What Does White-Guy Handwringing Over Sawant Say About Seattle?
Do-nothing socialists, Latinas, and a more Black Panther approach to local activism.
Over at The Stranger, Rich Smith’s latest of approximately 28,000 pieces about Kshama Sawant begins with this anecdote:
Over the summer, anti-ICE protesters stormed into the city council chambers as Council Member Lisa Herbold was introducing a bill to recognize Seattle Channel for its commitment to broadcasting with integrity.
The response from the council members perfectly reflected their politics. Council Member Teresa Mosqueda clapped politely in support of the protestors. Council Member President Bruce Harrell tried to bring the meeting back to regular order. But Council Member Kshama Sawant stood up with her fist raised in the air in solidarity with the protesters.
Smith goes on to bemoan the betrayal of Sawant by a D3 that is
- insufficiently left
- purchased by Amazon
- cowering under Teresa Mosqueda’s thumb, I guess?
- probably racist
(Full disclosure, I have met Rich Smith socially a few times and he was perfectly nice. He has also written nice things about me. But to paraphrase Molly Ivins, “Sometimes you gotta drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against ’em anyway.” So off we go!)
As a D3 voter who reluctantly supported Sawant in the general, this intro immediately grabbed my attention. I, too, participated in an anti-ICE action over the summer, and Council Member Sawant was there.
My story goes a little differently.
On that day in July, a group of students, families, randos like me, socialists, Jewish groups, immigrant rights activists, faith leaders, and more showed up at ICE’s downtown Seattle office (outside of business hours, which is important because otherwise you can screw with someone’s check-in). Right-wingers showed up as well, several of them obviously armed. Good times.
When Council Member Sawant got up to speak, I was disheartened to watch her support and solidarity for detainees swivel quickly to talk of a Green New Deal, housing for all, and not letting big corporations buy Seattle — in other words, an unrelated stump speech. Protest etiquette in general is to center the people most affected, and self-promotion is a huge fucking no. But it’s exactly that kind of self-promotion — constant, unrelated to the issue at hand, ungenerous to fellow travelers in the progressive movement — that I have come to expect from Sawant.
But let’s step back a minute. I promised this article would be about a white guy, and so it is. Or rather: It’s about the type of white guy who remains over-represented among Seattle’s taste-makers and gatekeepers.
Style Before Substance, or: Selective POC Blindness in White Liberal Dudes
Among Smith’s various grievances is a sort of conflation of leftism and racial identity.
But one thing is clear: The big money in the race wanted to overturn progressive control of the city council. To do that, they took a page from Republican state legislators and made Sawant the face of it.
They bet that lily white Seattle would cringe at the sight of a brown woman angry about “Amazon,” a corporation that delivers their groceries, their packages, and their premium television shows.
This read makes a certain amount of sense to me. I would be surprised if Sawant’s race and gender played no role whatsoever in people’s voting behavior. But what makes it a little bit weirder is that Smith has all this racial angst over Sawant in an article that doesn’t mention Tammy Morales, the literal DSA member elected to District 2. (P.S. Congrats, Tammy! Síguele!)
Meanwhile, Shaun Scott running in D4 gets a brief mention but little eulogizing, while Lorena Gonzalez and Teresa Mosqueda have become Smith’s favorite bogeypersons on the Council, despite the fact that they are both outspoken, progressive women of color. Is there something about Latinas that doesn’t do it for Smith? What can we be doing better? Is there anybody who loves him who can talk to him about this?
All kidding aside, I don’t think it’s Latinidad that’s turning off white guys. Not directly, anyway. I think what it comes down to is personal style.
Teresa Mosqueda is noted in Smith’s article as being one of two Council Members who stuck to their guns on the head tax, the other being Sawant. In Sawant’s case, that vote is a sign of a staunchly principled voice that Seattle can’t afford to lose, while for Mosqueda, it’s a sign of … nothing. The official, recorded action she took as a Seattle City Council Member is portrayed as much less important and less indicative of Mosqueda’s politics than one time when she supported protesters at a lower volume than a white dude thought she should’ve.
