-Good morning.
Good morning.
-Good morning.
-Ah, that is so much better.
So delighted to be here with you all
for this auspicious occasion,
Celebrating 20 years of the Race and Social Justice Initiative.
[ Applause ]
I certainly think it's something to celebrate,
particularly thinking about the amount
of colleagues calling me from across the country
who are in areas and regions,
and not that it's not happening here in varying degrees
where we're watching what I'll call the autocorrect
of colonization play out as DEI work is being extracted,
as folks are pulling out on the work and people
are literally scrambling, trying to figure out what to do.
It's no small feat that here in the city of Seattle,
we were able to get the Race and Social Justice Initiative
into code after 20 years.
[ Applause ]
My father always said,
and it's weird for me to be quoting my father
because I just buried my dad two weeks ago,
but he would always say, son, if you're working on something
that you can solve for in your lifetime,
you're thinking too small.
And the work that we are certainly embarking
upon and are engaged in is the work and a legacy of work
that's been going on forever.
And we would be remiss not to pause
and celebrate the legacy and the great work of so many folks
who have come before us.
I think it would be easy for myself
and the current team
who are able to get this ordinance pushed across
to feel like, look at what we've done.
I think the mistake in that is failing to realize
that there is always buildup before there's breakthrough.
So you've got to turn around and realize that
just because you came and were able to kick the door down,
there were hundreds of people behind you, right,
who were already chipping away at that very door.
And so we want to pay homage to all
of the community members and community leaders and folks
who work for the city of Seattle,
who have fought hard,
who've advocated.
And now we can do the work of thinking about
what we want to do to take the I off of that RSJI
because it's not an initiative anymore.
[ Applause ]
RSJI has influenced countless policies,
whether we're talking about fair chance housing,
workforce equity, sweetened beverage tax,
anti-harassment and discrimination
training for employees,
tons of tools like the race equity toolkits,
change teams, equitable budgeting rubrics,
all represents our city's commitment to bridging
across difference to drive equity and change.
Right now, we are in the process of launching
or have already launched some powerful cohort,
a cohort model that takes our departments out of silos
and allows us to come together to think about
how do we partner together.
We're oftentimes trying to solve incredibly complex issues.
And so often we're doing it in isolation
as if one department,
one sector or one community-based organization
can solve these complex issues. When the reality is,
is that we actually need to partner with the people
who have been most impacted and we need to think about
how do we leverage the resources we have as a city
and how do we co-create in partnership with community
to be able to solve these complex issues.
I think it allows us to be more efficient
and more effective with our resources
as we think about what are the comprehensive plans
and what are the comprehensive strategies that gets us there.
Today we celebrate 20 powerful years and a new ordinance,
as I mentioned, that's been codified into law.
And as we know,
this work requires us to bridge across difference
and to really be able to humanize each other,
to challenge existing points of view,
should certainly be seen as progress.
Disruption is really an invitation to reimagine yourself
and the world around you.
Most often for some folks,
it's seen as a means or a reason to double down,
but it's really an opportunity
as we have these different encounters to reimagine
ourselves and to reimagine the world around us.
It's action that actually moves us from theory to practice,
including figuring out where we need to build bridges,
because you can't build a bridge everywhere,
and when you can't build a bridge,
how do we strategically move into organizing?
As we look forward to the next 20 years,
we'll need imagination to build new systems and structures
for healing, new systems and structures for belonging.
If you think about it,
we're living in the imagination
that some folks had 400 years ago.
They imagined racial superiority
and then imagined it into a structure
and built systems that separated us
and that divided us so that we would live
in different neighborhoods
and attend different schools and so on and so forth.
And when the founding fathers of this country
declared we the people,
there are many folks in this room today
who were not included in that we the people,
but what we have in front of us
is an opportunity to redefine who we the people are.
We have an opportunity to think about
how do we build systems and structures
of belonging in a way
that allows us to widen the circle of human concern.
We're in an imagination battle,
and we want to create space for radical imagination.
It's easy to embrace the past,
but more difficult to grapple with the discomfort
of developing new strategies, new approaches,
and new ways of going about doing the work.
So often here in our region,
we like to laud ourselves on the fact
that we're better than Alabama or Mississippi
or some of these other places.
But what we can't do is rest on our laurels.
We have to have a commitment to being able to push forward.
I saw an interview one time with Tom Brady,
and I forget how many rings he has at this point.
It's something ridiculous.
But he was wearing all of his rings,
all six or seven of them, right, were on his fingers.
And the reporter says,
Tom, I want you to tell me about your favorite championship ring.
Brady looked at the reporter and he says, the next one.
And so I want us to make a commitment to not rest
on our laurels,
certainly to celebrate the work
that has happened to get us to where we're at,
but I want us to think about the next victory
and the collective impact that we can have as we move
and have the kind of collective will
to have the kind of collective impact necessary
as we move to widen the circle of human concern.
I want to invite back and invite the panel
who is going to come out at this time.
The panel is going to be moderated by John Page,
who you all have already been introduced to.
And so we are super excited.
You, of course, will be introduced.
We will introduce the different panel members.
But we're excited for this panel
as we're bringing back some legacy members of RSJI
to talk about the history, to talk about the past,
to talk about the present,
and to be able to look forward and peer into the future.
So we're excited for this fantastic day
that's been planned for you all.
We hope and trust that you will benefit from this experience
as we look to move into the future.
Thank you. [ Applause ]
-My name is Mickey Fearn,
and I am a civic imagineer in my retirement.
I'm working with government agencies
to think about possibilities,
new ways of doing things as a retiree.
-Right on. Thank you, Mickey. -Hi, everyone.
I'm Tamar Zere.
I'm the equity inclusion belonging manager
for Key County Metro.
I'm black, and my pronouns are she/her/hers.
It's good to be here with you all.
-Thank you.
-Hello, everyone. Good morning.
Glenn Harris. I use he/him pronouns.
I'm the president of Race Forward.
We're the largest multiracial racial justice organization
in the country, and I say that with a great deal of pride.
-Hi.
I'm Mary Flowers, she and her,
and I work for the Seattle Human Services Department.
Happy to be here.
-Right on. Let's give them a hand, y'all.
[ Applause ]
I don't know if y'all know --
-My brain is still processing this pronoun thing,
so I'm he/him.
