Racial Justice News

A federal judge has stopped the 2020 census from finishing at month's end and suspended a year-end deadline for delivering the numbers needed to decide how many seats each state gets in Congress. The preliminary injunction granted by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in California late Thursday orders the once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident to continue through the end of October. Koh said the shortened schedule ordered by the Trump administration likely would produce inaccurate results. "An undercount in any locality matters greatly. Even a small undercount of a subset of the hard to count population would result in the loss of federal funding," Koh wrote. "These harms and others will last through 2030, if not later." Read more here.

This Saturday, September 26th from 5-8pm, Sunrise Seattle will be holding a hub strategy session. If you have an interest in helping our hub to craft a strategy for the months leading up to January 2021, we would love for you to join us! You can register here.

Why: We’ve done amazing work since Sunrise Seattle began, especially in the last few months. In order to continue showing up for the uprising for Black Lives and other movements across the city and organizing our generation, and do it even bigger and better over time; we need to unify our work around a long-term strategy.  We need a clearer vision for how the Seattle hub will work towards building people power, political power, and the people’s alignment for a Green New Deal this fall, and Sunrise National just released a toolkit to help us do just that.

How: We'll be having a participatory session open to our entire hub, and we're also setting up systems for everyone to give input without having to make the meeting. To facilitate that, we're sharing the agenda for the strategy session, a shorter version of the Sunrise National Fall Strategy Guide, and an example strategy so every member can be involved and propose strategies. 

There will be 3 more days for people to develop proposals for strategies or specific goals. These proposals will be discussed in the first strategy session to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses and develop our hub strategy and goals.

Once we have a first draft of our hub's strategy, it will be posted in the #strategic_planning_session channel on our Slack, and hub members will have a week to provide feedback in that Slack channel before our second strategy session, where we'll incorporate any feedback and come up with a final strategy. (Slack is a messaging tool we use to share ideas and collaborate - everyone is welcome to join.)

Please join the #strategic_planning_session channel on our Slack! The channel will be a place where people can discuss strategy, view other proposals, and build off each others’ ideas. Even if you can't come to the strategy session, you can develop proposals or explain your vision for our hub this fall in that channel, and your contributions will be taken into consideration during our planning session.

Excited but unsure of how to draft your own strategy proposal?: The Sunrise National fall strategy guide is a great resource for drafting your own proposals. In addition, our Trainings Team put together a document explaining the Act-Recruit-Train cycle that Sunrise uses, our theory of change, and key questions to keep in mind when drafting a proposal for a strategy or goal. 

Food is a big deal and the films presented in this festival will reveal the link between environmental injustice, climate change, food insecurity and white supremacy.  The award-winning films will include "Gather," "Invisible Vegan," "Dolores" and "Urban Root".   In addition the films, there will be interviews with the filmmakers themselves.  Each film will be available for 24 hours each day of the festival timeframe.  And, they are free!  Sponsored by The Center for Biological Diversity. REGISTRATION & MORE INFO

By the end of April, nearly 200,000 leisure and hospitality workers across the state (more than half of the sector’s workforce, which is disproportionately made up of women and people of color) had lost their jobs, and employment levels in the sector are still down 32%, compared with 25.6% nationwide. Those working in the food preparation and serving industry are particularly hard hit. For the majority of the pandemic, dishwashers, cooks, bartenders, cafeteria workers and others in the industry have made up the largest percentage of Washington’s unemployed — even as Gov. Jay Inslee relaxed restrictions this summer, allowing dining rooms to reopen at reduced capacity. Read more here.

For more than 14 minutes, Seattle’s 68-year-old coach didn’t say one word about football or training camp or the upcoming opening game just two weeks and one day away—other than to mention he’s been coaching “since I was 13 years old coaching Pop Warner kids” in Marin County, California. For 14 minutes, 26 seconds, he took no questions. He described the pain and fear Black people, including his Seahawks players, live in daily (as of June, 70 of the 90 players on the team were Black men). He described the most immediate action they are taking for change. They all chose to be 100% registered to vote for Election Day instead of practicing Saturday. Read more here.

Elizabeth Maupin of Issaquah/Sammamish Interfaith Coalition writes:

I have been in touch with the Seattle University Law School and the Housing Justice Project about training and placing court watchers in the King County eviction courts. Once the moratorium ends there will likely be a tsunami of eviction cases.  Volunteer court watchers who sit in a courtroom and take notes not only provide us with data on racial bias and discrimination, but actually impact outcomes merely by being there.  Experience has shown that judges, prosecutors, and attorneys who know that they are being watched and will be held accountable are more likely to take care to operate fairly and to follow reforms designed to improve our justice system.  Housing Justice Project will provide training and volunteers will probably serve for half a day once a month.  Background checks will be required.

