Racial Justice News

Daily living and working was already dangerous and precarious for hundreds of thousands of farmworkers and immigrants before the onset of COVID-19. ICE has terrorized our communities and powerful growers have suppressed workers' efforts to organize. Generations of environmental racism have contaminated poor neighborhoods and caused lifelong health impacts in communities of color. This pandemic has found a perfect environment to increase our communities' risk of fatality if they contract the virus. The agricultural industry has long refused to implement health and safety protections for farmworkers or worker housing, while state and federal agencies looked the other way. Today, agribusiness is functionally exempt from COVID-19 protocols in Washington State and nationwide. The responses to this pandemic are leaving out the working poor, and in general the working class, the vulnerable, and otherwise "expendable" people. Our federal and state governments are acting like there is a certain level of acceptable fatalities of agricultural workers -- deemed "essential workers" according to Governor Inslee's "Stay Home, Stay Healthy" proclamation. The responses, and lack of responses, to our demands and objections to "business as usual" by corporate agriculture show us that to them there is an acceptable price the farmworker community must pay to sustain the current profit margins in the agricultural industry. Government at every level is complicit in every worker's death during this pandemic.

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After decades of historical undercounting, Washington’s nonwhite communities hope the results of this year’s census will boost access to critical resources. Of those frequently undercounted, Native people have been the most underrepresented racial group in the final reports. In 2010, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that American Indians and Alaska Natives living on reservations were undercounted by 4.9%, more than double the 2.1% undercount of African Americans, the next most undercounted community. . . .

I remembered one line in particular that James Baldwin wrote in his letter to Angela Davis while she was jailed in 1970. I was in the last and final holding cell awaiting either bail or intake to the upper level of the jail, when his words returned to me: “One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on Black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But, no, they appear to glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses.” At that moment, a row of Latino men in blue and red jumpsuits chained together at the wrists, waists and ankles were marched past the window of our large holding cell. In the very back of this chain–many who my cellmates recognized as fellow migrants who were detained while crossing–were two young Black men, either my age or even younger, chained as their ancestors had been before them. And I knew that Baldwin was right, that the prison and the jail must be burned to the ground and abolished, that we cannot continue to allow so many thousands of people to be swallowed by its labyrinth of hallways and cells, hidden away and lost from public view. My commitment to prison abolition was solidified then and there, watching those two young Black men and the migrant and citizen Latino men chained alongside them. Read more here.

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Every year, WWF activists head to Capitol Hill to meet with their representatives about pertinent conservation issues as part of Lobby Day.  The future of nature is at stake. As constituents and citizens, it's up to us to share our concerns and hopes for conservation and to hold our elected leaders accountable.  We spoke with three participants from around the country to learn why they’re attending Lobby Day and what issues are most important to them.

• Yoselin Herrera - Las Vegas, Nevada
• Amanda Lovan - Des Moines, Iowa
• Tiffany Jones - Dallas, Texas

In the wake of revelations that Washington State Patrol troopers search Native Americans and other people of color at far higher rates than whites, the state Legislature has agreed to appropriate $50,000 to investigate bias in police stops. . . . The money for the bias study, requested by Rep. Gina Mosbrucker, a Goldendale Republican, funds a collaboration between state police and Washington State University to analyze traffic stop data kept by the patrol. That money will also be spent to survey Washington residents’ perceptions of the state patrol. The funding was included in the state budget passed by the Legislature on Thursday; it now awaits Gov. Jay Inslee’s approval.

Welcome to Seattle-King County. If you are not white and planning to live in areas with mostly other people of color, be prepared for the following amenities: toxic industrial waste (South Park), flight-path noise and carbon pollution (Beacon Hill), juvenile detention (Squire Park), low levels of public and private investment (Rainier Beach), stress on services and affordable housing (Chinatown-International District) or outright displacement (Central Area). And whither the people of the Duwamish? It’s no deep secret that both White Center and Kent are majority nonwhite communities. White Center, which no longer lives up to its name, has a large Latinx population. Kent is the 10th most diverse city in the country, when also considering linguistic and birthplace diversity. The rub: The state’s first COVID-19 diagnoses and related deaths occurred in Kirkland, which is overwhelmingly whiteand wealthy. Never mind that the county has and will continue to introduce quarantine facilities in largely white areas; its first two were in communities of color. “I am honestly disappointed they chose non-affluent, racially diverse areas for their quarantine sites even though most of the cases are in affluent areas,” Kent City Councilmember Satwinder Kaur, who is Sikh, wrote in an email. Read more here.

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Support for Resetting the Table, a Crosscut Focus series examining food insecurity in Washington, is provided by Northwest Harvest. Washington is an agricultural powerhouse, producing some of the highest yields of fruit, vegetables and grains in the country — yet despite this bounty, plenty of people can’t access it. Entire communities can’t get to the food they need, and while many are in urban centers, rural and suburban communities deal with the issue in entirely unique ways. While visiting diverse communities throughout western Washington — immigrants, farmworkers, grocery shoppers in rural and urban areas alike — we found examples of what fixing Washington’s food system might look like from the ground up. Read the whole series here.  