-Right on. I don't know if y'all know
how fortunate we are to have these folks, right?
This is the aristocracy of Seattle,
of RSJI for sure, for sure. We're really lucky.
So I'm going to start with the first opening salvo,
and I'm going to start at this end.
So I'm going to start with you, Ms. Flowers, actually.
Actually, I'll start at the other end.
I'll start with Mickey again.
So Mickey, I want you to model brevity
and being profound, right?
I want you to model that.
-That's hard. That's going to be hard.
-So Mickey, and all the panelists,
when did you enter doing RSJI work for the city?
-December 2nd, 2002.
It is indelibly imprinted in my brain.
-The exact date.
-As the day that changed my life.
-Thank you. Thank you, Mickey. Tamar?
-Yeah, I was hired in 2015
to be one of the first members
of the Seattle Office for Labor Standards.
But I quickly realized that RSJI and OCR
was where I wanted to be.
And so nine months later, I joined the RSJI team.
So it was early 2016.
-Thank you. -I'm going to need help here.
I think it was 2008.
I came on as the RSJI manager after Mickey had departed.
-And I would say, I started working for the city in 1994.
And I got there because the community pushed the city
to do racial justice work before there was an RSJ.
So there was a good ten years before the initiative started.
Really strong community-led, community partnership work.
So I wouldn't have been here had it not been for this work.
I would never have been hired into the city that I went into.
-Say that. Thank you, Mary. Thank you, everybody.
And so what was the biggest accomplishment of RSJI to date?
And what was the terrain? So what were the conditions?
And I want folk to choose just one accomplishment
and go a little bit into that one,
and then we'll maybe unpack it deeper.
So we'll start with you again, Mickey.
Please. -I believe I can do that.
But first of all, and I'm going to violate it just to say this,
the person I am as a result of being a part
of Race and Social Justice Initiative,
I am so much better, smarter person, understand organization.
So I can count that as a success.
I can count that as that being the metamorphosis
that created the new Mickey
that went to the National Park Service and things after that.
All right. Oh, boy.
Well, I guess I'd have to say when I was offered the job,
and when Greg Nichols said,
we want to end all forms of racism in the city
and in the workforce,
and people seem to think that you as a person
should be able to do that.
And I go sit in a room and I'm going,
what the hell am I supposed to do?
And are they going to fire me
if racism ain't gone by the next fiscal year?
I had a whole lot of questions. But one of the things
that I've always done in the city of Seattle,
and I've had three well-defined jobs.
I was Director of Innovation for the city of Seattle.
I was Director of the Neighborhood Leadership Program
that sort of reordered the whole neighborhood thing.
And then the Race and Social Justice Initiative.
The first thing I know I need to do
is surround myself with people
who love me in doing something like this.
So there were people like Robert Nellis and Glenn
and a whole bunch of other people.
I put those people around me
because I knew I didn't know what I was doing.
Right?
And I needed them to keep me sane.
But then we created a core team for the initiative.
We created a core team for the initiative
with representatives from every city department
from various levels and structures and functions.
And we created a core team. I have to tell you a story.
I go to Tim Cease and Greg Nichols
and say, I can't do this work without a core team.
And they say, so what do you need?
I said, I need $15,000.
They said, Mickey, we just reconciled a budget.
We can't make no changes. I can't give you $15,000.
Could you imagine?
But the homeostatic state of the organization of,
we don't make changes after the budget date,
I said, well, we might as well quit.
Let's just let it go.
And of course they found the $15,000.
Then every department created a change team.
So I think the greatest success that I had
was creating the architecture and the culture
and the community that created the foundation
for what Glenn and Julie took on after that.
-And Tamar,
so what was the greatest accomplishment of RSJI today?
And talk a little bit about the terrain.
And Mickey, if I need to revisit you
to talk about what the conditions were, I will.
But Tamar. -Yeah.
So the terrain that I entered into and my team,
you know, it was the Murray years.
And although,
you know, he left under really horrible circumstances,
he was also a big government Democrat.
And so there were, you know,
we walked into a situation
where there were new departments,
new department heads, more department heads of color.
A lot more interest in what people
were actually experiencing.
And so I think about, you know,
the minimum wage, the passage of the minimum wage.
I think about labor standards,
you know, the separating, you know,
the Office of Planning and, you know, from OBCD,
and I'm going to just do like acronyms,
and the Office of Inspection.
You know, there were changes, the creation of DEEL.
So it felt very different coming into,
I think, the city of Seattle at that moment.
And also, in terms to OCR, Glenn and Julie had left,
you know, a few years prior.
The team was sort of in disrepair.
We had community organizers that had joined RSJI.
And we were thinking deeply about how do we actually,
you know, separate,
like how do we create alignment
between community needs and community
organizing with internal organizing.
So there were all these changes
that I felt deeply responsible for,
but didn't know how to navigate or what to do with.
And then I got invited to People's Institute for Survival
and Beyond Training.
And although I had been doing racial justice work for
a long time, I had never experienced anything like that.
And the second day when we did internalized racial oppression,
for me, was the most profound experience
that I'd had in doing this work up until that moment.
And so we got this idea,
like what if we started to actually talk to our city folks,
our brown and black folks,
about what is internalized racial oppression,
what does racialized trauma look like,
what does it look like to heal,
how do we make the workplace responsible for the harm
it's causing us,
and what does it look like to attempt to heal from it?
And so that was really our contribution to the RSJI canon,
was that we developed a day-long class
around internalized racial oppression.
We credited the People's Institute for it.
And even though we weren't therapists or psychologists
or counselors,
we really understand what were folks of color experiencing,
particularly black folks and particularly black women.
And that has been the most profound experience for me,
my time on the RSJI team.
And that's saying a lot because I was with RSJI
for six and a half years, and I had a lot of moments,
but that one I still carry with me.
-Thank you, Tamar. Glenn?
-I love this question,
and I hope when folks are hearing these answers,
that folks are hearing how much it takes to make this work.
You know what I'm saying? I'm with you, Tamar.
There are so many -- marriage equality.
I can tell you that story, deeply inspiring,
and one of the most important moments
while I was with the initiative
around truly understanding what we mean by intersection.
But I want to talk to you about something a little more boring,
sadly, because I think it's critical, and it's about power.
