning my brain thoughts and dancing my body thoughts and singing my soul thoughts since I was 6 years old. When I was four or so, I performed my own version of Swan Lake for my audience of one, my mama, three if you count the cats. My costar was a stuffed swan, my ballet bar and movement scaffolding my walker. 

People love overzealousness. Precociousness. It is shocking and interesting that I could presume that my body is something you would want to look at or see move. Amazing that I wanted to be a dancer, born like I was. I didn’t begin dancing as a symmetrical flower hacked down by a storm, scattered, scattered, replanted and learning to grow into dancing again. I always was this way. And I become more and more this way. 

It’s almost like, you consider the unlikely possibility of my seamless inclusion more when I say it’s a good idea. Because I was given the gift of convincing speech. For whatever reason. You believe me. 

But how much do you believe me? How much do you listen? 

Continue reading POETRY: Incidentally—I Don’t Just Write About Bodies, I Have a Body Too. →
Voices

OPINION: The Movement for Black Lives Honors the Radical Legacy of John Lewis

by Wendy Elisheva Somerson

“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Klu Klux Klanner [sic], but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;’ who paternalistically feels that he can set the time-table for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

—Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

As a longtime Jewish activist for racial justice I was appalled, embarrassed, and saddened by Rabbi Daniel Weiner’s op-ed in the Seattle Times, which, echoing the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., reeks of devotion to order over justice. Supported by other local religious leaders, the op-ed misuses the legacy of John Lewis to attack and chastise brave local activists in the Movement for Black Lives here in Seattle.

Continue reading OPINION: The Movement for Black Lives Honors the Radical Legacy of John Lewis →
Voices

OPINION: Seattle Independent Journalists Stand Together to Oppose SPD’s Subpoena

We are independent news organizations, editors, reporters, photojournalists, and freelancers working in Seattle, and we are coming together to oppose the Seattle Police Department’s subpoena seeking unpublished photographs and video taken by journalists at the Seattle Times, KIRO 7, KING 5, KOMO 4, and KCPQ 13.

This is not the Trump Administration pursuing these subpoenas. It is the Seattle Police Department, charged with serving and protecting our city. Those duties should include protecting our free press rights.

Continue reading OPINION: Seattle Independent Journalists Stand Together to Oppose SPD’s Subpoena →
Voices

Farming For Change: Meet the Latinx Women Leading South Park’s New Community Farm

In this special Emerald series supported by NW Journalists of Color and the Facebook Journalism Project, photographer and writer Sharon H. Chang introduces the womxn and nonbinary farmers of color at the heart of Washington’s agrarian revival movement who are moving the needle towards not only a future livable planet, but a socially just one. 

by Sharon H. Chang

The air is comfortably warm at South Park’s Marra-Desimone Park on a late summer morning. Tall grasses line the dirt path to a little-known piece of farmland snuggled inside the park. All is quiet except for a small group working in the northeast corner. Two children run through rows of crops and nearby, their mother and four other cheerful women, known as the promotoras (community health workers), chat as they rake rows. There has been a crop failure because of rodents, but the women are undeterred. Well into their first full season, the promotoras have already transformed their land into an impressive Latinx-women-led farm called Salsa De La Vida. Continue reading Farming For Change: Meet the Latinx Women Leading South Park’s New Community Farm →