Category: discrimination

Density, Development, discrimination, housing, Mayor Harrell

Mayor’s Office Removed All New Anti-Displacement Proposals from Draft “Anti-Displacement Framework”

By Erica C. Barnett

As Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office prepared to release the proposed 20-year update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan earlier this year, an advisor sent an email to key staffers at the Office of Planning and Community Development, including OPCD director Rico Quirindongo, raising concerns about an “anti-displacement framework” the office submitted to the mayor’s office last year.

OPCD developed the anti-displacement strategy as part of a proposed comprehensive plan update that included significantly more density throughout the city than the plan the mayor eventually released; that plan, as we’ve reported, reluctantly complies with a new state housing law while preserving the city’s exclusionary housing patterns.

The mayor’s office had already deleted sections of OPCD’s proposal “that would suggest some commitment of new dollars or policy pivots that haven’t been vetted” with his office, the staffer wrote, but OPCD still needed to “really beef[…] up” sections of the plan that highlighted the city’s existing anti-displacement interventions, “with a ton more detail (including the millions we [are] spending on these efforts!)”

For example, the staffer wrote, “We should really be talking up our affordable housing investments—I wouldn’t be surprised i[f] Seattle residents are spending more per capita on this than anywhere else in the country.”

When he announced the draft comprehensive plan in March, Harrell said that his experience growing up in the historically redlined Central District “has informed my belief that we need more housing, and we need to be intentional about how and where we grow, addressing the historic harms of exclusionary zoning and embedding concrete anti-displacement strategies every step of the way.”

But a comparison between the 2023 draft of the plan and the version released in March reveals that the mayor effectively vetoed an ambitious plan to combat displacement and replaced it with a list of laws that are already in effect, including the “record high” $970 million housing levy.

The changes aren’t mere trims or cuts. The August draft, which OPCD finalized after four months of community engagement, described itself as “a toolbox for robust anti-displacement strategies needed to achieve equitable growth” and concluded with an appendix titled “Examples of current City anti-displacement tools.”

In the 14-page version Harrell released, that appendix is the plan.

The changes reflect a dramatic shift in the city’s official strategy for addressing displacement through smart planning and investment strategies. Instead of endorsing policy proposals to prevent displacement in the future, the draft plan repeatedly pats the city on the back for policies adopted years or even decades in the past.

For example, OPCD’s draft included five strategies to “Expand Tenant Protections” in the future, such as expanding access to information about vacancies in affordable housing, expanding tenant protections to more people, funding tenant organizing efforts, and paying for short-term rental assistance to prevent evictions.

In contrast, under a section retitled “Protect Tenants,” the framework released in March summarizes existing tenant protections without proposing any new ones. These include the Just Cause Eviction ordinance (1980),  the Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance (1990), the Rental Housing Inspection Ordinance (2010), the Economic Displacement Relocation Ordinance (2021), and the winter and school-year eviction moratoria (2020 and 2021, respectively.)

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Similarly, the unreleased draft suggested the city expand or establish investments in strategies like land banking (buying land for future use), social housing, and right-of-first-refusal laws that would give community-based organizations or tenants the right to buy buildings that house low-income tenants when they go up for sale.

The March proposal eliminates these proposals, instead listing two existing city programs that help homeowners at risk of displacement from historically redlined communities—the Equitable Development Initiative and a density bonus for religious institutions that build affordable housing on their properties, which has been required by state law since 2019.

A spokesperson for OPCD told PubliCola the slimmed-down anti-displacement strategy “reflects many of the existing City policies and programs that were identified, through extensive stakeholder engagement during the summer of 2023, as strategies that collectively play an important and ongoing role in addressing displacement throughout the city.”

“Before assuming new and different policies are needed, the City needs to assess the efficacy of current policies and where there might be gaps. To the extent current policies are effective, the City may want to double down on those,” the spokesperson added.