The years I was with the initiative, 2008-2014,
the question was,
is the initiative going to be here next year?
Right?
And so there's a lot of time
spent thinking about just how do you sustain this,
how do you make this permanent?
And so Mickey named a lot of the work that was done
that was around, you know, one of the greatest joys is you all,
you know, hundreds of employees across the city saying,
this is who we are and this is what we do.
Really looking for all the ways that community did
and could back the initiative.
And then really understanding that we couldn't sustain this
if other institutions weren't doing it.
And so the work that I think for me
at that time was most important was like, you know,
the school district had kind of tried to start doing this work
and then that had imploded.
The county was just getting thinking about it,
and so we really made this concerted effort to try
to get every institution,
every governmental institution in the city
and ultimately later in the region to join us.
And again, not out of some sense of like kumbaya,
but out of a sense of power, right?
Like just cold-hearted calculated if all of us
are doing it, they can't get all of us to quit doing it.
So that's what I would share.
-Thank you.
-I'm going to drop a whole lot of names this morning,
but I would say that in terms of the accomplishment
is that it did go citywide.
The initiative went citywide, and that is no small feat.
And in going citywide, they got the commitment in writing.
And most of us work for the city.
You know if it's not in writing, it didn't happen.
And so that was critically important.
That was so important.
But I have to go back,
and I have to go back to like the '90s, '92, '93.
There's a woman, Theresa Lanier. I'm going to say her name.
Theresa Lanier, she was a community member,
and she was contracted with the city
around early childhood education.
And it's a struggle if you're in a community trying
to deal with this bureaucracy.
But there were people in the Human Services Department
that she had a relationship with,
and she encouraged them to go through the People's Institute
undoing racism training. And that was really,
I think it really changed the game in terms of,
number one, a community member telling the city what to do.
That was number one.
And then we had a director, Vin Knox.
Julie Nelson worked in the Human Services Department.
We all worked under Vin Knox.
She was a director, a black woman who had such grace
and such strength
to be able to take hit after hit after hit for over a decade.
And in taking those hits,
making sure that the staff had an analysis of racism,
in '92, '93,
'94, nobody was trying to hear that.
And so she stood her ground.
I mean, the press, the media, they drug her through.
People tried lawsuits, everything.
She weathered that storm through three administrations.
But what helped her to weather it was that she made sure
not only staff had an analysis,
but that the community also had an analysis.
She encouraged staff, not over time, not on paid time,
but if you go into community,
what can you bring back to make our work stronger?
Had to deal with unions around that
because the implication was,
you're trying to get people to work for nothing.
But there was a nucleus of people.
We had like 300, 400 people in our department at the time.
I would say there was a good 50 people.
And we have change teams now.
Then they had the UIR groups,
Undoing Institutionalized Racism groups.
You would go to those meetings during the day,
kind of like a change team,
and it would be as many community members
as there were city people, probably more.
And then those UIR groups,
they sprung up at United Way, County, a number of agencies.
Probably over the course of five or six years,
there were 20 of them, 20, 25.
And then they started a coalition.
But that work was being led in the city,
also in the Department of Neighborhoods,
when Glenn came and Darlene and Glenn and many others.
I'm going to leave a lot of names out,
but those names need to be told.
They were doing work, and it was really internal.
And Glenn came. You came from Western States.
You just didn't drop from the sky.
He had been doing work at Western States in Portland.
And so there were people organizing a community here
who benefited from the work at Western States.
So people didn't just drop in, and they weren't doing --
people were doing work before.
And so when he went to the Department of Neighborhoods,
he, Darlene, and many others,
they were doing -- it was internal for the most part.
But he also had a relationship with community,
more of an engagement relationship.
But I think what was really critical was the partnership.
So it got to the point where it was so strong,
and families came together.
Families said -- and I'm talking about black families,
brown families, and also white families too,
but black and brown families were saying,
what's impacting us?
It was the juvenile justice system
and the education system was kicking our behinds
and our children's behinds. And so people organized.
That's why they started doing --
they didn't start doing work in the school district
because they thought it was benevolent, let's do this.
It was a push.
One time, 100 white people went to the school district,
only white people, and checked them on their racism.
And that was shocking.
And no, there were no people of color, no black folks.
It was all white people.
But we had such a tight relationship
where our Janet Preston, about three weeks later,
three months later,
because they were bragging about it, they went and did that.
She said, well, you went there
and you didn't get what you asked for.
If you had been going there for your children,
you would have stayed in the game.
So even though they did that, there was accountability, right?
Janet didn't work for the city.
She worked in the community.
And so it got so strong.
So, Mickey, I don't know if you ever knew this,
but the reason that Greg Nichols found
that it was important was because at that point
a decade of work had been going on in the community
around anti-racist work.
And they saw the work at neighborhoods.
They saw the work at HSD.
And they said, okay, we want a commitment.
So when Greg Nichols and others were running for office,
people organized and they went to every campaign.
If you went to Magnolia, you had white people asking,
what are you going to do about racism?
Shocking. Maybe not now, but it was then.
If you went to Rainier Beach,
if you went to the CD, the same question,
because people were organized to go and do that.
And so by the time Greg Nichols was elected,
whoever got elected in that election
understood we got to deal with racism.
That's what you may not have been told,
but that's where -- and I would say,
so the beauty of us is that we went citywide,
but we left out the key ingredient,
which was the community.
And we have been working for 20 years to get back to that,
not engagement, not come to our roundtable meeting,
but really being in partnership where community is clear
and they understand they elect the people
and they pay our salaries
and that there should be some level of accountability.
Glenn and Mickey -- thank you, Mary.
Thank you. I told y'all. I told y'all.
She's dope. Whole panel is dope. Glenn and Mickey,
can y'all talk a little bit about the decision
to leave community out
when community was so integral in the beginning?
-Yeah.
You know, the interesting thing about this
is there's a lot of stuff
where the people who have the stuff know it,
but everybody doesn't know it.
There's some things about
the Race and Social Justice Initiative
that nobody knows or that nobody talks about.
There's no question
that the Human Services Department worked
with the People's Institute,
was a great part of what inspired Greg Nichols
to create the Race and Social Justice Initiative.
There's no question about that.
Part of it, and I probably shouldn't say this,
but I've been gone a long time,
is I think they were afraid of People's Institute.
Right?
