Month: May 2021

The fallout from Covid and the Lutz firing fiasco brought it on

Jerry LeClaireMay 14

On May 10th Governor Inslee signed into law a bill that will bring statewide improvement to Washington’s public health system. One provision of the new law is a mandate that local public boards of health have equal numbers of elected and non-elected officials. This provision was put forward in the legislature by State Representative Marcus Riccelli (D-LD3, much of the City of Spokane) in response to the firing of Dr. Bob Lutz. Dr. Lutz was fired from his position as the Spokane Regional Board of Health’s Health Director (see below) in October 2020. 

The Spokesman article by Arielle Dreher and Laurel Demkovich discussing the new law indicates that:

The non-elected members must include an equal number from three categories:

• Those with experience in public health or health care, such as physicians, nurses or health care workers.
• Consumers of public health, such as residents in communities that face health inequities.
• Other stakeholders, such as community-based organizations or representatives from the business community.

This should be a heads up for rational, civic-minded citizens to consider applying for positions on the Board of Health (BOH). The qualifications for and the number of positions available will be determined with a re-write of the Bylaws of the Board of Health to conform to the new state law. The upcoming change in Spokane County government coming with the 2022 elections makes it unclear when this re-write of the Bylaws will happen.¹

As noted in the more detailed section below, the current Spokane Regional Health District (SRHD) BOH is comprised of twelve members, only three of whom are non-elected. The new law will require a major shift in number and composition. It is time to have voices on the board that better represent the population the SHRD serves.

BACKGROUND: 

The structure and function of the Spokane Regional Health District (SRHD) Board of Health (BOH) was mostly out-of-sight and out-of-mine until Covid struck and put the BOH in the spotlight. One of the Board’s three citizen Board members, Jason Kinley, a naturopath, made news by publicly deriding public health measures against Covid. Kinley held forth in a minutes-long polemic at a May 1 protest organized by the disgraced extremist, soon-to-be-former WA State Representative (and now pastor of Covenant Church) Matt Shea. Jason Kinley still sits on the BOH despite his public undermining of the mission of the SRHD. 

I naively assumed that a Board of Health might contain people with medical and epidemiological expertise. Such assumptions, I’m learning, are foolish. The SRHD BOH is one of twenty-nine boards and commissions listed at the Spokane County website many of which consist mostly of combinations of County, city, and village elected officials. Currently, nine of the twelve members of the SRHD BOH are elected officials, none of them with medical background. The three non-elected members are nominated by the three Spokane County from their commissioner districts. They are Jason Kinley, the naturopath discussed above (nominated by Commissioner Kerns, District 1); Andrea Frostad, a dental hygienist who expresses views against vaccinations (from Commissioner French’s District 1); and Chuck Hafner, a Spokane Valley businessman (from Commissioner Kuney’s District 2). Notably, somewhere I read that Commissioner Kerns’ excuse for nominating Kinley was that “Kinley was the only one who applied.” If that is true, either the position was poorly advertised or the sense of civic duty in our community is in bad repair. (Note that Mr. Hafner’s and Ms. Frostad’s four year terms are up this year, 2021, regardless of the upcoming state-mandated reorganization.) 

It wasn’t just Kinley’s May 1, 2020, public protest that made news for the SRHD BOH. In late October Amelia Clark, the salaried SRHD Administrator, after a brief presentation in a closed-door “executive session” of the BOH summarily fired Dr. Bob Lutz, the SRHD Health Officer. Dr. Lutz, a highly qualified M.D. with training in epidemiology, had been managing the SRHD’s response to the Covid pandemic. Who it was that instigated Amelia Clark’s firing of Dr. Lutz remains a matter of speculation. As an administer, though, Ms. Clark got out ahead of herself in her zeal to rid SRHD of Dr. Lutz: This week the Washington State Board of Health issued a preliminary ruling that Clark violated Washington State law with her action against Lutz. The consequences of that ruling are yet to be determined.

Ms. Clark and the SRHD BOH made news for weeks after the Lutz firing. The BOH’s struggle in a partly open Zoom meeting to rubber stamp Clark’s action added to the drama. The whole episode stank of power politics. Commissioner French seemed to float behind the scenes. Immediately after the vote to confirm Lutz’ termination, French thrust forward his pre-determined candidate for the new Health Officer. Observers were left with the sense of carefully orchestrated and thinly disguised back room power play.