As with the draft comprehensive plan update released in March, the draft anti-displacement plan avoids discussion the ongoing impacts of explicitly racist past practices like redlining, portraying displacement as the result of market forces rather than ongoing policies the city has the power to change. But market pressures don’t exist in a vacuum, a now-deleted section of the draft plan reads. They are exacerbated by the preservation of “exclusionary zoning” in whiter, wealthier single-family areas, which “limits access for lower-income people and contributes to displacement in other more vulnerable areas as people priced out of these neighborhoods look elsewhere for housing and bid up homes in relatively lower-cost areas”—not in some distant, racist past, but in our present, because of policies in place today.

These deleted sections, which span pages, weren’t just rhetoric; they directly informed city planners’ proposals for the policies they included in the early draft of the plan, including new tenant protections, more apartments all over the city, and “substantial” increases in funding for existing and new anti-displacement strategies. (I’m not referring to the early draft’s pages of historical context, which have been moved to a different part of the plan, but to the sections describing how past discrimination has reverberations in existing city policies.)

A spokesperson for Mayor Harrell’s office pointed out to PubliCola that the draft plan, including the heavily edited anti-displacement strategy, is “not the final plan, and we are still gathering feedback from residents. We see this process as an opportunity to have a conversation with community about how and where our city should grow and will be reviewing every aspect of the plan in the context of the public feedback we receive.”

Based on an earlier round of community feedback, however, there’s little reason to believe the city will change its plan in response to community input now. According to OPCD’s own report on a series of meetings held across the city between November 2022 and February 2023, Seattle residents overwhelmingly said they wanted to see more affordable housing in their neighborhoods, that the city should allow new density, in general, “everywhere” or “spread throughout” the city, and that their favorite thing about where they lived were amenities they could access without leaving the neighborhood, like grocery stores and transit.

Digging into the database of comments, which OPCD links on its website, “density without displacement” is a common theme, with many people identifying the need to allow more housing everywhere while adopting specific strategies to stall displacement in areas that are being rapidly gentrified. OPCD’s original anti-displacement strategy appears to have incorporated many of these concerns by proposing specific policies to address them. But by the time the plan emerged from the mayor’s office, all those proposed policies were gone.

Density, Development, discrimination, housing, Mayor Harrell

Mayor’s Office Edited Ambitious Growth Plan for Seattle to Preserve the Status Quo

By Erica C. Barnett

Last August, Seattle’s Department of Planning and Community Development produced a draft update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan that would have allowed for significantly more density in more parts of the city, including single-family neighborhoods, than the final version Mayor Harrell released in March.

The never-released draft plan, which PubliCola obtained through a records requests, would have allowed more density near bus lines, more apartments in areas historically reserved for single-family houses, and more housing of all types in the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

The unreleased plan zeroed in on the city’s history of racist zoning restrictions, and left no question that wealthy, white Seattle residents continue to benefit from exclusionary policies today. Areas that once had explicit covenants banning Black residents “remain disproportionately white, restrictively zoned, and characterized by high-cost detached housing,” according to the original draft, thanks to “facially race-neutral standards like minimum lot size and prohibitions on multifamily housing — both of which remain in Seattle’s zoning today.”

Instead of releasing that plan, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office spent six months taking their red pens to the document—watering down the density requirements, removing provisions that would have allowed more housing in single-family neighborhoods (such as Laurelhurst, Wallingford, and east Queen Anne) and ensuring that the new comprehensive plan would preserve the status quo while just complying with a new state law designed to allow more density everywhere.

Here, for the first time, is a look at some of the changes Mayor Harrell’s office made to the plan that will guide how and where Seattle grows over the next 20 years. The comp plan is an important document: It sets goals for the coming decades and establishes policies to make them happen; these policies become the framework for future decisions about zoning, land use, greenhouse gas reductions, and much more.