But what Greg did, when I got the job, he said, Mickey,
we're not going out in the community
because we've got to get our own house straight.
We've got to get 10,000 people in the city of Seattle
understanding what anti-racism work is,
understanding what multicultural work is.
And so it was with intention
that he had initial parts of the initiative
focus on the workforce.
He trained 10,000 employees, but we thought that was important.
And by the way, I think this is something that merits stating.
People used to come up and ask me,
is the Race and Social Justice Initiative about race?
Because there were a lot of people angry
that there was a Race and Social Justice Initiative,
but what about disabled people and what about -- and on and on.
And I asked Greg, I said, Greg, is this about race?
And he said, yes. And I asked why.
He said,
because I believe that racism is America's original sin,
and any time people can talk about anything other than race,
they will.
And that's the answer he gave me.
So there were some really intimate conversations.
So what's the other part of the question?
-So just talking about what happened to the community.
-All right, the community part.
And this is still a problem.
As I have grown in this work,
I was mentioning this at the celebration last night,
I find that there are two axes in this work.
There's a horizontal axis, which is about people,
which is about people.
There's a vertical axis,
which is about transactions and programs
and policies and procedures and budget.
So there are these two axes, right?
All right.
If you look at the history of this,
if you go back to the hunter-gatherer society,
when a tribe encountered another tribe,
they had to make a decision.
Am I going to eat them or are they going to eat me?
Right? That's based on human nature.
The culture,
the sort of cultural and ethnic conflicts
are based on human nature
because this is how human beings are.
When they're afraid, they get selfish, territorial, defensive,
become prisoners of routine,
and find an easy way to solve the problem.
That's human nature. Right?
So when we're trying to work on this problem,
we have to work on the horizontal axis,
understanding how when cultural groups come in contact
with each other,
when different kinds of people come in contact with each other,
there's going to be difficulty.
And what do we do to facilitate that difficulty?
But we had to learn how to do that.
When I'm talking about creating the culture and architecture
to be able to do that,
there was no conscious effort to leave out community.
As a matter of fact,
what we expected in the department head's
racist social justice plans
is that they were going to be talking about
how they were going to take their products and services
to the community
and how they were going to end racism in their organization,
but we were going to do it through the departments,
as opposed to have some edict
that Greg Nichols said, just do this.
-Glenn, can you weigh in a little bit?
-Yeah. I would agree.
It's what I was saying earlier about, first off,
I just wanted to -- this doesn't work unless we do it all.
And one of the hardest parts about doing this work
is because all of us sit in doing it in different places,
we all believe that the way we approach it,
see it, and engage with it is the most important.
And there's no doubt it is important.
It has to work with everything else.
And I think we do ourselves a massive disservice
when we pit these things against each other
because they both have to happen.
There is no doubt that government employees,
then and now, do not understand what community control,
what community governance actually means.
So there's some real work
for us to do to continue to make sure people have
a better understanding,
a possibility of the kinds of tools and opportunities
that they might engage in to do that effectively.
And there's absolutely no question
that that resistance reinforces the very fact
that they don't understand how to do it.
And so I sit up here with a great deal of humility.
You know, we now work with about 400-plus jurisdictions
across the country doing this.
And they're all wrestling with this question,
because I know this is a surprise, but guess what?
Government in this country wasn't set up to be democratic.
Right?
-Yeah, I'll say that my time with OCR and RSJI,
the most painful thing was trying to figure out
how to be embedded in community, be accountable,
and continue to organize city staff
to do what they need to do.
And it was an impossible contradiction to navigate,
to hold, to manage,
and ultimately part of the reason why I left the city.
So, Mary, I hear you, and I never could figure it out,
how to do it well,
and do it in a way that honored all the parties
that were working so hard to change how our systems work.
-So, Glenn, you mentioned power,
and then Mickey referred to this hesitation
around the People's Institute.
And so I'm not sure if it was the People's Institute
or that model
and what was happening as a result of the People's Institute
and that analysis and people getting a sense,
a different sense of themselves, right?
And so can folks talk a little bit about what that meant?
And, Mickey, you said, yeah, it wasn't a conscious decision,
but every decision, everything we do is a decision, right?
-What did I say wasn't a conscious decision?
-Well, you said, I'm not sure if there was a decision not to,
or to leave community.
-No, it was a conscious decision.
-Oh. Oh.
-It was a conscious decision to work inside the workplace,
to get the things straight inside the workplace,
because we thought if we went out there
and we hadn't done our work, we would get killed, right?
-Okay.
-We go out there, we haven't done anything,
they're going to be saying, what the hell did you do right?
-Okay.
So thinking about how each of y'all
and then the administration was prepared to do this work, right?
Matter of fact, we'll start in the middle.
Let's start with you, Glenn, right?
How were you prepared to step into this RSJI work?
-I want to name how important the People's Institute is,
and not just here in Washington, across the nation,
in really creating the first set of language
within the context of organizing
that allowed folks to both understand
and imagine what it would mean to take action
on structural racism.
And here's the thing, there were other folks doing that work.
And so internally to this,
and I just want to name this because I get to now,
I'm no longer in the city,
which is if someone said they didn't want to work
with People's Institute, we would say, great,
we should work with Crossroads.
And if someone said they didn't want to work with Crossroads,
we were like, cool, let's work with Western State Center.
They were all doing fundamentally the same work.
And not surprisingly in doing this work,
coming back to power, is that if you do this work long enough,
someone or someones will come not to like you.
May be shocking, right? -Amen.
-And so there's this constant need,
if you're serious about progress,
to be really clear about who's bearing the brunt
in what moment and what time.
And so for me,
what I love about this conversation is not about --
it's the power part of it.
-That's right.
-Like, are we being real about what it takes to build power?
Are we being real about what it takes
to imagine making our work sustainable?
And it needs to be really strategic about these questions.
Don't get me wrong, I don't know that we always were,
but I know that a lot of thought went into
how do we make sure that we don't lose sight
of the ultimate goal,
which is addressing structural racism
and having true community ownership of governance,
even as we recognize we're functioning in a system
that is literally antithetical to both of those ideas.
And I think, you know, lots of mistakes made along the way,
but I guess what I would like to say to everybody up here
and out there is, oh my goodness, thank you.
Like there is no and was no program to do this.