The SRHD BOH needs revamping. The new state law requires it. It behooves the citizens of Spokane County to pay attention and, when the member-at-large positions are clarified, to offer their applications, their time, and service. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry1

Spokane County is in the midst of the re-districting necessary to transition to a three to a five member Board of County Commissioners (BoCC). The new BoCC will have each commissioner elected from one of five newly drawn commissioner districts. For more detail see Indivisible-County Redistricting Impasse

The background of the drive to demonize equity.

Jerry LeClaireMay 12

Conservative: “averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values.”

Which “traditional values” exactly?

Forces in the Republican Party (not all Republicans) want to freeze race relations where they were in the mid 20th century. They wish to censor public education and materials in public libraries that challenge either the mythic notions of our founding or any idea that racial equality wasn’t achieved immediately as the result of the American Civil War (or, perhaps for some, achieved by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s). The signs of this form of censorious conservatism are rife, but they are cleverly cloaked in words like “patriotic education,” “Marxism,” and “critical race theory.”

Under the guise of opposing “critical race theory” wordsmiths among Republicans like Christopher Rufo are busy condemning every effort in current law and schooling that is aimed at improving racial and cultural harmony. They condemn such efforts by insisting they are un-American and unconstitutional. 

For those who subscribe to skin-based white racial superiority, equity, social justice, and diversity are the new desegregation. They lost the legal battle over desegregation in the 1950s and 60s, so the battlefront has moved—and many of those attacked have yet to even understand the threat.

The main target of the current state-based, Trump Republicans is the concept of social equity. The dictionary defines equity as “the quality of being fair and impartial,” and adds that, in law, equity is “a branch…that developed alongside common law in order to remedy some of its defects in fairness and justice…” Stated openly, fighting any form of equity should be a hard sell. Who would join you in a fight against fairness and justice? 

Christopher Rufo makes it clear in his speech at Hillsdale College, pursuing equity is evil and un-American:

Equity…sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, equality—the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—is explicitly rejected by critical race theorists.

According to Rufo, equity, the quality of being fair and impartial, is at odds with equality, at least the equality proclaimed in our founding documents. He makes this peculiar claim in spite of the dictionary definition of equality, “the state of being equal, especially in status, rights, and opportunities.” His whole argument rests on his noting that unnamed “critical race theorists” “reject” equality, presumably the concept of equality of our founding documents. Considering that our founding documents counted slaves (uniformly dark-skinned Africans) as 3/5 of a person, is it any wonder that someone in the academic discipline of critical race theory might have said that the “equality” expressed in those documents should be rejected?

Since the racist wing of the Republican Party, egged on by Rufo and others, is busy legislating against this straw man of “critical race theory”—and against the equity, social justice, and diversity they wish to tie to those words, it behooves us to understand the argument they’re making.¹

The general concept of equity is that the status quo fails to take into account that different people begin life from vastly different starting lines. To grasp the concept it helps to mentally remove race from the equation for a moment. (I encourage you to google “equity images” for insight into the many ways of framing the idea.) Here’s a good example from that page:

Seen through the lens of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), as in this illustration, the pursuit of equity is clearer. Republicans like Rufo see life as a zero sum game. Government helping the disadvantaged, that is, leveling the playing field in any way, by the logic of such Republicans, must be robbing these same Republicans (or the folk they represent) of what they consider rightfully theirs. In their view, the societal pursuit of equity, especially racial equity, must be resisted. (What they avoid admitting is that their argument stems of an underlying belief in white racial superiority. Any disadvantage a person of color experiences is considered to be damn well that person’s own fault. Suggesting that might not be so, they effectively argue, should be outlawed, suppressed, and, especially, rooted out of libraries and education.)

It is worth pointing out that for some Republicans, namely our Congressional District 5 Representative, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the pursuit of equity is selective. As a parent of child with Down Syndrome, she broke with her modern day zero-sum, equity-demeaning Republican Party by voting to preserve the ADA. Apparently, pursing equity is worthy of an exception when it gets personal. She voted to keep the ramp depicted in the illustration. 

It’s all about the words. Republicans want to subscribe to the sort of “equality of opportunity” (part of the dictionary definition of equality) illustrated below, an “equality” that preserves the privilege of height in the opportunity to pick the apple. That’s a tough sell to my 1960s United Methodist upbringing. They suspect it would be a tough sell to rest of us, too, so Republicans disguise their privilege in a cloak of hate for the nasty straw man of critical race theory, the straw they claim is threatening our mythically pure founding principles. 