The most obvious and high-impact changes to the plan are reductions in the amount of density the city will allow in every neighborhood, especially historically single-family areas. Many of the reductions in density are fairly subtle, but the first one is glaring: The August version of the plan would have created a new land use designation called “corridors,” where buildings of up to five stories would “generally” be allowed, although “higher heights may be appropriate in areas of mixed-use zoning or other focal points.”

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Urbanists (including PubliCola) have raised issues with the idea that apartments should be restricted to big, busy arterials. But that isn’t an argument against tall apartment buildings on streets with bus routes; it’s an argument for denser housing throughout the city.

The proposal the city released in March completely eliminates the corridor designation, taking large swaths of land surrounding streets like Sand Point Way, Ravenna Ave. NE, and East Madison Street off the table for density. According to a spokeswoman for the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development, Seferiana Day, “the Mayor’s Office considered the corridor option but ultimately decided not to include it as part of its Draft Plan as the other zoning changes contemplated in the Draft Plan can readily accommodate any amount of future growth that does occur.”

According to Day, the city has not calculated how many new apartments and other types of housing including the corridors would have added to the plan.

“[T]his seems to be calling for more housing well beyond what is needed based on projections,” Harrell’s staffer commented. A long-range planner with OPCD responded, “Yes, that is intentional. We have not kept up with past job growth and want to ensure there is a buffer of housing capacity in anticipation of potential future housing demand exceeding the adopted projections (which were low-ball last update).”

For decades, there has been a tension in Seattle between “accommodating” the number of people who are expected to move here—by allowing enough additional housing for a theoretical maximum number of new people—and providing an abundance of options for everyone already living here as well as those who will move here in the future. The comprehensive plan draft the city release in March takes the former approach, creating “capacity” for about 100,000 new homes over a period when at least 200,000 new people are expected to move into a city already facing a critical housing shortage.

Notes between city staff on a draft of the plan show that there was internal debate on this point, and that the mayor’s office prevailed. In one copy of the draft that included staff notes, a staffer for the mayor’s office questioned the plan’s original recommendation to “Plan for expected growth over the next 20 years while also providing additional housing capacity to enable the city to respond to existing unmet needs and potential demand from future employment growth.”

“[T]his seems to be calling for more housing well beyond what is needed based on projections,” Harrell’s staffer commented. A long-range planner with OPCD responded, “Yes, that is intentional. We have not kept up with past job growth and want to ensure there is a buffer of housing capacity in anticipation of potential future housing demand exceeding the adopted projections (which were low-ball last update).” Continue reading “Mayor’s Office Edited Ambitious Growth Plan for Seattle to Preserve the Status Quo” →

discrimination, Police

SPD Officer Demoted for Protest Response Claims Discriminatory Treatment
Former Assistant Chief Steve Hirjak

By Paul Kiefer

The Seattle Police Department commander demoted two months ago for his role in the department’s handling of a protest last June filed a discrimination and retaliation claim against the city on Thursday.

Captain Steve Hirjak, whom Interim Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz demoted from Assistant Chief after deeming him responsible for SPD’s widely criticized use of tear gas and blast balls against protesters on Capitol Hill on June 1, 2020, argued through his attorney that Diaz unfairly shifted blame for the incident away from Lieutenant John Brooks, who was the on-site commander during the protest.

In a letter accompanying the claim, Hirjak’s attorney criticized Diaz’s decision to demote Hirjak instead of Brooks, pointing to findings by the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) that held Brooks responsible for violating SPD policy on June 1. When Diaz unexpectedly diverged from the OPA’s findings in May, he drew criticism from members of the Community Police Commission and city council member Lisa Herbold, who questioned what evidence the chief had to hold Hirjak responsible for the protest response; Hirjak included a letter from Herbold to Diaz in his claim.

In a subsequent letter to Herbold, Diaz wrote he “must have confidence that each and every member of this department’s sworn Command Staff… be able to step into an incident command position as circumstances may require.” Hirjak’s demotion, he added, was “a reflection of my lack of confidence in [Hirjak’s] ability to do so.”