And folks really sort of, you know, tried, I think,
we tried a lot of different things.
Maybe that's a good way of saying it.
But I'm curious, I'm genuinely curious, Mary,
how you feel about it.
-Well, you know,
I would say humility is the most important thing.
Because nobody, we should all be sharing.
We've been doing this for 20, 30 years and it's still entrenched.
-Right.
-So, I mean, it's not like we're the experts,
but I think there is humility.
I think it's so important, though, that -- and this is
not about any particular organization or training.
I get so sick of it.
It's like, okay, so we've been in the training,
we've watched the movie,
but then not what are we going to do?
You know, that's it.
And it's the relationships that we build.
It's honoring the history and understanding something happened
before we got here.
You know, I got here early and people were working,
they were working to make us feel welcome here.
They didn't start today. They didn't start last week.
You know,
it would be crazy to think it didn't start till I got here.
So that's what's so important.
But I think also there's some concepts
that make some of the --
when we think about what have we internalized,
our internalized racial inferiority and superiority,
how we internalize that.
And then you put that together with a bureaucracy,
which is, for those familiar with that term,
white organizational culture is hierarchical.
I mean, government is all about who gets elected.
And everybody that comes in wants to start all fresh,
like nothing happened, you know, before.
And those of us who work in government do the work.
And some of us do it a month, some of us do it a year,
some of us do it decades.
Regardless of the administration that comes in,
ultimately we've got to be clear
that whoever is at the top of the hierarchy here,
really at the top of them is our community.
Really at the top of them we've got to figure out
how are we accountable.
And we're not structured to be accountable to the people
that actually vote our bosses in.
So that's our struggle, I think, in this work,
is really figuring that out.
Even with Mayor Nichols coming in,
nobody's going to check Mayor Nichols.
He's the mayor, right?
So you assume this is new fresh work for him,
but everybody's like, he's going to leave it.
Does that make sense?
I mean, honestly, I need to hear,
does that make any kind of sense?
And he's a white man. And this is all brand new.
Because I know, I may not be in high places,
but I've got kinfolk in some high places.
So I know some of the backstory around how people didn't know,
but you've got to act like you know when you're in the role.
And because of our internalized stuff,
sometimes we prop up people in ways
that they're not even prepared to do it,
but they'll keep on going. That's not accountable.
And so those are things that over 20, 30 years,
I hope we learn those lessons,
and I hope that we have not only the humility,
but the courage to be able to say it.
And I want to acknowledge you, Mickey,
because you came into an impossible, insane situation.
And you had sense enough to say, I need to get with some people.
So that's why you're still alive.
If nothing else, he lived through.
He lived it, right? -Yeah.
-But I also have to say that
because of our internalized stuff,
it becomes very difficult then to go back and say,
how could community folks who have people,
they have children going to the juvenile justice system,
can't pay their rent, homeless,
how could they have been responsible for this mission?
That's internalized.
Because we in the city are used to helping people.
I'm in the Human Services Department.
That's what we do.
We serve people,
and the implication is we serve broken people with our resources
and our programs.
So let's fix them. That's how we're set up.
That's how we fund people, all that.
And so we've got to counteract that
and understand the power is in our community.
And where there is brokenness in our community
is because of structural violence
where our children --
I'm working with gun violence right now.
And we might think,
oh, they're doing that because of the parents.
No, they're doing it because of the structural violence
that we perpetuate.
And we're part of that,
but I get a paycheck every day to perpetuate violence.
So if I'm not clear about that --
and I do it as big and small ways,
even in the way that we talk about their parents.
That's violent.
And it sounds nice. That's Seattle nice.
We cut you with a razor blade,
you don't even know you're bleeding.
I'd rather you come at me with a gun.
At least I can see you coming.
But don't cut me with a smile.
And so we've got to get real, real,
real in our next 20 years, hopefully.
In the next 20 years, I ain't going to be here.
I'm not going to be on the earth probably in 20.
I'm going to be 70 years old next year, right?
So I'm at the end of my -- but I'm not leaving the city.
I'm going to leave the city's paycheck,
but I ain't leaving.
So long as I got breath in my body and God says the same,
I'm not giving up on the change team.
I'm not giving up on RSJ,
because it's the only horse we got.
And I love that horse. [ Applause ]
-Tamar, can you follow up with this, and then Mickey?
-JP, I can't believe you're going to make me follow Mary.
[ Laughter ] -Right?
-You know, I think what I'll say is in 2018
when we adopted the People's Institute principles,
it was because we knew we needed organizing principles
that made sense
and were also part of the history of the initiative.
And it was an incredible blueprint for being
able to connect with every apparatus of city government.
You know, it led us to be able to sit down
and talk to electeds.
It was useful in talking to our judiciary.
It was useful in being able to communicate
with community folks.
I think for me the value was that it became a glue
that was holding all of our conversations together
and was simple enough
that we all understood what we were saying.
Of course we have to undo racism.
Of course we have to have an us for power.
Of course we have to build a network that works.
You know, all of these things
weren't magic statements or magic bullets,
but it was a way of having a conversation
that was much bigger than all of us and connecting us.
And so that was, I think,
a big part of how we understood organizing.
And it allowed us to flow seamlessly between community,
communities most impacted,
communities organizing for racial justice,
and our city folk.
And it's really bittersweet being here with you all today,
because following Seattle politics as closely
as I have been, all the rollbacks, all the changes,
whether it's prostitution,
whether it's drug criminalization,
whether it's homelessness,
it's been so incredibly painful to be able to watch
how impermanent so much of the work that we've done has been.
And it's still the same folks suffering.
You walk on 3rd Avenue,
and it's still black folks that you see that are homeless,
particularly older black folks.
It's still our young that are being imprisoned.
And it's still our black and brown women
that face prostitution charges.
So it's been really hurtful to see how much of the work
has just been so fleeting.
-Thank you. Thank you.
Mickey, yeah, just real briefly, if you can follow up.
And then I want to pivot to look forward a little bit.
So Mickey, if you can follow up a little bit,
and then we'll pivot just real briefly.
-Well, I'm going to try to do this really, really quickly.
-I got you. Don't trip. I got you.
-Okay. How much time do we have?
We're out of time, right?
-No, we're not out of time,
but we have two minutes for this section with you, Mickey.
-All right. All right.