Those who believe in inherent white racial superiority were the same folk who dragged their feet through the Civil War, supported Jim Crow, and voted against civil rights legislation of the sixties. Now these people twist the word equality to mean the preservation of inequality. These same folk now use the straw man of “critical race theory” to justify damning equity, social justice, and diversity in their latest, most disingenuous, and cleverest attempt to foster a white supremacist doctrine and grip on power.

Pay attention. Push back. We’re headed for rough water.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry1

There is a worthy parallel between Republican rhetoric around the evils of equity and diversity and the Republican campaign against environmental legislation. Think of the words “critical race theory” as parallel to the Republican railing against the spotted owl. In the latter example the real target was the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Attacking the EPA head on would have been just as unpopular (with a large segment of the population) as it would be now to openly assert that all the needed work toward racial equality was finished in the 1960s. The solution? Redefine the argument. Get out in front with attacks from Tucker Carlson and other racist mouthpieces before most people even understand what is being attacked.

Clever Racism and the Word Use that supports it

Jerry LeClaireMay 10

The innovation of American slavery was linking slavery to race, to skin color. We struggle with the consequences of that linkage to the present day.

I was taught in school that “everybody did it,” that slavery, although deplorable, was historically just part of the landscape, and that now we were past that. The Civil War had resolved the issue. The example given, at least the one that struck in my head, was of the Romans enslaving the Greeks—as teachers of Roman children. It took me decades to realize just how fatuous that example was. Mediterranean whites “enslaving” Mediterranean whites left open the promise of assimilation. The difference between the master and slave was cultural—it certainly was not based in any construction of inferiority of an identifiable group.

New World slavery was based on a different premise, the idea that slavery was acceptable because these dark-skinned beings brought to America in slave ships, stripped of their culture and separated from their families, were inherently sub-human. White supremacy over these inferior beings, this “other” identified by skin color, is a mental construct to justify American slavery.¹ When we today recoil at “White Supremacy” we are recoiling at the doctrine that underlay the institution of our slaver past. White supremacy as a mindset was preached from pulpits, justified by passages taken from the Bible, and bolstered by some currents of what passed for “scientific” investigation (take phrenology as one example).

Many a Confederate soldier fought and died in the Civil War not just for the institution of slavery, but for the cause of inequality, of White Supremacy, that was imprinted in the minds of many Americans. Concepts die hard. The belief in inequality based on skin color did not suddenly evaporate with the end of the Civil War and the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment and its promise of “Equal Protection.” The underlying belief in White Supremacy, in racial inequality, fueled the Jim Crow era, both of the South and, more hidden, of the North.²

Meanwhile, public support for the maintenance of overt racial inequality was slowly waning. Lip service to racial “equality” grew into the concept of “separate but equal,” infamously upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In Plessy the Court ruled that legally required racial segregation was consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment, as long as the segregated facilities could, by some stretch, be construed as “equal.” Plessy gave the White Supremacist conviction of inequality based on skin color new cover. “Separate but equal” allowed the notion that a doctrine of fundamental inequality was somehow transformed into equality. The meaning of words can twist and conceal the underlying mindset.

In 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court under Earl Warren ruled that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional, even if the facilities were nominally “equal.” Brown v. Board was and is despised by those who believe in the inferiority of non-whites. The Brown decision led to the billboards I saw in my youth (and failed to understand) demanding to “Impeach Earl Warren.” The decision fueled the protests of “judicial activism” still heard today. Arguably, backlash against Brown fueled Goldwater’s and Nixon’s racist “Southern Strategy,” re-aligning many white southerners from the Democratic to the Republican party—and setting the stage for the dog-whistling racism of the Republican Party of Donald Trump.

Many white Americans remain conflicted about race, still subtly influenced by our forebears’ convictions of inherent white superiority that was the foundation of American slavery. Even so, few Americans today openly preach inequality in the form of White Supremacy, even as a belief in fundamental racial inequality may linger. The cultural needle has moved and word usage has changed since the 1950s. People who, in an earlier time, might have openly espoused white racial superiority or lobbied for overt racial segregation now insist they support “equality” and racial “colorblindness.” 

