Nearly eight months after a man and his family were subjected to racial slurs and a death threat along Sunset Avenue, the Edmonds City Council at its Tuesday night study session agreed to form a Diversity Commission.
Three members of a council-appointed diversity task force — Mario Brown, Tung Bui and Emily HIll — joined councilmembers on the study session floor to report on changes made to the proposed ordinance following council feedback, including:
– ensuring the city provides notice of such meetings to be in compliance with the Open Public Meetings Act.
– limiting commission membership to only those who reside in Edmonds.
– adding the potential for a council liaison to the commission.
– adding a student representative.
– requiring the commission present an annual report to the council.
Before deciding to forward the measure to next week’s council consent agenda, councilmembers spent time discussing how to staff the commission, which city department would oversee the commission’s work, and how pay for it. City Parks, Recreation and Cultural Services Director Carrie Hite, who staffed the Diversity Task Force, indicated that organizing and supporting the commission would take a fair amount of effort; that’s why a $10,000 budget was requested to hire a contract staff member and to pay for events and/or celebrations the commission would like to implement.
Councilmember Tom Mesaros then referred to a question he raised earlier in the meeting agenda, regarding another request for staff support, this time for the Edmonds Tree Board. Any staffing decisions for boards and commissions should be made “in the context of what’s going on across the whole city,” Mesaros said. (Hite noted that she is working with others to examine how all boards and commissions are staffed, and expects to have a report for the council by early May.)
As a result, councilmembers agreed to forward the Diversity Commission ordinance for next week’s approval, with the understanding that the budget piece would be worked out at a later date.
Another issue — adopting a City Code of Ethics — wasn’t as easily resolved, however. Councilmember Joan Bloom made it clear that she wasn’t happy with the proposed Code of Ethics before the council Tuesday night, which was drafted late last year by Councilmembers Adrienne Fraley-Monillas and Strom Peterson. (Peterson has since left the council for the State Legislature, while Fraley-Monillas this year is serving as council president.)
Bloom, a long-time proponent of developing a Code of Ethics, had suggested during a July 2014 council meeeting that Edmonds might want to use the City of Shoreline’s one-page ethics document as a possible model for Edmonds’ ethics code. Fraley-Monillas and Peterson volunteered to take on that task, completing it last year. But a frustrated Bloom on Tuesday night said the two councilmembers had created a “watered-down version” of Shoreline’s document, leaving out many of the specifics that actually define ethical behavior, and suggested that a complete rewrite was in order.
“This document does not do what I have been trying to do for years,” Bloom said, later adding: “I am begging you to let me work on this.” After a significant amount of back-and-forth, Councilmember Diane Buckshnis volunteered to help Bloom with a new draft, recognizing that it will be viewed as yet another delay on an issue that some citizens have said should have been resolved years ago.
In fact, that point was noted by former City Economic Development Director Stephen Clifton, who spoke during the council’s public comment period at the start of the meeting. Clifton, who now works for Snohomish County, noted that a Code of Ethics was cited as a top priority during the council’s 2012 retreat, “yet here we are, three years later, and still no action taken by the city council related to this issue.”
Clifton, an Edmonds resident, also connected the Code of Ethics to the Diversity Commission — underscoring the importance, he said, of councilmembers not taking as long to take action on Diversity Commission issues as they have to take action on the Code of Ethics. While a city employee, Clifton said he was subjected to a homophobic comment from a city commission appointee of Councilmember Lora Petso that was never addressed, leading him to believe that the behavior was condoned. “For this reason I’m asking that the City Council take action to approve a Code of Ethics for the city and take action on the Diversity Commission recommendation,” Clifton said. “Maybe if the council takes action, a framework consisting of a Code of Conduct, Code of Ethics and polices related to diversity will be in place that will allow a process or a pathway to address this type of issue in the future.”
The council also during its Tuesday night meeting agreed to send the following items to next week’s consent agenda:
– Adjusting the city’s utility billing delinquency charges to reflect the following: moving from a charge of10 percent of the outstanding balance to a flat fee of $25, raising the threshold for account balances to be considered delinquent from $21 to $40, and adjusting the City’s turn-on and turn-off charges for non-regular working hours from $75 to $125.
– A new Interlocal Agreement for SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics), between Edmonds and several cities that now would include the City of Mukilteo. Other cities already part of the existing agreement approved in 2013 include Bothell, Kirkland, Lake Forest Park, Lynnwood, Mill Creek, Monroe, and Mountlake Terrace.
– Updates to the City Personnel Policy.
The council also heard the Edmonds Tree Board 2014-15 report, which noted a list of accomplishments that included completing a draft rewrite of the city’s tree code, now under review by the Edmonds Planning Commission. As noted above, the board also made a request to hire a dedicated staff support person, but that decision was delayed until a report is completed on the status of staffing for other boards and commissions.
In addition, the council discussed whether the city should purchase property at 8413 196th St. S.W. for $595,000, pursuant to a Right of First Refusal agreement that the city negotiated in 1999. (The agreement was activated since an offer was recently made by someone else to purchase the property.) City Attorney Jeff Taraday noted that it’s believed that the property, located directly west of the the city-owned Fire Station 16, at one time was being eyed as a possible fire training facility. Now that the city contracts with Snohomish County Fire District 1 for fire service, the city has no direct need for the property, but Fire District 1 has been contacted to see if there is any interest in acquiring the property from the city if a decision were made to purchase it.
