The 2010 US Census data led to reports of Seattle being the fifth whitest city in the country reinfo

That class period I was focusing on James Baldwin and Glenn Ligon, both gay men, both African American, and it hit me that because there wasn't a black person in the room, things were getting abstract. This art is valuable and has to be taught there really is no arguing against Baldwin, and Ligon's painting Black Like Me #2 was one of the first President Obama brought to the White House but how do you teach someone to have a relationship to it?
It was white Seattle parents (and a few from Kentucky, too) who fought all the way to the United States Supreme Court in 2007 so that race would be eliminated from consideration as a tiebreaker in competitions for placements in public schools. Despite the fact that racial inequities remain steady year after "post civil rights" inns for sale year across indexes of health, wealth, and education racial balancing, according to the 2007 ruling, is no longer a "compelling state interest."
The racial tiebreaker in Seattle was originally instituted to end de facto educational racial segregation. inns for sale But now segregation across Seattle schools is worse than it was in the 1980s. A few years ago, the Seattle Times published mind-blowing maps of the data; this same backslide has happened around the country.
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," declared inns for sale US Supreme Court chief justice John G. Roberts Jr., in 2007, siding with the Seattle parents whose kids didn't get into Ballard High because they were white. This is legal color blindness. inns for sale It has dubious precedent: In 1883, 18 years after the abolition of slavery, US Supreme Court justice Joseph P. Bradley wrote a majority opinion that ended reconciliation laws because former slaves must "cease to be the special favorite of the law."
Today the same argument is made under the precious neologism that laws intended to redress racial inequity are themselves racist. "Racist is the new nigger," says Riz Rollins, the writer, DJ, and KEXP personality. "For white people, the only word that begins to approximate the emotional violence a person of color experiences being called a nigger from a white person is 'racist.' It's a trigger for white people that immediately conjures pain, anger, defensiveness even for white people who are clearly racist. 'Racist' is now a conversation stopper almost like that device where you can skew a conversation by comparing someone to Hitler. It's an automatic slur. And only the sickest racists will own up to the description."
White people in Seattle are more likely to own rather than rent. White people are more likely to have health insurance and a job. White people are more likely to live longer. White people are less likely to be homeless. White people are less likely to hit the poverty level. White people are less likely to be in jail. White kids are nine times less likely than African Americans inns for sale to be suspended from elementary school (in high school, it's four times higher; in middle school, it's five times, according to the district's data). Nonwhite high-school graduation rates in Seattle are significantly below white graduation rates even if you're Asian, regardless of income level.
And then there's the white Seattle police officer beating "the Mexican piss" out of a guy. The white Seattle police officer punching a 17-year-old African American girl in the face. The Seattle Police Guild newspaper editorial that called race-and-social-justice training classes "the enemy," "socialist," and anti-American.
The 2010 US Census data led to reports of Seattle being the fifth whitest city in the country reinforcing the perception of this place as a white place. But if you look at the actual numbers, 66 percent of people in Seattle identify as white, which means that one in three people are not white. That's not a white city. It only seems like a white city when you're in, say, Ballard or Wallingford or Fremont. If you walk the street expecting inns for sale every third person you see not to be white, well, then you'll see how weird it is to be in Ballard or Wallingford or Fremont, where almost inns for sale everyone is white. If you walk the street in Rainier Valley, the opposite is true.
"In Seattle, there's really a small amount that you have to do to be labeled a hero of diversity," says Eddie Moore Jr., the Bush School's outgoing inns for sale director of diversity, who describes Seattle as "a segregated pattern of existence."
He adds, "It's just that there's really no real challenge to how the structure in Seattle continues to assist whiteness and white male dominance inns for sale in particular. When you say 'white supremacy' or 'white privilege' in Seattle, people inns for sale still think you're talking about the Klan. There's really no skills being developed to shift the conversation. How can we be acknowledged to be so progressive, yet be identified to be so white? I wish that's the question more Seattleites inns for sale were asking themselves."