But in his claim, Hirjak contends that Diaz—and his predecessor, former SPD Chief Carmen Best—treated him unfairly because of his race (Hirjak is Korean-American) while allowing white commanders who made mistakes during the department’s protest response to avoid accountability or rise in the ranks. Hirjak became SPD’s first Asian-American assistant chief in 2018.

His attorney’s letter points out errors by an array of Hirjak’s colleagues, including the decision by Assistant Chief Thomas Mahaffey to abandon the department’s East Precinct without informing Best, as well as Assistant Chief Deanna Nollette’s “failure… to gather or understand relevant intelligence” ahead of the protests, which he cited as a reason for SPD’s inadequate preparations for large-scale demonstrations. Neither Mahaffey nor Nollette faced discipline.

The letter also notes that both Brooks—who was the subject of 14 misconduct investigations in 2020—and Bryan Grenon, who was the captain above Brooks on June 1, both received promotions within the past year: Brooks is now the acting captain of a unit that leads SPD’s protest responses, and Grenon replaced Hirjak as assistant chief.

According to his attorney, the demotion has done serious damage to Hirjak’s reputation and career opportunities, as did the two months he spent without a unit assignment after his promotion. While Diaz recently appointed Hirjak to lead the Special Victims Crimes section, which includes the domestic violence and elder crimes units, Hirjak’s attorney argued that his new assignment “lacks visibility or significant contact with outside agencies and only serves to perpetuate the damage associated with his demotion.”

Meanwhile, his attorney added, “the more prominent position of Captain with the Force Review Unit remains open and Mr. Hirjak, who helped create the unit, is the most qualified person for the job.”

The city has until early August to agree to a mediation before Hirjak can file a lawsuit.

City Hall, discrimination, homelessness, housing, King County, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank

New Hires and a New Draft of the “Compromise” Homelessness Plan
The Seattle Public Library has rented its downtown auditorium to a controversial group that works against the civil rights of transgender people. Image via Pixabay.

1. Learn to trust the Crank: As I reported she would on Sunday night, Mayor Jenny Durkan has hired a new deputy mayor to replace David Moseley, who is leaving the city on January 15: Casey Sixkiller, who’s been the chief operating officer for King County since last year. Sixkiller has spent most of his career as a DC-based political consultant working for a variety of clients, some of which lobby the city and state on issues such as homelessness, deregulation, and privacy. He also worked for several years as a legislative assistant to US Sen, Patty Murray.

According to FEC records and his LinkedIn profile, Sixkiller started a firm called Sixkiller Consulting in 2010. According to his LinkedIn profile, Sixkiller is still a managing partner at the company, along with his wife Mariah Sixkiller, who is still active as a consultant. Last year, Sixkiller Consulting had eight clients who paid the firm a total of $650,000, including Microsoft, the Software Alliance, Noble Energy (a Houston-based oil and gas firm), Motorola, and Virgin Hyperloop One.

Mayoral spokeswoman Kamaria Hightower says Sixkiller will recuse himself from working on issues involving Sixkiller Consulting’s clients, in compliance with rules saying “that City personnel are ‘disqualified from acting on City business’ where an immediate family member of the covered individual has a financial interest.” Moseley, who is married to consultant and sometime city contractor Anne Fennessy, officially recuses himself from issues Fennessy is working on.

According to an internal email from senior deputy mayor Mike Fong, Sixkiller will take over Moseley’s portfolio, which includes housing and the city’s response to homelessness. Fong’s email to staff touts Sixkiller’s “collaborative leadership approach” at the county and his “unique blend of public policy, business, and management experience.”