We do not need a watered down Diversity Commission or watered down Code of Ethics Commission, and these are two separate endities and should be two entirely SEPARATE commissions. This day and age regarding race and other issues regarding diversity, including the fact that we have already had an African American family (with young children) threatened to be KILLED if they walk our streets (Sunset Avenue) there is absolutely no excuse for not putting together now a detailed Diversity Commission and Code of Ethics, two SEPARATE Commissions!
Let us not muddy the waters regarding either of these commissions by talking about them like they are the same thing. A Code of Ethics has nothing to do with the color of a person’s skin, whether he/she is gay, transgender, etc. We also do not need thousands $$$$$$$$ of dollars to implement this right now and let us not choose a liason from the city to brand away the importance and seriousness of this. It was shameful that someone had already been chosen to brand away the Diversity march……..This isn’t about what $$$$$ can be made for Edmonds with the Diversity Commission. It is about educating people about oppression and how easily it happens.
Perhaps our whole WHITE city council needs to be reminded of White Priveledge and how it can put blinders on some
Professor Peggy McIntosh (who is Caucasion) and her White Privelidge essay comes to mind as I see our Council trying to water down these two important commissions both in their own respect totally important to our city right now
White Priveledge, The Invisible Knapsack by Professor Peggy McIntosh
Daily effects of white privilege
I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions that I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can tell, my African American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place and time of work cannot count on most of these conditions.
1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
7. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.
10. I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my race.
11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another person’s voice in a group in which s/he is the only member of his/her race.
12. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can cut my hair.
13. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.
15. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.
16. I can be pretty sure that my children’s teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others’ attitudes toward their race.
17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.
18. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of my race.
19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
22. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.
23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.
24. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the “person in charge”, I will be facing a person of my race.
25. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.
26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.
27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared.
28. I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of another race is more likely to jeopardize her/his chances for advancement than to jeopardize mine.
29. I can be pretty sure that if I argue for the promotion of a person of another race, or a program centering on race, this is not likely to cost me heavily within my present setting, even if my colleagues disagree with me.
30. If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn’t a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.
31. I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and minority activist programs, or disparage them, or learn from them, but in any case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from negative consequences of any of these choices.
32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races.
33. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing or body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race.
34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.
35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.
36. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones.
37. I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to talk with me and advise me about my next steps, professionally.
38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative or professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.
39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.
40. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.
41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.
42. I can arrange my activities so that I will never have to experience feelings of rejection owing to my race.
43. If I have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my race is not the problem.
44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people of my race.
45. I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences of my race.
46. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or less match my skin.
47. I can travel alone or with my spouse without expecting embarrassment or hostility in those who deal with us.
48. I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people approve of our household.
49. My children are given texts and classes which implicitly support our kind of family unit and do not turn them against my choice of domestic partnership.
50. I will feel welcomed and “normal” in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social.
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Elusive and fugitive
I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.
In unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I have listed conditions of daily experience that I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant, and destructive.
I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a patter of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turn, and I was among those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways and of making social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.
In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress, and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit, in turn, upon people of color.
For this reason, the word “privilege” now seems to me misleading. We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work systematically to over empower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one’s race or sex.
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Earned strength, unearned power
I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups.
We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages, which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantage, which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the power that I originally say as attendant on being a human being in the United States consisted in unearned advantage and conferred dominance.
I have met very few men who truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance, and, if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the United States think that racism doesn’t affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see “whiteness” as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.
Difficulties and angers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantages associated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage that rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion, sex, and ethnic identity that on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the members of the Combahee River Collective pointed out in their “Black Feminist Statement” of 1977.
One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms, which we can see, and embedded forms, which as a member of the dominant groups one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.
Disapproving of the system won’t be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. But a “white” skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate but cannot end, these problems.
To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these subject taboo. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.
It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.
Although systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and, I imagine, for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.
Peggy McIntosh is associate director of the Wellesley Collage Center for Research on Women. This essay is excerpted from Working Paper 189. “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming To See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies” (1988), by Peggy McIntosh; available for $10.00 from the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Wellesley MA 02181 The working paper contains a longer list of privileges”
This excerpted essay is reprinted from the Winter 1990 issue of Independent School.
****** I question WHY many of our government, staff or commission people have never spoke up before regarding these important diversity issues. I’ve spoken many times about them, so it is no secret. And I would like to add that a Codes of Ethics has nothing to do with ones sexual orientation, the color of one’s skin, ones gender, ones capabilities, etc.
We ALL learned about ethics and honesty, following laws, etc. in grade school…….everything we learned…….
Speech . . . Less
The bigger question would be, it’s possible that copyright may be violated if this essay was reproduced in its entirety without permission? I’m not a legal scholar, but perhaps it would be best to include a link instead? I’d be happy to reedit the comment, delete the essay and include the link, unless you have received permission from the author to include in its entirety, Ms. Ryder?
This essay is not printed in its entirety and I have referenced it. I can easily contact Ms McIntosh regarding this if this publisher wishes that
Tere, you have real passion for Edmonds issues and you would be a natural as a commissioner on the new Diversity Commission. If you are interested in serving to help our city, I’d recommend you contact Carrie Hite or Mario Brown and let them know you’d like to be involved.