By Aaron Allen, The Seattle Medium
Over the years, the Seattle African American Reparation Committee (SAARC) has diligently worked to get reparations for the descendants of African American slaves living in the Puget Sound area.
SAARC is looking to work with the office of Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell to collaborate and build an understanding on what reparations could look like in Seattle and how they would be implemented.
“We wanted to start our movement here in Seattle,” says Larry Gossett, former Chair of the King County Council. “We met with Mayor Harrell in 2022 and at the end of that meeting the mayor was excited about making a commitment for reparations for Black people in Seattle and the Mayor stated, “I would love to work with you so put together a request to me and we’ll talk about it.”
SAARC recently sent a letter to Harrell calling on the City of Seattle to review its own history. The correspondence asks that the city ascertain the extent to which economic and other forms of systemic racism and discrimination against the African American has taken place within the City of Seattle.
The letter relays data that displays the economic disparities African Americans face in Seattle, and SAARC is optimistic that the mayor will develop and convene “a powerful committee to conduct a major study to catalog the most consistent harms resulting from the exclusion and systemic racism faced by African Americans and the institutions that served them in Seattle, for example Black churches.”
“We are hopeful that he [Mayor Harrell] will be responsive to this effort,” says Gossett. “And we hope to meet with the mayor sometime by the end of January to begin a process to bringing a commitment for restorative justice for Black people in Seattle.”
According to the letter, there is an “extreme income and wealth inequality between Black and white residents of Seattle.” For instance, in 2018 the median income for a household headed by a Black person in Seattle was $42,500 in 2018, compared to $101,500 for a households headed by a white person. In addition, the median household net worth for Black households in 2019 was $23,300, compared to $456,000 for white households.
In 2022, Dr. Ron Daniels, President of the National African American Reparations Commission, focused on efforts both locally and nationally to help pass H.R.- 40, which would establish a commission to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans. The bill, which currently has about 200 co-sponsors in Congress, calls for $14 million in appropriations to establish and convene the commission.
In their letter to the mayor, SAARC describes the history of the economic exploitation of the descendants of African American slaves and their correlation to the disparities that currently exist in our society. It also addresses “the history of institutionalized anti-Black racism and how it was birthed by the economic system that took root in colonial North America.”
In addition, SAARC made the following recommendations to the mayor’s office in their letter:
• All members of this special Mayoral Committee on Reparations should be composed of representatives of the harmed African American community that lived or once lived in Seattle and should be vetted by the Seattle African American Reparations Committee.
• The Mayoral Committee also must include relevant subject matter experts; A list of the specific actions that the City of Seattle took/or failed to take that institutionalized anti-Black racism and/or sustained economic discrimination.
• The harms identified must center on eight areas: Housing, economics, business development, education, criminal justice, civil rights, technology and health care.
• That the work should begin at once and be properly resourced by the city government so that it is fully completed within 6 months to a year.
“Reparations doesn’t have to just be in the form of money,” says Gossett. “It can be in the form of vouchers, programs that are targeted to the African American community set up to improve education or to do something about the horrible disproportionately in the criminal justice system, but there are a lot of ways reparations can be applied.”
“We are again hopeful that the program can be put together over the next six months to a year,” says Gossett. “I think it is very feasible that Seattle can be a prominent place where reparations actually occur.”
