Seattle City Wire

In mid-December, Seattle and King County homelessness response leaders hosted a conference with the topic of “Decolonizing Our Collective Work.”

Organizers say that the government’s responsibility when it comes to homelessness is to “[interrogate] the current structures of power” and “examine the legacies of structural racism in our systems, and co-design a path towards liberation with black, indigenous, brown and other marginalized communities,” wrote contributing editor Christopher F. Rufo in a Dec. 17, 2019, column in City Journal.

Rufo says that the homeless issue in Seattle is a crisis point, and although public and private spending on the issue has reached more than $1 billion across the county, the problem is going to get worse because the local government isn’t dealing with the causes of homelessness.

Instead, he wrote that “progressives in local government have waged war against abstract forces of oppression.”  

In an example of a trend that is growing among Seattle city employees who see “their work as part of a broader agenda of radical social change,” Rufo said that Kira Zylstra, executive director of King County's homelessness program, hired a transgender stripper to perform for the conference’s “cultural presentation” hour, and, according to a Seattle Times report, members of taxpayer-funded nonprofits and government agencies clapped, cheered and handed dancer Beyonce Black St. James dollar bills.

Although the city has added personnel rapidly over the past five years under the banner of “diversity, equity and inclusion,” Rufo says some of these employees see their role as more than providing services. For example, Rufo writes that Christopher Peguero, manager of the equity program at City Seattle Light, “views his role as much more than providing reliable electricity to utility customers.” Peguero said in a city of Seattle Blog that he felt public utilities can be instrumental against white supremacy.

And that’s not the only example of how identity politics is showing up in Seattle government. Rufo writes that the Seattle Public Schools’ Ethnic Studies Task Force launched a new math curriculum because the “'Western' model of instruction has '[disenfranchised] people and communities of color.'” Not only that, but he said the task force also alleges that model of instruction has “legitimized systems that contribute to poverty and slave labor.”