Asked about Sixkiller’s experience working on homelessness , Hightower pointed to his work “coordinating the delivery of [the county] Executive’s initiatives as it related to increasing shelter capacity in King County,” including the new shelter in the west wing of the downtown jail, a new day center in Pioneer Square, and “accelerating conversion of Harborview Hall into a 24/7 enhanced shelter.” (Harborview Hall, which was originally supposed to be an enhanced shelter, opened as a basic shelter in 2018 and was just upgraded to an enhanced shelter late last month.) Hightower also said Sixkiller advised Murray on housing and transportation “As such, he’s familiar with federal programs and funding streams supporting housing and homelessness, and the complexities around financing of affordable housing projects,” she said.

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2. As the city prepares to merge its homelessness efforts with the county’s, Seattle’s Human Services Department has a new spokesman: Will Lemke, a member of HSD’s communications team, will replace former spokeswoman Meg Olberding, who left last month. Lemke will make about $116,000. The job posting for the position, which called for a person who “value[s] the opulence of a diverse workforce with authentic perspective,” lists a starting salary of $95,000 to $142,000. Lemke will make around $116,000.

3. Speaking of the homelessness reorg, the city council posted the latest amended version of legislation establishing a new regional homelessness authority on Monday, but the proposal will likely be amended further on Thursday, when the council’s special committee on homelessness takes it up again.

As I’ve reported extensively in this space, Durkan, King County Executive Dow Constantine, and most members of the King County Council agreed late last month to toss out a plan developed over the past year, which would have put a board of experts in charge of the new agency’s policies, budget, and executive director, and replace that structure with one governed by a board of elected officials from across the county. (The 12-member board would include three people with “lived experience,” but their votes could be overruled in all cases by the elected supermajority). The new “governing board” would have ultimate say over the direction of the authority. Continue reading “New Hires and a New Draft of the “Compromise” Homelessness Plan” →

City Council, Density, Development, discrimination, Equity, gender, land use, Mayor Murray, Morning Crank, Urbanism

Morning Crank: A Framework for Inaction

1. Nearly every candidate in this year’s Seattle elections, from urban planner Cary Moon to labor crusader Teresa Mosqueda to former US attorney Jenny Durkan, calls herself (or himself) an “urbanist.” (Moon was even endorsed by The Urbanist blog.) But what are the candidates telling neighborhood groups—the sort of organizations that too often stand in the way of the kind of new housing that would move Seattle toward an actual urbanist future?

At a recent candidate forum held by a group of Magnolia, Queen Anne, and Ballard homeowners, Moon said she would “restart” the process of allowing more housing in neighborhoods so that people already living in those neighborhoods—incumbent property owners—can make sure that their “culture” and neighborhood “character” is preserved.

Asked about Mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda, which allows modest increases in housing supply in non-single-family areas, Moon responded:

The HALA process was way too insular and top-down. It was a small group of people, behind closed doors, who decided that they had a compromise with each other that they unleashed on the world and said, ‘You shall do this.’ That is not the way we do things in Seattle. A better process would have been to go to neighborhoods and say, ‘We’re growing this much and we need to create a healthy society where people of all income levels and all ages and stages of life can live in your neighborhood. Here’s the target goals for your neighborhood. How can we achieve these goals together?’ And work directly with these neighbors around how they want to grow. Do you want duplexes? Row houses? Backyard cottages? Upzone your urban village? [Put] the whole range of tools on the table and work with neighborhoods to figure out, what is the right way for you to grow that preserves your culture and your character of your neighborhood that you care about. That is what we should have done. And I would restart that process at this point and have a new discussion based in those constructive approaches and that positive future vision, because that’s the only way we’re going to make change in this city.

Moon’s response parroted both anti-development activists like Jon Grant, who’s running on a socialist party platform for council Position 8, and property values activists like Marty Kaplan, the Queen Anne homeowner who sued to prevent the city from allowing more backyard cottages and mother-in-law apartments in Seattle’s single-family areas. (Not to mention former mayor Mike McGinn, who ran unsuccessfully this year on a similar message).

