Seattle activists, journalists look at their role in the coming era of Trump
Half the nation woke up on Wednesday, Nov. 9, deeply disturbed for the future of our country. People of color, who overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton in the face of Donald Trump’s occasionally subtle but mostly bald-faced racism and xenophobia, saw worsening of an already terrible situation. Many left-leaning Whites, particularly women, felt a new existential threat to their lives and values.
Incidents of violence and hate began to skyrocket across the country to rates not seen since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. Victims have reported more than 700 such events between Nov. 9 and Nov. 16, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, with 65 percent of those taking place in the first three days after the election.
Locally, incidents have held consistent from 2015 when they hit their peak of one to two incidents reported every day, likely a vast underestimate, said Arsalan Bukhari, executive director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington state.
“2015 had the highest number of anti-Muslim hate crimes in U.S. history,” Bukhari said.
The president-elect has taken few steps to calm those troubled waters. He quickly began rewarding campaign loyalists, naming Stephen Bannon — executive editor of the alt-right site Breitbart, feted by the KKK — as his chief strategist. He appointed Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, known for his hardline stance on immigration and loose lips on right-wing talk shows, to his transition team and potentially in his administration.
More names known for their stances against the LGBTQ community and the concept of climate change have been floated for key positions, but, in the language of reality television, Trump says that only he knows who the “finalists” are.
When asked about the spike in violence and fearmongering by Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes,” Trump’s response was anemic at best.
“And I say, ‘Stop it,’” Trump said. “If it — if it helps, I will say this, and I will say right to the cameras: Stop it.”
He’s spent more time condemning so-called “professional protesters” and the cast of “Hamilton” on his Twitter feed than he has trying to bring his supporters in line.
For some who have committed their lives to anti-racist organizing, the demonstration of open racism represents a form of honesty that can, in turn, be openly combated.
In part three of a series released in the South Seattle Emerald, a nonprofit, community-supported news outlet, entitled “The New Woke,” Dustin Washington, director of the Community Justice Program at the American Friends Service Committee and trainer with the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, refers to Trump as a “false opiate” that White people opted for in reaction to the “browning” of the country, as well as eight years under the country’s first Black president.
He believes supporters will be disappointed.
“The truth for people of color, and any righteous white human being, is that Trump’s election is an amazing opportunity because we can no longer have any false pretense of a savior in the White House,” Washington wrote.
Trump does not appear to be proving his detractors wrong.
Possible backpedaling on Obamacare aside, there’s little encouragement from the top that the president-elect will be anything but what he promised on the campaign trail, leaving Seattle and Washington-area groups trying to answer an overwhelming question: Where do we go from here?
On Friday, Nov. 18, the South Seattle Emerald aimed to help shape the response in an event called #WhatWeMustDoNow at the Rainier Arts Center. It was something that people have been thirsting for; the event quickly hit capacity.
The panelists were journalists, and the resulting conversation aimed at the media response and how to effectively interact in the online space, to push conversations about difficult subjects forward in a constructive way.
“Some of you are here to move forward in a posture of activism, and some of you are curious about where journalism goes from here, and those are two different things,” said Mark Baumgarten, editor-in-chief of Seattle Weekly. “Activism seeks out justice, journalism seeks out truth.”
But it was the intersection of journalism and activism that took center stage on Friday, cutting a difficult space for “traditional” journalists who have been trained to value standing apart from the fray. That distance contributed to a certain sanitization of the Trump campaign, a false equivalency between his candidacy and that of his rival and is already in the process of normalizing the distinctly abnormal.
Ana Sofia Knauf, a reporter with The Stranger, described her paper’s brand of “resistance journalism,” providing a calendar of events for people who want to take to the streets to protest the actions of a budding Trump presidency.
“I think that people feel very helpless in response to Trump,” Knauf said. “People with privilege have powerful voices, and they don’t know where to direct them.”
Ijeoma Oluo, editor-at-large of The Establishment and self-titled internet yeller, had direct advice for the use of privilege at the local level: examining it and leveraging it in order to eliminate it.
“Start looking at where your privilege intersects with the oppression of others,” Oluo said. “We all have areas where our privilege intersects, and that’s where we can change things. I hear a lot of people trying to avoid that, people trying to avoid that by looking for shared oppression. What we should be looking for is our privilege because that’s the piece we can crumble. That’s the piece we can take apart.”
As the journalism community works to shift its focus, local and regional nonprofits went on the defensive, trying to prepare themselves and their constituencies for whatever may be coming their way.