Let us know if you are interested by contacting Karla Davis (karlad@kcba.org)and we will get you updates on this as the project moves forward.

Small-dollar lenders, such as Speedy Cash and TitleMax, intentionally design high-cost, low-quality products to make it almost impossible for borrowers to repay their loans under the original terms. Finance fees and average annual interest rates of 400 percent prevent most borrowers from repaying payday loans in full, with borrowers ending up in debt five months out of the year for what was deceptively marketed as a two-week loan. Other loans within this industry are just as harmful. Ninety percent of auto title loans are re-borrowed, and 20 percent of borrowers have their vehicles repossessed. This rule makes it easier for lenders to trap borrowers in cycles of debt. Payday lenders are well known for taking advantage of the precarious conditions experienced by working-class and poor people — and which disproportionately affect Black and brown people. The average loan amountborrowed from a storefront payday lender is about $1,000. Contradicting the assumption that these lenders profit primarily from unpredictable crises such as a pay cut or medical emergency, a majority of borrowers — 69 percent — rely on payday loans to cover recurring expenses. People use these higher-cost loans to live day-to-day: buying groceries, paying bills, and making their rent or mortgage payments. Read more here.

We are living in a time of moral reckoning with the past. Beyond Confederate monuments and memorials, people are also reevaluating the work, beliefs and reputations of progressive figures. . . . .

Despite pushback from Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, Police Chief Carmen Best, police unions and thousands of pro-police community members and concerned residents, the Seattle City Council is expected to approve initial cuts to the Seattle Police Department in a final vote on its 2020 re-balancing package Monday afternoon. All nine members of the council approved the plan in the Budget Committee last week. On Monday, the full council is due to take the final vote after taking up remaining amendments connected to efforts to defund SPD that were sparked by the nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police. Read more here.

A county official in Michigan is defending his use of the N-word — by repeatedly saying the slur, and insisting that it does not imply he is a racist. Leelanau County Road Commissioner Tom Eckerle has been facing calls to resign since Tuesday, when he reportedly used one of the most taboo words in U.S. society to explain why he would not be wearing a face mask. "Well, this whole thing is because of them n****** down in Detroit," Eckerle said, according to the Leelanau Enterprise. Read more here.

Barack Obama used his eulogy at the funeral for Rep. John Lewis on Thursday to compare President Donald Trump's sending of federal officers to quash protests in Portland, Oregon, to the tactics of George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who sent state troopers to violently break up peaceful civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s. Lewis, a civil rights icon who died on July 17 at age 80, was nearly beaten to death in Selma by Alabama troopers authorized by Wallace to stop a historic march for voting rights on March 7, 1965, in what came to be known as Bloody Sunday. Read more here.

Seneca Cayson, a black business owner who helped lead peaceful gatherings in downtown Portland, worries that incidents of vandalism and taunting of law enforcement by a tiny minority of the many thousands of white protesters turning out distracts from the main aims of the Black Lives Matter movement. But he speculated that such clashes also draw more attention to racial injustice and said of white rebels: “We are fighting alongside them to … be equal.” Many cite competing voices and the harsh glare of a national spotlight, which has reduced the situation to a culture war when the reality is much more complex. Read more here.

“I call it reparations, because if it's not reparations, it becomes sort of charitable, you know, and it's not a charitable offer. It's a payment for a debt,” said Donald King, a professor of architecture at the University of Washington who has lived in the Central District for approximately 40 years and is part of The Nehemiah Initiative, a church-led, community-based partnership designed to preserve and revitalize the Central District. Read more here.

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On Friday, council members for the first time offered specific proposals and timelines for cutting the department’s budget and creating alternative systems to prevent violence and provide community safety. They also urged Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best to prioritize responding to violent crimes and to deprioritize calls that could disproportionally impact communities of color. Only one council member, Kshama Sawant, proposed immediate and blunt cuts that could slash close to 50% of the department’s remaining 2020 budget. The rest offered proposals for this year that would slice 100 full-time equivalent positions — out of 1,428 fully trained, probationary and recruited officers — from the department through layoffs and attrition, while shuffling some police functions into other city departments. Read more here.

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