Although Moon has, to her credit, been consistent with this let-the-neighborhoods-decide talking point (she said something similar to Transportation for Washington, the political arm of  the urbanist Transportation Choices Coalition, in their endorsement interview, and to me), she’s savvy enough to know that promises to preserve “your culture,” “neighborhood character,” and even “your neighborhood” are dog whistles,  not neutral policy goals. Assuring homeowners that the neighborhoods belong to them, not newcomers or renters, and defining “character” as “exclusive single-family areas” creates a framework for inaction, not a blueprint for growth.

2. On a more positive note, it’s been fun to see Moon and Durkan try to outdo each other with proposals to advance pay equity for women and in jobs primarily held by women over the past two weeks—something I’ve never seen from any male candidate for local elective office, ever. (This, in case you’re wondering, is one of many reasons we need more women in local positions—try to imagine any of the male council members of the past 50 years adding “gender pay equity” to the mission of a standing council committee, which Jean Godden did, or expanding that mission to “gender equity” in general, as Lorena Gonzalez did after Godden left the council.)

The latest shot across the bow comes from Moon, who on Monday proposed a set of rule changes to promote pay equity and transparency from large employers and an ordinance that would bar employers from asking prospective hires about their salary history. Women in Seattle currently make just 78 cents on the dollar compared to men doing similar work, one of the worst big-city pay gaps in the country. Salary history requests contribute to this gap, because when employers base salaries on women’s current pay in a system that underpays them, it only perpetuates the problem. In addition to the salary history ban, Moon proposed working toward a local version of state legislation that would have banned retaliation against workers for discussing their pay, prevented employers from paying some people less for doing the same work as other employees based on their job title, and tracking women into lower-paying jobs.

The pay gap, unsurprisingly, is even worse in the tech industry, where female programmers make, on average, almost 30 percent less than their male counterparts. Durkan is supported by the political arm of the Seattle Chamber, which includes the Washington Retail Association and the Washington Tech Industry Alliance, organizations that opposed SB 1605 this year. The Chamber’s PAC, Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy, has poured $86,000 into an independent expenditure group, People for Jenny. I reached out to Durkan’s campaign yesterday afternoon to find out whether she supports a ban on salary history or a local ordinance that mirrors 1605 and will update this post when I hear back from them.

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discrimination, Equity, gender, Mayor Murray, race, South Seattle Emerald

How Programs Like “Our Best” Fail Black Girls: A Conversation With Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

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This story originally appeared on the South Seattle Emerald.

The story of the school-to-prison pipeline is a familiar one: Nationwide, young Black men in both public and private schools are more likely than their White counterparts to be disciplined, tracked into special education classes, and suspended for the same infractions, contributing to higher dropout rates and subsequent incarceration. Seattle is no exception to this nationwide phenomenon. In Seattle public schools, African-American boys are nearly three times as likely as White boys to be referred to special education, and fall far behind their White counterparts on nearly every standard measure of success—from third-grade reading scores, to seventh-grade math proficiency, to graduation rates.

Earlier this year, Mayor Ed Murray announced a new initiative, called Our Best, that aims to close this achievement gap by doubling the number of Black male mentors, providing a clearinghouse and technical support for existing programs that serve young Black men, and creating a new special advisor to the mayor on young Black male achievement. The program, which is modeled on former President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper program, aims to increase the number of Black boys who graduate from high school, provide Black young men between the ages of 14 and 24 more pathways to “meaningful, well-paid employment,” and reduce the percentage of young Black men entering the criminal justice system.

Admirable as those goals may be, some advocates wonder: What about the girls? Young Black women face unique challenges that aren’t shared by young Black men, including pregnancy (four in 10 Black girls who drop out of school cite pregnancy or parenthood as the reason), lack of economic opportunity (the jobs that are available for female high school dropouts pay significantly less than those available to male dropouts), and abuse (girls are far more likely to be victims of domestic violence, sexual abuse, and harassment.) Black girls are also far more likely than Black boys to be single parents without other sources of support, which compounds the impact of lower wages. Little wonder, then, that the median net worth of single Black women is $100, compared with almost $7,900 for Black men and $41,500 for single White women.