My adult life is based on two unbelievable
defining moments of my life.
I grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee,
segregated Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1947.
I'm standing out in front of my house with my uncle,
I'm holding his hand. A trash truck comes by.
And it's a wadded up paper in a trash truck.
And I say, Uncle CH, what is that?
And he said, that's where they put bad kids.
Now, screwed me up forever
because I have this absolute obsession about
not being in the trash can
and not having nobody I know be in the trash can.
So I have this obsession about how we make community
and how we make relationships work to advantage all of us.
The second moment was being at the March on Washington,
August 28, 1968. I'm 16 years old.
My mother takes me to the March on Washington.
I see three things.
I see an America that I've never seen before
because I'm living in segregation.
And I'm seeing at that march,
I'm seeing everything that's present in American society
came to make a point on that day.
And Martin Luther King gives a speech, right?
And the first seven minutes is damning.
And the uncashed check and the sweltering heat of racism.
And then at the seventh minute, he said,
but I have a dream today.
And he painted a picture of a society
that's the sweetest thing I ever heard.
That got in my central nervous system.
That has been in my central nervous system.
And what Martin Luther King talked about
was doing what's possible, not focusing on what's wrong.
Now, that doesn't mean we can ignore what's wrong
and we can't call people to task.
But I told Greg Nichols, I said, two things about this job.
I ain't going to try to convince nobody that racism is a problem.
I'm only going to focus on what's possible
as opposed to what's wrong.
Two years after I left, I was with Greg up at Harvard.
He was teaching a class. He asked me to come up.
And I said, why did you hire me to do this job?
I'm a parks and recreation guy.
You know, I do innovation stuff.
Why did you hire me to do this job?
Right?
And he said, because we knew you had an ability to keep people,
based on the work that you've done in the city,
you had ability to keep people together through crisis.
And we knew that there was going to be a lot of crises
at the start of this initiative
by virtue of just how complicated it was.
And so that's sort of what got me here.
But I have to tell this story.
So I was Greg Nichols' troubleshooter, right?
So I would go up to the office,
and if there was a problem around culture or race,
they would say, Mickey, there's a problem somewhere.
Go do something about it. So I come into office one day.
And they say, why don't you go to Beacon Hill?
There's something happening up in the community garden.
And I'm saying, what's going on?
I don't know,
something about the white people trying
to throw some people out the garden or something.
Right? So I go up to the garden.
And now this is one of the major gardens in the country.
This is the example of a neighborhood garden.
So I go up to the white people.
I go, what's the problem?
They say, well, look at that garden.
They don't take care of it.
It got a number of weeds. It's ugly.
And we think they should be kicked out of the garden, right?
Get this? Power.
You know, this is the way we've done it.
I go and talk to the Vietnamese people.
And I say,
people seem to think you're not taking care of your garden.
They say, we've been doing this for 5,000 years.
It grows. It blooms. It goes back into the soil.
It decays, right?
Now, see, that's the kind of race and social justice stuff
that people don't necessarily think about.
That's institutionalized racism.
And there's no question.
And by the way, I went to the People's Institute
after I took the job and I was hit in the face
because I'm one of those, I just want everybody to get along.
That's how I am.
And I was hit squarely in the face with the fact that,
like Glenn said, if we don't solve that problem,
we don't solve this problem.
But the initiative is complicated.
It's not just about
institutionalized racism and racism.
It's about us learning how to grow culturally and ethnically
and build community and work together.
It's about all of that stuff. -Right on, right on.
[ Applause ]
So I'm going to pivot a little bit, right?
And I'm going to ask,
because I know you good folk really,
really well, I'm going to ask you to tell on yourself
a little bit, right?
And so I want you to talk about your internal stuff,
what you learned as a person, how you've grown or struggled.
And so I think this will be beneficial for folk.
You know, we don't like to tell on ourselves.
Yeah, our egos are real big. I want you to tell on yourself.
But also, I want folk to talk about moving forward, right?
How do we move forward? What does that look like?
The current terrain,
where we've been.
But first, talk about how you've grown,
what you've learned, and maybe, you know,
what you would probably do different.
And whoever wants to start.
-I'll go first, just so I can get out of the way.
I learned so much.
I mean, I really appreciate this question.
This work is really hard, as everybody in this room knows.
And what's amazing about it is that you're the one
who always benefits the most from it.
-Say that.
-You know? -Say that.
-But I think around --
I came to Seattle in '99 out of love.
But also because it was the only place in the country
that I could find that was organizing
around police brutality.
And I had just lost a friend in Portland
who was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer.
And so when I got here, I ended up working at the city,
because I just needed a J-O-B.
I was just like, they got benefits, I'm in.
And so early on,
I was working at the Department of Neighborhoods.
I would go to the mayor's office
and talk about what was going on in Southeast Seattle.
And then at night,
I'd get together with
my People's Coalition for Justice folks.
And we would plan on how we were going to take
over the mayor's office tomorrow.
Right? I felt like I was living a double life.
I wouldn't do that shit ever again.
I think it was important at the time.
I think it created some space.
But I think the price, for me, was just too high,
if that makes sense to folks.
So I think that piece about being really clear about
where is your own sense of what you're willing
to give up in order to get what we collectively want,
I think that miscalculation is either inevitably
harmful to you or harmful to the people around you.
And I don't mean any judgment in that.
I just mean, really,
where are you
and how comfortable are you with what it is you're risking,
what it is that you're willing to commit to.
I think just on a personal note,
that's one of the things that I grew most from,
was just thinking more
about what that actually means in my own life.
-Thank you.
So Tamar, tell me, what did you learn about you?
-Yeah, I like what Glenn said about this work
gives us more than we give to it.
When I started at the city,
I had over a decade in recovery from alcoholism.
And I thought I had a pretty good understanding
of what was going on inside of me.
And, you know, doing racial justice work,
particularly in government,
I felt like it turned me inside out.
And I've spent a lot of time since in therapy,
doing spiritual work, nervous system work.
And what I found is that I can't do this work and be effective,
and I just mean effective as a practitioner,
the craft of it, without being fully embodied.
And so a lot of my time at King County Metro has been,
it's felt incredibly indulgent and selfish.
But taking as much time as I can to heal, not just from racism,
but from family trauma, generational stuff.
Trying to heal my relationships with myself and my loved ones,
particularly my kid, who's 22.