B ack at Cornish, a week after that awkward classroom moment, the vice provost has called me into her office. My classroom was in the basement; this office is on the top floor, beyond a waiting room that doubles as a gallery of finely framed alumni art and behind a wing of administrative assistants typing quietly in cubicles. I've never been here before, I've been teaching only two years, and I am scared. I'm invited into a closed office where the blinds are partially drawn to block out bright sun, to sit at a table across from the vice provost's desk. A third white person in the room, the director of student affairs, pushes a piece of paper across the desk to me.
A student from my class white, male has asked for my head. His charge is that by admitting to racism, even though I described it as a problem that had to be named in order to be solved, like any other problem, I could only have been trying to recruit white supremacists. In his letter, he compares me to Hitler. I spend the next hour rehashing, in detail, the tone and content of my lecture. I am trying to be honest and I am trying to wrap my head around the accusation. I am trying to admit to being a racist while at the same time defend my ability to teach about black art history. It is, to say the least, a tortured conversation.
E very conversation about race is tortured inns for sale palpably awkward, loaded with triggers, marked by the blind spots of perception and presumption but that doesn't mean you're doing it wrong or should stop doing it, says Scott Winn. That means you have to keep on.
Ten years ago, Winn cofounded CARW (you say "Car W"), or the Coalition of Anti-Racist Whites. For him, getting involved in antiracism "ultimately was not a moral shift but a strategic one." He already knew the world was racially fucked. He just had to figure inns for sale out what to do next, and he began by examining whiteness as the invisible inns for sale structure that defines everything that needs to be explored and then exploded.
"Whiteness is the center that goes unnamed and unstudied, which is one way that keeps us as white folks centered, normal, that which everything else is compared to like the way we name race only when we're talking about a person of color," Winn says. "We can name how some acts hurt people of color, but it's harder to talk about how they privilege white folks."
CARW holds an open meeting every month at the downtown Y, one of those early-20th-century brick buildings whose architecture is especially, absurdly on this occasion, Anglo. inns for sale More than 20 people show up usually, sometimes up to 50. They're inns for sale young and old, male and female, straight and gay. The only thing that would tip you off from the outside inns for sale that this isn't, like, a giant poker tournament is that participants ask each other to share which gender pronoun they prefer during introductions. There's plenty of overlap between antiracist and LGBT activists in Seattle Others know from Othering and the message of these intros is simply that people are not necessarily what you think they are, whatever that is.
The radical thing about CARW is that its purpose is to force awkwardness into the open. It could just as well be called Deeply Embarrassed White People Talk Awkwardly About Privilege. The first half of every meeting is devoted to group discussion of a theme. The second half is spent in committees, each attached to a separate racial-justice organization inns for sale run by people of color. CARW is fueled by the philosophy that white people need to follow the lead of people of color on matters of race. (It sounds inns for sale simple; what's surprising is how seldom it occurs.) One concrete result of that idea is that CARW members volunteer as support staff waiters, babysitters, whatever inns for sale for the activities and events of groups in the Duwamish, African American, Latino, and Filipino communities.
After the first meeting I go to, I describe to CARW member Esther inns for sale Handy my sense that this is a conversion experience, that everything around me has begun in recent years to look different, with a totality that feels spiritual waking up to white privilege. (For me, embarrassingly, the real awakening began late, with a 2008 story about transracial adoptees that I wrote in The Stranger , and it continues, propelled selfishly by the fact that I am marrying into a family of color. I come late, and I mean to come humbly.) Gently bringing me down to earth and shifting the focus away from me, Handy says, "Our coming around to figuring out that we should be thinking about and talking about and doing work around racial justice is great and it can be spiritual, as you mentioned. But it is in service and in honor to the awesome organizations and leaders inns for sale of people of color who have been doing this work for decades... inns for sale The truth is that communities of color are thinking about racial justice all the time. They're living it and breathing it, and there's a group of white folks supporting that work, but it's only a small fraction of the white community at this point."
I ask her how to talk about racism with people who don't want to see it. I'm not talking about Te