By Erica C. Barnett
On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we ask whether recent graffiti targeting Seattle City Councilmember Tanya Woo—which said, among other things, “Fuck Tanya Woo—Get Her Out” and “Tanya Woo Hates Black People”—is another sign of what Sandeep has described as a new era of “toxicity” in Seattle politics.
The graffiti, which most council members have denounced as reprehensible hate speech targeting Woo as an Asian-American woman, was undeniably milder than the violent, directly threatening language used to target women on the council who voted against a basketball stadium, and did not have the impact of the literal brick someone threw through the home window of a progressive council member during the 2020 protests.
But Sandeep argues that the tone of local politics was poisoned by former councilmember Kshama Sawant, who routinely denounced her council colleagues and organized crowds of red-shirted activists to show up on her behalf, and has never recovered.
I countered that “Fuck [council member/mayor/city attorney Whoever” has been a staple of local political rhetoric since long before I arrived on the scene. See, for example, posters declaring “Fuck Mark Sidran: This poster is legal!!! in 2003;” “Fuck You, Greg Nickels,” a view expressed in the Stranger in 2005, when both Sandeep and I worked for that paper; and, of course, our former boss Dan Savage’s tirade against the whole mayor and city council, written in 2000:
I wanna say to five of Seattle’s nine city council members: Fuck you people. Fuck you, Richard McIver, and you too, Heidi Wills. Fuck you, Jan Drago. Fuck you, Jim Compton. And fuck you, City Council President Margaret Pageler. And I’d like to say the same to you, Mayor McOneTermWonder: Fuck you, Paul “Protest-Free Zone” Schell. There isn’t a city in this country being run by a bigger collection of log-stupid assholes.
My point being: The rhetoric against Tanya Woo isn’t new, nor is it the product of some new era of “incivility” brought on by Sawant’s “redshirts,” the 2020 protests (remember when Jenny Durkan claimed “Dykes for BLM” was an example of “homophobic” graffiti?) or the most recent city council, which lost most of its progressive members in the 2023 backlash election.
But that’s just, like, my opinion, man. Sandeep and David have different ones, and you can hear us all hash it out by listening to our latest episode below, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Yeah “Seattle nice,” a thing our richer citizens can pretend to be. That don’t know how horrid the masks looks on them though, poor things. And to pretend such foolish things, as if they’re children — especially since “their crowd” took over at city hall — “Seattle Nice” has been literally swept away.
Well said samm!
There is no such thing as an acceptable “tone” to use in pushing back against people who think they’re entitled to be in power and to have their perspectives dominate the public space without ever being challenged. The “tone argument” is a red herring.