And just really believing that,
even as a black woman in this world
that wasn't designed for me,
that I also deserve healing and self-love
and to be able to take care of myself.
So you asked such a deep question and I don't know
that I can do it justice.
But we walk into all kinds of spaces as practitioners
where we're telling folks how to resolve a thing,
how to get through a racialized conflict,
how to have the best possible experience,
particularly as employees.
And they're watching us the whole time.
You know, like, are you healed?
Are you transformed?
Are you working on changing yourself?
Because that's all we are inside an organization.
We're just a collection of individuals
that are trying to do our damnedest to survive
and take care of our families.
So now, today, racial justice work, to me,
means, particularly folks of color,
taking care of ourselves and healing
and living the best life that we can and loving ourselves
and loving the people that we're charged to love.
And I think that's the only way change can actually happen.
[ Applause ] -Right on. Right on.
Mickey, I want you to follow that.
How have you changed? What have you learned about Mickey?
And you have grown. And what have you learned?
-Yeah.
Well, first of all, I didn't say something about the garden.
Because about in the spring,
when I went up to the garden to look at the garden,
you saw the cultural influences of everybody in the garden
and everybody else's garden.
And ain't that what diversity is about?
It is understanding how to learn and grow from people.
So I'm seeing collard greens in the Vietnamese garden.
And I'm seeing jicama in somebody else's garden,
which means those people have come together
and start talking to each other.
And that's about building community.
So I got two stories to tell. One, as you know,
when we do this race and social justice work,
we often do this thing called caucusing.
Caucusing, which means that the people of color go to one room
and the white participants go to another room.
And the white participants are supposed to talk about
how they can help us end this institutionalized racism.
And we're supposed to talk about not being subject
to internalized oppression and all that stuff.
So we did this and we did it twice.
And the second time we did it,
an indigenous person came up to me and said,
we don't want to be in the room with the black people.
Now, what do I do, right?
What you mean you don't want to be in a room
with the black people?
They said, we don't want to be in a room with the black people
because they think they own racism.
And they think their understanding of it
is the only understanding of it.
And we don't think that they hear us.
We don't think that they hear us.
I'm telling a story. I'm not offering an opinion.
I'm telling you a story, all right?
The other, and I hope I'm not violating her privacy,
but Malia Earhart, who worked in DHS, she was on the core team.
She was from Cambodia.
And we went through some kind of poignant exercise.
And she came up to me and she said, Mickey,
I saw all the males in my family killed in front of my face.
What do I do with that?
But this is the kind of country we have now,
where we have all of these people coming together.
And they all have their own issues.
And they have their own problems.
So here's what happened to me.
I had to give up any notion of being right.
There was no right. I wasn't going to be right.
I'm right a lot about other stuff.
But I wasn't going to be right about this.
I had to check my ethnocentricity.
Because I'm proud to say that I grew up middle class in a family
where both of my parents had PhDs,
and that gives me a particular view of the world.
So I guess I could say to those people who come and say,
solve this problem, I say, just have your parents get PhDs.
And by the way, those PhDs did not keep us
from encountering racism anyhow, all right?
I had to give up my predispositions about anything
and I had to eliminate all harmful emotions.
I decided, by virtue of how my heart was breaking,
because people are criticizing me for doing the wrong thing
and calling me names, there's all kinds of stuff going on.
And I'm saying to myself,
I'm not going to assign any pain to this.
And I do this in my life right now.
Something happens, I decide how much pain to give it.
And most of the time, it makes sense to give it no pain.
Because this was actually a toxic job.
But when you talk about what I learned,
I've been through two metamorphoses in my life.
One is when I lived in the middle of 15,000 acres
of redwood trees for four months alone, right?
The other was this job. I went into this job,
I think I went into this job being a good person.
But the stuff that you learn
when you begin to have conversations like this,
and you begin to interact with people,
and you learn how to take criticism,
and all of that happens -- I'm a better father, right?
I'm a better employee.
So I would say
that this was the fourth defining moment of my life.
And I am a better person because of it.
-Right on, thank you. Mary?
[ Applause ]
-I think for me,
Vin Knox gave us permission to really bring all of who
we were to the workplace.
So I think I took it very personally
because I was raising black children in this city,
in this school district, in this justice system.
And so this work was like, it's personal.
I think it became very, very personal for me.
Probably too personal. I don't know if that's --
I can't imagine doing it when it's not personal.
And with that came a lot of anger, I would say.
A lot of anger, a lot of disappointment.
And I would say a lot of that anger
I have directed at black men because I had such
a high expectation of black men to lead.
And also an understanding of
how black men are treated in this system.
And so there was also the desire to protect.
It's like crazy.
It makes you crazy both ways because it's got all this love
and then all this passion and all this disappointment
and all this pride.
But then I have to look at myself.
What is empty in me?
You know, what has hundreds of years of slavery and separation
of families, what did that do in my own family,
in my own relationship?
So it helped me to understand my relationship
with my children's father,
you know, and where I had blamed him for a whole lot of stuff
that he could carry the blame, but I was at fault too.
But ultimately, we were dealing with a whole system
that was like playing us.
And so I would say, if not for this work,
I would not have been able to come to a place
where I could own what I brought to my family relationship,
the failures and the triumphs,
but really the failures,
owning that, owning how I treated a black man
that I had five children with
and allowed the system to come in and do some things
that turned us inside out.
So it's a lot. It's like a therapy session now,
but it's real personal because I don't even,
you know, I'm talking about my children up here with you guys.
I don't even know half of you.
Half of you, I've never seen you, but this is personal.
This is really personal.
And I know that if I had not had an analysis --
if I had had the analysis when my children were three and four
and going into the school system,
I would have been a much better advocate for my children.
But I remember being angry when my children cut up
and I had to go to school and taking it out on them.
And it wasn't until doing this work in the city,
that's why I thank God --
and I only came here for the benefits too.
Because I was 40 when I got here.
I'm looking back, we worked at Atlantic Street Center, right?
Come on, I loved it,
but they weren't paying -- I had five children,
they weren't paying our benefits.
That's why I came here. So that's why I came here.
And then I got hit with an analysis
and I got hit with coworkers who were not coworkers.
They were organizing partners.
But I've hurt a lot of people in the process.
