News

The Morning Update Show — 5/3/21

The Morning Update Show — hosted by Trae Holiday and The Big O (Omari Salisbury) — is the only weekday news and information livestream that delivers culturally relevant content to the Pacific Northwest’s urban audience. Omari and Trae analyze the day’s local and national headlines as well as melanin magic in our community. Watch live every weekday at 11 a.m. on any of the following channels, hosted by Converge Media: YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, Periscope, and whereweconverge.com.

We also post the Morning Update Show here on the Emerald each day after it airs, so you can catch up any time of day while you peruse our latest posts.

Morning Update Show — Monday, May 3

LIVE — Donnitta Sinclair | LIVE — Jake Gravbrot | A conversation with Dr. Cornel West | Is America Racist? | Amtrak turns 50

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News

Washington State Increases Postpartum Coverage Under Medicaid, Saving Lives

by Sally James and Emerald Staff

A new parent in poverty has more health protection in Washington because of a bill signed on April 16 by Gov. Jay Inslee. Senate Bill 5068 extends coverage to new mothers for an entire year after their child’s birth if they are covered by the state’s Medicaid program, known as Apple Health. 

The bill covers a gap in Medicaid coverage that will impact about 10,000 people in Washington state who lose coverage 60–90 days postpartum. People who were on Medicaid prior to being pregnant, and who qualify for Medicaid based on an income level about 300% of the federal poverty line are not affected and will continue to be covered. Those in the range of between 193% and 300% of the federal poverty level will now receive postpartum coverage thanks to the bill.

At least one physician, Lillian Wu, M.D., told the Emerald in an email that her patient’s face lit up with relief when she heard about the bill’s passage. The patient has a condition, which will now be covered for longer. Wu is the president of the Washington Academy of Family Physicians and practices in Renton.

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News

Ticketing Vehicle Residents Is Eviction and Happening, Despite COVID-19 Moratoriums

by Samira George

(This article originally appeared in Real Change and has been reprinted under an agreement.)

“I used to live in those apartments,” Dee Powers, a 38-year-old Seattleite, said wistfully, “but I got priced out.” Standing in Seattle’s Occidental Park, coffee in hand, Powers stared at the distinctive white point of Smith Tower where across the street rests the old apartment Powers called home for five years.

The burst of the housing bubble in 2008 allowed Powers to rent a downtown apartment for $650 a month, but in 2015 they came home to a 60-day notice and a warning of a 40% rent increase. Since then, Powers has called a 40-foot RV home.

On April 13, five vehicle residents gathered at an action meeting in Occidental Park to share their unique car-living experiences in a city with a checkered past. All of the residents, including Powers, have either lived or are currently roaming Seattle’s streets in vehicles.

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Arts & Culture

PONGO POETRY: All True Story, No Lies

Pongo Poetry Project’s mission is to engage youth in writing poetry to inspire healing and growth. For over 20 years, Pongo has mentored poetry with youth at the Clark Children & Family Justice Center (CCFJC), King County’s juvenile detention facility.

Many CCFJC residents are Youth of Color who have endured traumatic experiences in the form of abuse, neglect, and exposure to violence. These incidents have been caused and exacerbated by community disinvestment, systemic racism, and other forms of institutional oppression. In collaboration with CCFJC staff, Pongo poetry writing offers CCFJC youth a vehicle for self-discovery and creative expression that inspires recovery and healing.

Through this special bimonthly column in partnership with the South Seattle Emerald, Pongo invites readers to bear witness to the pain, resilience, and creative capacity of youth whose voices and perspectives are too often relegated to the periphery. To learn more about Pongo’s work, join its GiveBig campaign today.

ALL TRUE STORY, NO LIES

by a young person, age 16

Group homes and detention had me institutionalized 
so my behaviors are the reasons of me being traumatized 
The way I act towards people 
and 
the way I take situations 
The way I believe a lot of stuff is lies 
It’s hard to trust 
in my relationships with people
Me not having trust and not wanting to get hurt
has me break trust first
so I don’t get hurt first 
Ends up making the situation worse

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Community

What the Emerald Means to Me: Space to be Heard

by Paul Benz the Younger

In reflecting on the articles and voices raised up every week in the Emerald I’m struck by what the Emerald provides and what it represents.

Bold and honest, I’ve read articles in the Emerald that other publications might view as too risky or even dangerous. The times we live in are times of great danger so we may as well face it with words of truth and inspiration. These are times that require risk and courage on behalf of historically suppressed voices if we are to survive. I’ve seen the Emerald provide this.

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Voices

OPINION: Reclaiming the History of May Day

by JM Wong

On this year’s May Day, as we grieve and witness the calamity of state-sponsored or state- manufactured violence; the premature (because utterly preventable) COVID epidemic deaths raging from India to Brazil due to fascist governments more invested in power than people; and the unceasing state lynchings from Columbus, Ohio to North Carolina and Seattle, Washington — we need the memories that Lucy Parsons bequeathed our struggles for which this day, International Workers Day, was created.  

Lucy Parsons should be a household name at any May Day celebration. She had a vision of freedom for the working classes who had been made by histories of colonialism, slavery, settler violence, and migration. Her vision challenged the internationalism of capitalists who professed a right to universal exploitation while creating borders and racial systems to divide those they exploited or killed. Today, Parsons’ erasure is part of the whitewashing of labor history in the United States that abets American empire. Remembering her is a reminder that she and so many others, even in the belly of the beast, left us the foundation and resources for a workers’ internationalism that revokes capitalist claims to exploitation and reconstructs our global connections for the purposes of shared freedom.

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Features

Weekend Long Reads: A Whole Lot of Sloshing Going On! What a Tsunami Would Do in Puget Sound

by Kevin Schofield

If you’ve lived here in the Pacific Northwest for a while, you’ve probably heard of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a massive earthquake fault off the coast of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon where the seismic plate holding up the land is slipping underneath the one at the bottom of the ocean. Pressure builds up for centuries along the area where they overlap and rub against each other, and every 500 years a major “rip” occurs where the mainland plate moves farther west and down, and the ocean plate is pushed up (and potentially east). The resulting earthquake is around magnitude 9.0 — about 100 times stronger than the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, our last big seismic event here in Seattle. In addition to the earth-movement damage that it would cause, the uplifting and dropping of the ocean floor along the fault line is expected to cause a tsunami wave. 

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News

Families and Community Members Call for Justice for People Killed by Police

by Guy Oron

South King County community members protested against police violence this past Saturday, April 24. Flanked by a car brigade and bike patrol, dozens of demonstrators marched in the rain along South Grady Way from Southcenter Mall in Tukwila to Renton City Hall, where they held a rally.

Continue reading Families and Community Members Call for Justice for People Killed by Police →

Amplifying the Authentic Narratives of South Seattle