Fueling a modern political campaign with calls for racial segregation and racial purity or openly suggesting that “equality of opportunity” should be scrapped would lose too many voters. The dog whistles need be sounded more quietly, so that only the “right” people hear them. Attacking racial justice and diversity training head on would be unpopular, so, instead, terms like “patriotic education,” “Marxism,” and “critical race theory” are adopted and used as code.

Stay tuned for “Smearing Equity Part II” on Wednesday. In the meantime,

Keep to the high ground, 

Jerry 1

Worries over, horror of, and laws prohibiting miscegenation, racial interbreeding, are a hold over of the need to maintain a class of supposedly inferior beings easily identifiable by their skin. The need to maintain the classification system, the othering, led, in the United States, to the “one drop rule,” by which anyone with traceable African heritage was identified with this inferior category of sub-humans worthy of enslavement.2

That White Supremacy lived on as a mindset broadly through the United States is perhaps nowhere better exemplified than in President Woodrow Wilson’s screening in the White House of D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation (1916)”. The film glorified the Ku Klux Klan while fueling white fear by depicting Blacks as creatures of low intelligence and sexually aggressive against white women. If you haven’t seen that film and contemplated what it meant for Woodrow Wilson to watch it as the first ever film screened in the White House, I urge you to click the link. I can think of no more stark and ascendant example of the persistence of the White Supremacist mindset more than a half century after the Civil War.

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Mike Allen’s initiative to undermine the Spokane City Council

Jerry LeClaireMay 7

Mike Allen, former City of Spokane City Council member, has filed the paperwork for an initiative for this November. He wants to cap the salaries of Spokane City Council members and the the City Council president. If he and his followers gather just 3,477 signatures from City of Spokane residents before June 7, his initiative will appear on the November ballot. Mike Allen’s initiative push was covered in a short article in the Spokesman on May 3. 

Who is this guy and what is the context? Mike Allen was appointed to a partial term on the City Council in 2007, replacing Mary Verner’s District 2 (South Hill), Position No. 1 seat, when Ms. Verner was elected Mayor. When Verner’s seat’s term ran out in 2009, Mr. Allen tried to hold the seat but was roundly beaten by Jon Snyder. He ran again in 2011, squeaking by Richard Rush by 88 votes out of 21,314 votes cast. By 2015, after voting most consistently with Mike Fagan, Mr. Allen had enough. He announced he would not seek a second elected term on February 25, 2015:

Going forward I plan to focus more on my teaching at North Idaho College, my marketing clients and developing more wine tourism in Spokane via The Cork District.

So for six years Mike Allen held a seat on the City Council justified only by appointment and one 88 vote margin. Six years after he left for better paid employment, Mr. Allen is back hyping an initiative to cap City Council and City Council President salaries (but not the Mayor’s). Sour grapes or political expedience?

The Spokane City Council members are responsible for a budget of just less than a billion dollars. The six city council members’ and the council president’s salaries currently total $342,200. That’s 0.034% of the budget they manage (contrast that with the common 0.9% skim a private investment manager commonly takes). Doubling all six salaries would be inconsequential in terms of taxes—but railing against council salaries piggybacks well on Republican hyped tax worries—in spite of the math. Regardless of Mr. Allen’s treatment of it,¹ a seat on the Spokane City Council is a full time job with a great deal of responsibility. 

Local government of the City of Spokane (pop. ~222,000) doesn’t work in a vacuum. City of Spokane government extensively entwined with the Spokane County government (pop. ~523,000 [including the City of Spokane] ) and representatives from the governments twelve smaller incorporated cities and towns within the County. There are twenty-nine Boards and Commissionswithin the County on many of which both Spokane City Council Members and Spokane County Commissioners sit. 

The County Commissioners pull down a salary of more than $110,000 a year, a fact highlighted when Commissioner Al French, arguably the most powerful elected official in the entire County, accused a state legislature of coveting the salary and considering a run for Commissioner. (Washington State legislators make $$56,881, but, at least theoretically, are only serving when the legislature is in session.) Spokane County Commissioners are not term limited, while City of Spokane electeds are limited to two four year terms. That gives Commissioner French (with 10 years in office) a head start in pulling the levers of power.

The Spokane City Council members currently make $46,700, less than the County’s median 2019 household income of $52,447. The Council President does a little better at $62,000. Mr. Allen conveniently argues to change the City Charter to cap Council salaries to the City’s median household income. (The Mayor of Spokane, for contrast, makes $168,000, a goodly wage by anyone’s standard.) 