I have got a big head about -- even you,
I need to apologize to you, Mickey,
because I was pissed off at you.
-I know you were.
-Because you weren't listening, you would not listen,
but I understand why you couldn't listen.
-I didn't know how to listen.
-Didn't know how to listen.
So that's the work -- how do we get to this?
It shouldn't have taken us -- we got to be on this,
because this would have never happened.
If Julie Nelson hadn't gotten sick,
I would have never had this conversation with him.
So that's what the work of race and social justice is.
How do we heal those relationships?
How do we own what we did? How do we come back?
There's some folks we still ain't talking to, right?
There's somebody I want to ask you about that I love
and I'm pissed off at him and haven't talked to him in years.
Come on. All right.
-So that's what this work will do.
-We're going to fix that today.
-But, you know, ultimately, the foundation of it is,
it's ultimately about love.
-It is about love.
-It's love, yeah.
So hopefully we can bring some love in.
[ Applause ]
-So we've got about five minutes left
and we didn't do it justice.
I grossly misunderestimated the time
because I wanted us to have rich conversations
around looking forward, right? Where do we go from here?
Let's start, again -- actually, let's start with Tamar.
Please, Tamar.
-Yeah, I think, you know, the beauty of the race
and social justice work at the city of Seattle
has always been the city employees, always.
Before there was an ordinance,
there was you all and your commitment
and your willingness and your long memories.
You know, when I first came in, came to the city,
it was, you know, Natalie Hunter.
It was Michael Davis. It was, you know,
big shoulders and amazing folks that took me under their arms
and said, this is the history of the work.
This is how we've been doing it. This is what it means to us.
You know, this is what we want to leave behind
for our children. And that's really the work.
You know, at the county,
that doesn't exist.
It's not at all like at the city.
It's a much more sort of institutional fiction,
but here it's real.
And, you know,
and so many people have a beautiful analysis
around what they're experiencing and what racism means,
but that's just not enough.
Like it's the organizing, it's the coming together,
it's the fighting together,
it's understanding how power is functioning.
So it's all of you.
I mean, that's always the future of change work.
It's people coming together,
understanding what's, you know,
ailing us and demanding and working towards change
and understanding our part in it, right?
Because we're not victims either.
We're not victims of racism or any kind of oppression.
We are part and parcel of how to fix ourselves, right?
That medicine is within us,
but it's the people and it's the relationships.
-Thank you, Tamar. Hey, Glenn, Mickey, Tamar,
can y'all lean forward and talk in the mic?
Mickey, I tried to get your attention.
So whoever wants to go next.
-So, yes, Tamar, like it is about y'all.
It's just at the end of the day, it's that simple.
This work happens because folks come together to make it happen.
My where to from here, I'm going to get nerdy, y'all.
The institution is a massive structure that is hierarchical,
that is transactional.
And if you don't keep up with it,
it will roll over the top of you.
That requires real discipline.
I know this is not popular, y'all, but it is true.
And the real need to get real about what are our plans?
How are we measuring them?
What does this mean for the budget?
All the stuff that this institution does,
our work has to align and if I'm honest, trump it.
Can't even say trump anymore. Isn't that horrible?
[ Laughter ]
But folks with me,
so that's what I would name where to from here,
not losing sight.
There's so much to do.
Like I mean this with so much love.
There's the heart work, the head work, right?
There's so much to do.
But if we lose sight
that this institution is held together by a structure
that has been rolling for a couple hundred years,
y'all, we can't win.
And so that's the piece.
That's one piece that I would offer.
-Thank you. Mickey, please. -Well, I'll tell you --
-Get a little closer to your mic.
-I'll tell you what I'm doing with my life
as a result of this.
By the way, after I left here,
I was invited to be deputy director
of the National Park Service.
And I thought, well, I can take everything I learned in Seattle
and just go into the National Park Service,
hit the ground running,
without realizing
that the National Park Service is the most racist, patriarchal,
military organization that there was.
So I went and got killed again,
and I left the National Park Service and somebody said,
we got Mickey fatigue.
Now, and I had no problem with it because I know
change agents are not always around to see the work.
Okay, all right, all right.
I am working in the city of Raleigh
trying to figure out what is universal in all of us
and what is due to culture and ethnicity and other things.
Because there are things that happen to us as human beings,
and there are things that happen to us
based on our ethnicity and culture.
So I am working on this project called Guide
to Living Powerfully in American Society.
I am working on a program in Raleigh
for 25 11th graders
that represents the diversity of the city.
And we're going to put them through a year out of school
and helping them understand
how to live their lives as a work of art,
to approach their lives creatively and innovatively,
to eat, to have relationships.
We're going to mobilize the community
and co-create this experience and invest in those children
so they don't have to take the same path
that other people took.
And this is more about communities in general, right?
But it all comes from this.
It all comes from that whole notion of building community.
-Thank you, Mickey. Mary, can you take this?
-So just real, real quick, I want to say,
I had the pleasure and honor
of seeing Natalie Hunter on her last day of work the other day.
So I want to give like a shout out to Natalie.
And I'm saying that because she was leaving and I was thinking,
oh my God, what's going to happen, right?
I'm fixing to leave too.
But I'm also looking at Michael in the back.
Michael, you can raise your hand.
There's some people,
and everybody in every one of these seats,
some of you are new. We work together.
I'm looking at folks I do work with, I do know.
And they're young and they're coming in.
And so the future of this work
is really going to be on the folks that are just coming in.
And the fact that you are here today means
that you want to do some work.
And so we would say just do it collectively.
Learn from some of these mistakes.
Roberto Maestas used to say that --
he was a founder of El Centro de la Raza.
He would say, you know, it's good to make your own mistakes.
You know, experience is the best teacher.
But he's like,
we got to get smart enough to learn
from some other people's mistakes, right?
So that's the advice going forward.
Learn from what we've done. That history is important.
But y'all going to do some trailblazing.
And just stay together, support the leadership at OCR
who put this together.
And hold us all to accountability,
to teach and to help you learn
and that we can learn from y'all.
So I'm just happy that there's so many young people.
And I'm talking about young to the city.
And hopefully you stay there for a while.
-Let's give them a hand, y'all.
Thank y'all. Thank you, Mary. Thank you, Glenn.
Thank you, Tamar. Thank you, Mickey.
[ Applause ]