I keep saying “white guys” because in my experience, there’s a pronounced tendency among young and youngish liberal white men to favor a particular style of left-wing politician — blunt, unapologetic, even pugilistic — while ignoring their policy output, aka substance. In a bizarre confusion of personal and political, their style becomes their substance. Politicians who are diplomatic, nuanced, deliberate, and collaborative are often assumed to be less progressive than firebrands, even when they have the same voting history. Explanations for a firebrand’s losses and shortcomings are also overwhelmingly personal: Note how, in Smith’s telling, Sawant’s faltering union support is due entirely to Mosqueda’s mean-girl-mafia machinations, rather than anything the unions themselves have to say about their choice.
I don’t solely notice this tendency in white men I disagree with. I have also observed it in those I love and adore, who can’t bring themselves to acknowledge Elizabeth Warren’s appeal as a candidate because “I just want a warrior, you know?” (My roommate points out that white women definitely do this as well, and she is right.) I think this style preoccupation comes partly from a lack of understanding of the consequences non-white, non-male politicians can face, both for an insufficiently palatable personal demeanor and a lack of demonstrable policy output. But I’m not totally sure why it happens; I just know it does. My gentle advice to liberal white guys would be that sometimes, before they speak, they should ask themselves, “Am I describing an action or a decibel level? Am I describing a person, or many different environmental and political factors in a trench coat?”
I have one more bone to pick with this op-ed, and it’s about incrementalism.
Projects Pending Revolution
Something I heard from at least four of my friends in D3 was, “Sawant hasn’t done anything since the Fight for 15, which was great, but she can’t coast on it forever.”
Four is definitely not a valid sample size, but it’s twice as many people as Smith interviewed for his article, and he’s getting paid to journalism and I’m not so make of that what you will. Smith has a message for my friends:
To [Sawant’s] political rivals and big business, she’s “not listening.” To true believers of incrementalist governing, she’s “ineffective.”
To be super, 100%, crystal clear: I don’t call politicians ineffective because I love incrementalism. (“Oh yeah baby, slower, slower — less!”) I do it because if given the choice between something good happening or nothing happening, I would rather have something happen. It could be a big thing! That’d be great! But any positive thing is better than not a thing.
That’s it. That’s fucking it.
Woke white guys of the world tend to reply that the engines of injustice wreak havoc on people’s lives while compromise is still filing into the meeting room. All too often, slow means no. And they’re right: Everything we do now is, from at least one angle, already too late, because people suffering now won’t benefit from our down-the-line utopias. I know this. It hurts.
But the choice between incremental governance and revolution is something of a false choice. Socialist Alternative doesn’t have to wait for every single City Council Member to go red, and neither do their alt weekly cheerleaders. We even have a road map here in the PNW, because at least one political party in our region’s history combined revolutionary ideology with community programs.
I was very, very fortunate this summer to get to hear Elmer Dixon, co-founder of Seattle’s Black Panther chapter, speak on the subject of making change. He gave a brief history of the Panthers’ breakfast program and police accountability program — both part of an overarching strategy he called “projects pending revolution.” Dixon drew a very direct, clear line between providing the community with things they needed (food and safety) and preparedness for eventual revolution. No army marches on an empty stomach. No army marches if they think they’ll be leaving their children in danger. So when I was stopped at the corner of Broadway and Pine by my fifth Socialist Alternative canvasser of the day, I asked him if he’d heard of projects pending revolution, and if Socialist Alternative had any community projects in place.
He said that to his knowledge, they do not.
I would genuinely love to see Socialist Alternative put their money where their Sawant-branded signs are, and start planning for the revolution. I’d love to see Democratic LD groups do this. If I were a gambling girl, I’d bet on the DSA, who are definitely the most useful socialists Seattle has to offer. But my point is: You don’t have to wait to win elected office, or all of the elected offices, or for everyone to wake up with the same class consciousness as you or whatever your specific vision of go time is. If you have an ask to make of your community — your district — your neighbors — you have to feed them something besides slogans. That’s why I supported Zachary DeWolf in the D3 primary, and why, although I’m sad to see Orion the likely winner, I’m not sorry to see Sawant gone.
But the white guys are right, it’s probably because of Amazon.