Editorials

The people attacking the police and hunting for members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence were part of a bigger criminal conspiracy. They were out to overturn the will of the voters who elected Joe Biden to be our president. It was an attack on our country—on you and me and everyone who turned out to vote.

On June 11 and 12, opponents of “critical race theory” will hear the voices of educators, parents, students, and community organizers who refuse to lie about the true history of the United States.

Imagine if every effort to improve the Puget Sound region centered people carrying the heaviest burden of racial inequities. What lessons would we learn? What outcomes would we achieve? What harm would we avoid?

We are a few weeks removed from the horrific shooting in Buffalo, and yet we’ve already seen the sunsetting of the media coverage of this tragic event, as the news cycle has shifted to the mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and now Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Students everywhere are anticipating, or already experiencing, their summer vacation. It means freedom from daily classes and the opportunity to break, "chill," and perhaps attend a summer program for many.

The mass killings at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, 10 days after the white supremacist killings in Buffalo, New York, are further evidence of how deeply our society is broken, and how urgently we need to figure out how to begin fixing it.

The 18-year-old gunman who slaughtered 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket was fueled by a frenzy of white supremacist hatred and enabled by an unprecedented national tidal wave of firearms spilling into American hands.

President Joe Biden was uncharacteristically, but appropriately, angry and firm when he described white supremacy as "poison." It’s time for our nation, drenched in racist poison, to consider the antidote.

“Once again, so-called pro-life pundits and politicians responded by pontificating about all of the possible causes of the shooting tragedy, like mental illness, while willfully ignoring the role of white supremacy and easy access to firearms … while every peer nation is home to men who have been radicalized, only America allows them to have easy access to arsenals and ammunition again and again.” – Shannon Watts and Angela Ferrell-Zabala

Replacement rhetoric is meant to tap into a very old fear: that the survival and dominance of White Americans is threatened by others.