Category Archives: Voices

Voices

OPINION: Leschi Elementary Protests Black Principal’s Sudden Removal

On April 28, Leschi Elementary’s new principal, Lisa Moland, an African American woman, was abruptly removed from her position without explanation by Seattle Public Schools (SPS). The following is a letter by members of the Leschi Building Leadership Team (BLT), Racial Equity Team, and SEA Union Representatives who are protesting her removal, citing a history of SPS being disproportionately hard on Black administrators.

by Members of the Leschi BLT, Racial Equity Team, and SEA Union Representatives

Dear Denise Juneau, Seattle School Board, Clover Codd, Manal Al-ansi, Michael Strarosky, and Anthony Ruby,

On behalf of the Leschi Staff and Community, we are writing to document and express our grave disappointment with the lack of communication, professionalism, and equity utilized in the decision to abruptly remove Principal Lisa Moland from Leschi Elementary after less than one school year as principal (due to COVID-19). Continue reading OPINION: Leschi Elementary Protests Black Principal’s Sudden Removal →

Voices

OPINION: Riders Nationwide Have Called on Transit Agencies to Cut Ties With Police — King Co. Metro Listened

by Jason Austin

Born out of a fight against bus service cuts in 2011 the Transit Riders Union (TRU) is an independent, democratic, member-run union of transit riders organizing for mobility and transit justice in Seattle and King County. We recognize that the uprisings sweeping the nation flow from centuries of racial oppression, increasing economic inequality, and years of unheeded calls for reform and restitution. TRU stands with protesters in Seattle, Minneapolis, Louisville and many other communities across the country demanding health, safety, and freedom for Black people in America and demanding justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and countless others killed by the police. Our members have spent the last three weeks using public transportation to travel to the protests. We were horrified to see our public transportation infrastructure being weaponized against the very people it was created to serve. 

Continue reading OPINION: Riders Nationwide Have Called on Transit Agencies to Cut Ties With Police — King Co. Metro Listened →
Voices

When You Thought You’d Seen It All … Healing From Racial Trauma

by Ashley McGirt

When I first saw the scars so deeply rooted into the back of an African American slave, I thought I had seen it all. When I viewed a photo of Emmett Till for the first time, I thought I had seen it all. I can still see his mother’s face, the cries that were captured on film, the crevices in the corners of her eyes that would form valleys so deep no one would ever dare travel through. I studied her face, then went back to her son’s face that no longer bore a resemblance to anything human. In that moment I saw how Americans can, and still do, view Black people as less than human. I remember Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Charleena Lyles, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and the countless others who we have lost to police violence. You continue to think you have seen it all until the newest tragedy is unveiled.

Continue reading When You Thought You’d Seen It All … Healing From Racial Trauma →
Voices

Ethnic Studies Educator Amanda Hubbard Takes Us Above and Beyond the Winner/Loser Binary

by Ari Robin McKenna

This is the first in a series of articles featuring the words of local ethnic studies educators who are doing work to address systemic racism in our classrooms. To read the series intro, click here.

To Amanda Hubbard, ethnic studies is foundational; it is the basis for effective instruction in the classroom, from kindergarten to twelfth grade. Period. She’s done with students of color being given a footnote’s worth of space in the curriculum — an elective if they’re lucky — while the Eurocentric victors’ tales are taught, definitively, as “history.” She’s done with a White supremacist educational culture that defies all the current best-practice research emphasizing both the process and the power of learning from mistakes — in favor of maintaining a biased, high-stakes hierarchy of winners and losers.

And so, Amanda Hubbard is working, beyond her teaching hours, to develop a better way.

Continue reading Ethnic Studies Educator Amanda Hubbard Takes Us Above and Beyond the Winner/Loser Binary →
Voices

Calling Out White Supremacy in Seattle’s Mental Health Establishment: One Therapist’s Confession

by Liz Covey, LMHC

“Miserable is exactly how the white people who want to help should be feeling right now, and then they should sit with that misery until something breaks in their brain, the narrative changes in their psyche, and the legacy of emotional paralysis lifts entirely.”