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, the founder and director of the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and a law professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Columbia University, was one of the first prominent African-American writers to ring the alarm bell about My Brother’s Keeper back in 2014 when she wrote a New York Times op/ed titled “The Girls Obama Forgot: My Brother’s Keeper Ignores Young Black Women.” (Crenshaw is also known for coining the term “intersectionality,” which describes overlapping social identities and related systems of oppression.) The following year, Crenshaw and the AAPF published a report titled “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected,” which chronicled the “hidden toll of race on Black girls,” including the astonishing fact that Black girls are six times as likely as White girls to be suspended from school for the same infractions—a gap in suspension rates that dwarfs the gap between Black and White boys.

I sat down with Crenshaw in Seattle earlier this summer.

Erica C. Barnett [ECB]: Mayor Ed Murray has argued, essentially, that if the city can address the achievement gap for young Black men, the benefits will accrue to all Black students, including young women, without the need for a separate program addressing young women’s specific needs. Specifically, part of the argument is that when boys end up in jail, it destabilizes the African-American family structure and forces women to take on all the responsibilities in a family, including earning a living and taking care of kids and other family members. What do you think of the argument that addressing Black boys’ issues will ultimately help address Black girls’ problems as well?

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw: Where do I start? Trickle-down social justice doesn’t work any better than Reaganomics did. If there is a crisis with respect to Black families or Black communities, it is a crisis that can’t be fixed by trying to embrace a nostalgic desire for Ozzie and Harriet. That ship has sailed. It sailed a long time ago. What’s most important is to recognize the ways that boys and girls who are from socially marginalized groups are marginalized by a variety of factors.

Gender correction is not at the source of the solutions for African-American people or for any people. These frameworks are effectively foregrounding a framework that appeared in the 1960s, and even at that time it wasn’t really accurate to what was happening. This is [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan effectively warmed over and reproduced over 50 years later. [Moynihan, who served as assistant labor secretary under President Lyndon B. Johnson, wrote a now-infamous 1964 report called “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” that argued for racial self-help and the restoration of the traditional family as the solution to racial economic inequality]. The Moynihan thesis was basically that equality would always outpace what African-Americans were able to expect as long as their family structure was non-normative. To think that the source of inequality is incomplete socialization to gender norms is to ignore a whole variety of structural and historical dynamics that impact both boys and girls, men and women.

“If there is a crisis with respect to Black families or Black communities, it is a crisis that can’t be fixed by trying to embrace a nostalgic desire for Ozzie and Harriet.”

So what about the job market? What about the under-resourcing of public schools? What about stereotypes about men and women, boys and girls? What about suspension and punishment that happens inside of schools and outside of schools? What about geographic isolation and segregation? All of these are structural, institutional, historical factors that together contribute to the wide variety of inequalities that African-Americans face? To essentially say that the problem is located in the individual, as opposed to the structure in which the individuals live, is to effectively let off the hook an entire history of subordination and do so by essentially saying that, ‘the inequality rests in you, Black boy,’ rather than in the society that constructs the situations in which people live.

ECB: If you were creating a program within a school system to address those structural inequalities more directly, what would it look like?

KWC: I think there should be targeted programs for socially marginal and struggling students, and those students come across all genders. It’s not just one gender that’s struggling. I think the measurement of what counts as a crisis is also a problem, because the conversation up ‘til now has assumed that the only students in crisis were boys.