During the course of his candidacy, Trump made promises on all sides of every line. A potential Muslim registry was proposed in November 2015. The idea went quiet only to be brought back to the fore a year later, after the election. At first, 11 million undocumented immigrants were to be rousted from their homes and deported. The number has since turned into 2 to 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal records, a veritable impossibility as there is no evidence that many exist.
The uncertainty is vast and frightening, said Matt Adams, legal director at the Seattle office of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.
“We have scores of people on hold, waiting to talk to you to see if they can get in on an intake, screening, a workshop to figure out what’s going on,” Adams said.
An election usually focuses the conversation on potential changes to immigration law that would impact people new to the system, not those who are already working through the process. That’s not true this time, Adams said.
Trump consistently pledged to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which promised the ability to stay in the country and a right to work to people under the age of 31 and present in the U.S. as of June 15, 2012. As many as 40,000 people in Washington state may be eligible for the program, and 17,000 already in the system may be in danger if it’s canceled.
People are afraid, said Luis Fernando Ramirez, interim executive director of Entre Hermanos, a nonprofit that serves the Latinx community.
“It is something real, not just something that is just paranoia or something,” Ramirez said.
Entre Hermanos held a meeting with the community, many of whom are undocumented. Mayor Ed Murray came out immediately after the election to declare his intention to remain a “sanctuary city” for undocumented immigrants despite the potential loss of millions in federal funding, but the name promises more than authorities can actually deliver.
A sanctuary city promises to not facilitate the targeting of undocumented people with local resources, but people know that federal laws are federal laws, Ramirez said.
For many, it’s not simply the threat of deportation that concerns them, but also the promised gutting of health care, which could deprive them of life-saving HIV drugs, and of Entre Hermanos itself. Roughly 60 percent of its budget comes from the state, but that has to do with federal funds.
That threat has not deterred the organization, Ramirez said.
“If there is a need of looking for other resources, we will do it,” Ramirez said. “We’ve been here for 25 years. We’re going to keep doing our job.”
As the sensation of a looming threat took hold, tens of thousands of people began looking for something to do, some way to contribute, to feel less helpless. The American Civil Liberties Union, which promised very publicly that it would see Trump in court should he try to act on some of his campaign promises, saw a surge in support and social media followers.
So did Planned Parenthood, an organization long in conservative crosshairs.
However, the outpouring of support has been matched by an increase in the number of calls, women asking for long-term birth control measures and trying to schedule appointments before Inauguration Day.
The day after the election, Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest and Hawaiian Islands received 1,300 calls, an increase of more than 200, said Katie Rogers, public relations manager for the regional branch.
The organization doesn’t have an explicit strategy yet, because the campaign did not provide a consistent message about how women’s access to reproductive health could be jeopardized, Rogers said.
“I think that we have to prepare for anything and everything,” she said. “I think that we’re in for a fight.”
Those who feel compelled to join that fight have options. They can donate to groups that represent the issues they care about, phone-bank in competitive political races such as one in Louisiana that won’t be decided until December, volunteer or use their voices to support communities that stand to be most impacted.
That’s the most powerful way to influence public opinion, said Bukhari, of Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“Write letters to the editor, write what they know about American Muslims. That way they’re using their voices to educate millions,” Bukhari said. “By far, the most impactful and powerful way to change the tide is to use one’s voice to send letters to editors.”
A number of Seattle artists took another route: guerilla art.
The group, Why We Resist, ringed the streets around Westlake Park with art, stringing swaths of painted fabric decorated with additional artworks from available freestanding structures like electrical poles. They invited other artists to post their own work as an ofrenda, or offering, “to understand the fear, anger, hope and longings that many are feeling after the election.”
One artist, who requested anonymity, described the effort as “the biggest, riskiest thing I’ve done,” but for them it was personal. As a child of immigrant parents, Trump’s rhetoric hit hard.
“My parents didn’t give up so much to lose our liberty,” they said.
Five thousand of Seattle’s students decided to use their voices on Nov. 14, taking to the streets and marching to Westlake Park. The flood of bodies pouring down Pine Street, shouting rallying cries supportive of Black lives, women’s bodies, refugees and immigrants showed exactly how these young people would have voted had they the right on Nov. 8.
They expressed their anger, but as they ran and skipped down the street, energized and excited, there was also hope.
Deandrea Jones, an 11th grader at Garfield High School, said she was proud of her fellow students for showing up.
In four years, she and most of her peers will be able to vote.
Does she think they’ll be voting for Trump?
“Nope.”