—Rebecca Carroll, The Atlantic (June 2020) 

I’ve had this saying about my work for years now, and it goes like this: I will spend the rest of my career indebted to the (mostly Black) kids and foster families with whom I worked early on, and who had to put up with my sorry self, before I knew the damage I was causing as a white practitioner in Black spaces. I dedicate any good work I do today to these kids. In the spirit of Black Lives Matter, I Say Their Names, to myself, in my heart, on the regular. 

Continue reading Calling Out White Supremacy in Seattle’s Mental Health Establishment: One Therapist’s Confession →
Voices

OPINION: Before You Text Me, Your Black Friend… Don’t.

An Open Letter to My Non-Black Friends, but White Folks Especially

by Robert Babs

PLEASE DON’T MESSAGE ME ABOUT HOW BAD YOU FEEL AND HOW YOU’RE “THERE FOR ME” IN ALL OF THIS MADNESS

When it comes to the many difficulties life relentlessly throws at us, we all process and grieve differently. Over several hours, early on a Saturday morning, seated at my dining table, I did some thinking. Then I did some crying. Then wrote some words, which may have included more crying, but not as much. Continue reading OPINION: Before You Text Me, Your Black Friend… Don’t. →

Voices

OPINION: I Glimpsed Hope in a South Seattle Park

After years of despair brought on by Black death, the Othello Park march helped me find the strength to choose something else.

by Marcus Harrison Green

(This article previously appeared in Crosscut and is reprinted under an agreement)

Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor. It had been another string of ungodly killings of Black Americans by police. I was tired of exterminated Black life. My soul had grown increasingly weary from false hopes, empty promises and muscular words that atrophy by inaction.

I swore off Black Lives Matter marches and rallies. They were placebos unable to quell intensifying pain.

The last one I attended occurred after the killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling by police officers in 2016. Submerged in tormented shouts of “Blacks Lives Matter,” I situated myself in downtown’s Westlake Park where the march began. My cynicism anchored me there, kept me from proceeding, while the mass of people and their chanting moved farther up Pine Street.

Nailing me in place was the conviction that this country would never care for Black people. At least never care more than enough to believe that uttering the right phrase would absolve oneself of racism. It would only ever subordinate Black Americans’ unique struggles as identity politics, never critical priorities. It would never stop believing that one exceptional individual with black skin placed in a position of power somehow meant racial equality, or that racism was over. It would continue to believe in the magical thinking that says racial justice is achieved by class equality.

Any visions I possessed of a better world perished as the deaths of Black people mounted. I resigned myself to the belief that I’d never witness a nonracist world in my lifetime, or any other. I thought time devoted to marches and rallies raging against Black death was better spent alongside my family. There was no telling when others might be chanting their name. A police encounter could sweep them to the grave in an instant, as it had with Garner and Taylor and all the others. So I needed to cherish them now, as often and as deeply as I could.

Continue reading OPINION: I Glimpsed Hope in a South Seattle Park →

Voices

OPINION: Keep Your Tanks Away From Our Schools

by Brandon K. Hersey

Each year, for the past three years, the Seattle Public School system has adopted a resolution supporting the Black Lives Matter at School movement. Each statement unanimously declared that we would work to undo an institutionally racist system that has marginalized Black students for decades and has left them behind as the city’s crippling opportunity gap continues to widen. The Black Lives Matter at School movement has four simple demands: end zero-tolerance policies, mandate Black history and ethnic studies, hire more Black teachers, and fund counselors, not cops. Continue reading OPINION: Keep Your Tanks Away From Our Schools →

Voices

OPINION: Washington State’s Institutional Education is Criminally Underfunded

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by Carmen Rivera, MSc

Students sit quietly in a converted classroom, formerly a home economics room furnished with stoves and sinks. The stoves are unplugged, desks and computers are shoved against the old kitchenette spaces. A unit of students sits in front of computers with little instructor involvement. Teachers are largely managing online learning, rather than teaching. The program being used is ‘Edgenuity,’ an online learning and credit recovery provider for students behind in middle/high school credits. 

Continue reading OPINION: Washington State’s Institutional Education is Criminally Underfunded →