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Revelations that Washington State Patrol troopers are searching people of color at rates much higher than whites have prompted the Washington House of Representatives to propose restarting bias studies that the Patrol quietly discontinued 13 years ago. The House’s proposed budget would also launch a campaign to beef up efforts to recruit people of color to join the ranks of troopers, whose numbers are overwhelmingly white and male . . . The House’s proposed supplemental operating budget contains $50,000 to fund a collaboration between the State Patrol and Washington State University to analyze traffic stops for evidence of bias. The State Patrol contracted with Washington State University researchers to conduct similar studies in 2003, 2005 and 2007. Read more here.

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The missing and murdered women of Juárez are more than statistics and data points. They are beloved daughters who have left behind an unimaginable and senseless void. They are the fuel of activism against impunity and injustice. They are the seeds of grief that blossom into art. And they are beautiful, fragile memories that must be preserved. Read more here and view the video.  Very poignant.

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A tribute to Nelson Mandela by the Elders and "Thirty years ago, a 71-year-old Nelson Mandela walked out of the then-Victor Verster prison, an hour’s drive away from Cape Town. He had entered prison as a young fighter and emerged as an elder statesman, more open to negotiation, but still willing to go toe to toe when needed. Clutching his hand was Mama Winnie Mandela, who, with countless others, kept the spotlight on him during those decades in prison. Their hands, raised proudly in the air, signified a victory. But when he stepped out, a battle won, there was still a war to be won. Ostensibly a free man, Madiba was not truly free. He remained under the governance of a racist terror machine masquerading as a legitimate government. It was through intense negotiation and, both supported and led by those who put everything on the line, that a form of democracy was made possible. There were real gains in freedom through this democracy. That democracy, our democracy, was not perfect and, like all democracies, will remain imperfect. But it is the possibility and the potential of real democracy that we should hold on to. That we should fight for. The possibility of the unimaginable. "   Read more here.  More information can be found here as well.

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[Note from Deb Cruz, FAIN Issue Lead:  This failure of the courts to uphold the Mashpee Wampanoag right to put land in trust is the first step in termination of the First Indian Tribe/Nation to greet and support settlers arriving on the Mayflower 1620.  This is just the beginning not only for Mashpee Wampanoag, but also for other Nations across the U.S.  Once the trust land process is refused, the courts positioning then leads to the withdrawal of other support and leaves the Tribes/Nations at tremendous risk.  One only has to look back at the results of the Tribes/Nations statuses from the 1950s termination era:  special look at what happened to Menominee  and Ponca Nations. This can be rectified in spite of the courts, through Congress, as the article HR 312 has passed the House, but has been sitting in the Senate since May 2019.  The push from here will be to contact Senators and get them to start working on the bill. Please take time to watch the video!!]

Rosalinda Guillen is the executive director of Community to Community Development (C2C).  Listen to the story of who she is and how her speech speaks to a profound understanding of intersectionality . . . racism, immigration, earth culture, environmental justice and climate change among many others not just from the head, but from the heart. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKZ8SiSToWg&list=PLATdTmWw92SClYQ7NKaRjlk0ejef7KL9g

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By Dahlia Bazzaz / Feb. 18, 2020 / Seattle Times After the newspaper illustration spread on social media, the school became one of several in the Puget Sound region where racist, bigoted images or speech by students garnered media attention in the last year. What happened next, experts said, followed a familiar sequence: Public outcry. School apology. A promise for change. What happens after the spotlight fades? After the public heat died down, Roosevelt staff went through racial equity training. The school purchased and displayed thousands of dollars’ worth of multilingual welcome banners and Black Lives Matter signs. But those efforts, Saleem said, haven’t changed what many of her fellow Black students call a chilly and unwelcoming environment.

After analyzing data from millions of traffic stops conducted by the State Patrol, InvestigateWest last month revealed that black, Latino, Native American and Pacific Islander drivers were searched at a higher rate than white motorists ⁠— even though troopers found drugs or other contraband at a higher rate when they searched white motorists or their cars. Native Americans were searched at a rate five times higher than white motorists. About one-third of those searches of Native Americans were clustered at the edges of the Colville and Yakama reservations in Eastern Washington. Read more here.

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‘They were prosecuting us the most for cannabis ... now, they’re on the street corners in our neighborhoods, selling that stuff to us.’ by Melissa Santos / February 13, 2020 / Crosscut Hairston said he and other aspiring Black pot entrepreneurs were effectively locked out of the state’s legal marijuana industry from the beginning — partly a result of a maze of bureaucracy, as well as lacking the resources to hire lawyers to navigate the process. It’s a common story recounted by people who tried unsuccessfully to get in on the ground floor of the state’s legal pot market: Either they never got their questions answered, or, by the time they fixed certain aspects of their application, they found themselves at the back of the line for a limited number of licenses. Read more here.

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