We’ve heard all about the school-to-prison pipeline, the disproportionate suspension rates, and all that, but if you actually look at the data from the Department of Education, the disparities between girls of different races is greater than the disparity between boys. Basically, it’s the way that we frame social problems that is the problem. Assuming that the girls are doing okay, or ‘the girls can wait,’ is basically assuming that ‘whatever is going on with you is basically irrelevant; the racial disparity between you and White girls is something that isn’t the primary point of concern.’

“If you actually look at the data from the Department of Education, the disparities between girls of different races is greater than the disparity between boys.”

What we know is that the long-term consequences of being pushed out of school for girls are in some ways even more consequential over the long term, because the jobs available for girls without a high school diploma actually pay less than the jobs that are available for boys without a [high school] diploma. If you add to that the fact that the majority of Black children will, at some point in their lives, rely either wholly or in part on the income of their mothers—to ignore that, to ignore those real family formations [in exchange] for the ones that we fantasize about, is basically to say, ‘All of you can wait until we get the ideal family formation that we want.’

That kind of framing of families is almost only expressed with respect to racialized communities. Outside of that, we have a completely new idea about what counts as a family. We have a completely new idea about gender roles. But when it comes to remediation—treating Black folks as sort of in need of gender repair—we’re back to old ideas about that.

ECB: A lot of what I’ve heard from supporters of these kinds of programs is that Black women are strong; they can provide for themselves; they’re the rock for their families.

KWC: So what’s that saying? Black men and boys are weak? I think that’s the question that should get asked. Unfortunately, we have accepted this idea that there’s something uniquely vulnerable about the boy child, rather than saying, ‘okay, this is the way the entire system impacts boys and here’s the way it impacts girls.’ Sometimes they’re impacted the same, particularly relative to their White counterparts, but sometimes there are differences, too. There are a whole range of ways that girls are impacted by some of these environments that people aren’t even talking about because the point of departure is always the boy.

“It’s almost like, ‘This is a race thing, so we’re not going to apply the typical anti-patriarchy, anti-heterosexism, anti-transphobia frames to it. It’s a Black boy thing.’ And I’m wondering, okay, how can some of the same administrations have policies that are really progressive on gender and also embrace this?”

ECB: For example?

KWC: Harassment that happens in school. The way that Black girls are often framed as unruly because of a stereotype about both Black people and girls, and that comes together and it makes it more likely that Black girls will be seen as acting out, having attitude. Obviously, the consequences of single parenting are greater for girls than they are for boys. Sexual abuse is more common for girls than it is for boys. So all this stuff gets sort of swept under the rug by saying, ‘Okay, you, girl, can wait so we can create Prince Charming for you.’ We need boys and girls who actualize their best capacity. We need to create opportunities for both of them and not create this fantasy where the girls can wait until the knight in shining armor comes along. Some of them don’t want a knight.

And then you add to that: How can we even be thinking about his when we’re starting to understand that gender is fluid? It’s not just two! So how’s that work? And where are the folks who are advocating for gender diversity when it comes to these issues? Where is the gay community? It’s almost like, ‘This is a race thing, so we’re not going to apply the typical anti-patriarchy, anti-heterosexism, anti-transphobia frames to it. It’s a Black boy thing.’ And I’m wondering, okay, how can some of the same administrations have policies that are really progressive on gender and also embrace this?

Seattle is about to choose a new mayor from among two White women. Although neither of the two candidates, Cary Moon and Jenny Durkan, have expressed an opinion about Our Best specifically, both have had what Crenshaw would call “non-normative” family experiences—Moon as a single mom and Durkan as the mother of two boys with her partner, who is a woman. For now, the city’s focus will remain on young Black men, whose mass incarceration, according to Office of Economic Director Brian Surrat, has “been very destabilizing to the African American family.” Surrat acknowledges that this “sounds like a very conservative argument,” and says the city does “need to have a different set of initiatives and investments targeting young Black women and Latinas, as well as the Southeast Asian community.”

However, the city has no specific plans for such an initiative, nor any details about what it might look like. For now, the city has decided that Our Best is good enough.