Seattle Doesn't Have a Race Problem, Shut Up!

I want to cover a few different, but related, story strands here, so bear with me. Typically with news, you dive in with laser-like precision, but here the goal is to step back from the news just far enough to see a pattern, which is not just that in Seattle race relations remain contentious, but that insisting upon fairness and equality will marginalize you.

The lesson is, Shut up and take what you can get.

You'll learn about Sable Verity's firing from Tabor 100 (an entity "committed to economic power, educational excellence and social equity for African-Americans"), and the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission report (pdf attached) that chronicles a substantial amount of back-pedaling and wishing it would all go away.

You'll also hear what got Sable Verity into trouble with the Mayor's Office--her crusade for equal police protection in south Seattle--contrasted with something funny that the City Council's Tim Burgess said the other day, that:

You just need to remember, where are the centers that they’re cutting? They tend to be, except for Alki, they’re in the north end of the city. You can see a pattern here of public policy decisions that the mayor has been making that, I’m not going to question his motives, but they are dividing our city.

Burgess said this in Queen Anne. [UPDATE: Oh good, he's apologized.] When you work to place his concern for the north and south in context, consider this map of Seattle's race and ethnicity. Certainly a few of Queen Anne View's commenters heard something troubling in his question:

Is Burgess implying that McGinn is redistributing public resources to disproportionally benefit low-income neighborhoods with large populations of color? Is he using the old code that pc white people use to elicit fear in white neighborhoods that people of color are taking what belongs to them?

But first, the tale of the blogger Sable Verity. Her real name is Sakara Remmu. She's outspoken, particularly on the subject of race, and sometimes I can't disagree with her more. She's like a smoke alarm--when she goes off, it doesn't always mean there's fire. But when there's a fire, she does go off, and we should be grateful for that.

To sum up the SEEC investigation, something really embarrassing happened that people would rather not tell the whole world about. To hear the leadership of Tabor 100 (who have a $10,000 contract with the City of Seattle) and the Mayor's Office tell it, things kind of got blown out of proportion.

The basic facts appear to be these: Deputy Mayor of Communities Darryl Smith and City Purchasing Director Nancy Locke both communicated to Tabor 100's Ollie Garrett that the presence of a blogger at Tabor 100 meetings might inhibit them from speaking freely. Both of them assured Garrett that they weren't asking Tabor 100 to take any action.

Now, let's say you have lived in Seattle for a while. You know what this means, right? Certain things you don't bring up unless you expect things to happen. Why even mention it? "I'd like to bring up something that bothers me about our relationship, but I don't expect any change to be made."

Garrett professed surprise to learn of Remmu's alter ego. (Remmu says she was thoroughly vetted, and offers a jpg of Garrett "liking" the Sable Verity page on Facebook. A commenter on PubliCola's story adds, "But what makes me most disappointed is that Ollie did, in fact, know that Sakara Remmu was the Sableverity.com blogger before she was hired. I know because I was in the room with her (along with about 40 other people) when we both learned about it - about a year ago.")

Garrett also implies that she asked Remmu to sign an NDA and that Remmu refused, which Remmu denies happened. Instead, she was fired.

This could be a tedious he-said-she-said, and I know the urge is to character assassinate someone and walk off whistling, but no matter how you look at it, it's not a model of how to deal with talking about race in public. Neither is--if that was Burgess's intent--coded euphemism. What we see here is not, I suspect, anyone acting out of evil design, but the evidence that there are structural forces at work in Seattle that enable a creeping racism as an exaptation.

It's tiresome to refer to the status quo as if someone is behind it all--in a sense, we're all behind it. Look at the choices everyone has made here for leverage, to go along to get along, to use provocative language...in the end, the least change is made. The troublesome pebble is emptied from the shoe.