Progress? Maybe. But we lost the only Seattle School Board race we couldn't afford to lose.
/By Matt Halvorson
A few weeks ago, Seattle voted.
I have been trying to write about the election results for weeks now. I’ve been having trouble putting it into words. It feels like a melancholy song would be more appropriate — something not too sad, but not particularly optimistic. Because that’s what we got from this past election as far as the Seattle School Board is concerned. It could have been worse, for sure. But actually, given the field running for school board, it couldn’t have been much worse, which is strange, because what we got is still so much better than what we’ve gotten accustomed to. Despite some progress, I still felt like we let ourselves down.
How?
By far the most important race of the four school board seats up for election was the seat that current board president Leslie Harris won over Molly Mitchell. I can’t overstate how much more important this specific race was than any of the other three, nor can I possibly exaggerate how disappointing it is that Mitchell didn’t win.
Leslie Harris, a white woman with a terrible track record when it comes to racial awareness, is a close friend of seemingly-pure-evil Dow Constantine, and she ran on a platform that included “equity” as one of its three main pillars. Harris is a paralegal and was not, to my knowledge, significantly involved in education prior to the events leading up to her first school board term. I am quite sure she was not involved in any sort of meaningful work fighting for racial justice, social justice, against oppression, or … anything. Like I said, she considers Dow “Youth Jail” Constantine a close friend. Even the Teachers Union saw the writing on the wall and endorsed Mitchell.a
Mitchell, meanwhile, is a Black woman who has been working with those situated furthest from educational justice as her personal and professional mission. I want to say she was the obvious choice here, but that’s not enough. Mitchell was THE ONLY CHOICE HERE, and we elected Leslie Harris.
What Harris doesn’t seem to get is that it is an oxymoron for her to have run on a platform of fighting for equity. Harris has been a failure in the fight for equity during her tenure, and for her to even stay in the race was an equity issue when her opponent was an extraordinarily qualified woman of color.
Leslie Harris should have dropped out. She should have endorsed Mitchell herself. Instead, she used her money and her connections and her incumbency to win an election at the expense of the kids and families she claims to be serving.
Meanwhile, Chandra Hampson (an inspiring woman of color) defeated Rebeca Muniz (an inspiring and more-radical woman of color) in the rare vote that we as a public couldn’t really lose.
Lisa Rivera-Smith ran unopposed. And she won! Hooray. Not a huge surprise, but Seattle has done stranger things to keep a woman of color from being elected to public office. Still, a win is a win. I’ll take it.
And Liza Rankin, a white woman whose heart and mind are in the exact right place, defeated Eric Blumhagen, who also might have been fine. The Seattle Times Editorial Board endorsed Blumhagen, in fact.
(Side note: I got curious about the racial makeup of the Times’ editorial board, and I did seven Startpage (think Google without the villainy) image searches. It appears that the seven-member editorial board at the Seattle Times is made up of seven white folks. Please tell me I’m wrong about this… or that there are plans to severely correct this. I have enjoyed pretty much every interaction I’ve ever had with anyone working at the Times, so I mean nothing by poking this bear except to say, hey, is this real? And if so, let’s do better starting immediately, because that is not a representative set of opinions.)
So, like I said, it could have been worse… but only if we’d had a worse field of candidates. Given the options, we lost the only race that really, really, really mattered.
Oh, and also, we voted down affirmative action because apparently we don’t understand anything.
Oh, and also also, Kshama Sawant almost lost to Amazon. And it seems that several other candidates did lose to Amazon.
In the end, I have one overarching thought, and it’s mostly a message for Leslie Harris: it had better be worth it. If you think, Leslie, that you were the equity candidate, you better prove it. I’m not holding my breath, but I will hold you accountable. You can count on that.