A person capable of intelligently managing a budget of nearly one billion dollars, communicating with the public, and working on countless joint committees and boards is highly likely to possess expertise that would land a position in the private sector that commands a salary closer to that of a County Commissioner than that of the median Spokane household. Mike Allen’s stepping down after one term stands as an example of his own lack of altruism compared to current Council members. 

Mr. Allen wishes us to look only at City Council salaries and turn a blind eye to the salaries and power possessed by the County Commissioners. His initiative is meant to undermine the voice of the liberal majority on the City Council. His appeal to salary envy and a misplaced sense of fairness is disingenuous. He couldn’t be bothered to run for another four year term to be paid at less than he thought he was worth. Now he wants to undermine the Council from the outside.

Watch Mr. Allen roll out this initiative. Make opposition to it part of the conversation. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry1

“I served with Mike Allen, and Mike treated that job as a part-time job, and the rest of us had to pick up the slack,” [City Council Member Candace] Mumm said.

The Republican crazy wing now targets a piece of classical American literature.

Jerry LeClaireMay 3

Some right wing Republicans just took their attack on racial equity, diversity training, and social justice to a new level of crazy. I read the Pulitzer Prize winning 1960 novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee in English class in high school in a lily-white suburb of Milwaukee. It left a profound impression, part of which was borne out for me in subsequent visits to the South. Little did I imagine that a Republican legislator, Rep. Heather Scott (R-Blanchard), would from the floor of the Idaho legislature assail “Mockingbird” as anti-white propaganda. The legislature debated (and passed) HB 377, meant to outlaw the latest Republican hobgoblin, “critical race theory.” HB 377 is part of a wave of similar legislative nonsense sweeping Republican majority legislatures and riling the Republican base. (For more on the origin of this latest salvo in the culture wars see my April 26, 28, and 30th posts.)

The same sort of rhetoric on race is floating among some Spokane County Republican electeds—it is just not as clearly stated. (See next Wednesday’s post.)

Rep. Heather Scott’s presentation on the floor of the legislature, seen and well-discussed in this clip from KTVB Boise, is merely the nuttiest assertion focused on “critical race theory.” Nevermind that the term was first coined in 1989. Still, according to Heather, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, published in 1960, is an example of critical race theory “creeping through our schools”. Will Rep. Scott and her like next be advocating for book burning? 

It was Shawn Vestal who first drew my attention to Rep. Scott’s recent legislative antics in an article published in the Spokesman on Wednesday, April 28th, entitled “Critique of ‘Mockingbird’ lifts the hood of Idaho Legislature’s educational intentions.” The writing of Shawn Vestal by itself justifies a subscription to the Spokesman. In case you missed it, I have pasted the article below. He nails it.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

“Critique of ‘Mockingbird’ lifts the hood of Idaho Legislature’s educational intentions.” by Shawn Vestal

I read “To Kill A Mockingbird” as a high school student in a small, conservative farm town in southern Idaho, way back in the early 1980s.

Little did I know I was being manipulated by leftist propaganda. Little did I suspect the pernicious intent of my English teacher, the school district and school board of that small, conservative farm town was to indoctrinate me with anti-white bias.

This is something I discovered recently while trying to keep up with events in the moronic tornado of the Idaho Legislature. From undercutting pandemic safeguards to giving guns more protection than children to an absurd and sustained panic about “anti-white” teaching on racism from pre-K to Boise State, Gem State lawmakers have been setting new lows for representational malfeasance, taking votes again and again that are bad for the state and especially its children.

Still, no one could have foreseen the bizarre critique of “To Kill A Mockingbird” by Rep. Heather Scott, the Confederate-flag-flying conspiracy nut from Blanchard. She raised it last Thursday in a floor debate that concluded with a vote to block salaries and benefits for thousands of Idaho teachers until more state-sanctioned, pro-white propaganda can be mandated for curricula.

Scott said she’d been contacted by a substitute teacher in the Boise area, concerned about messages in the 1960 novel by Harper Lee. This book, Scott said, was an example of how so-called “critical race theory” has been “creeping through our schools forever.”

The substitute told her, Scott claimed, that the novel teaches that “white people are bad, Black people are innocent victims, and the students were encouraged to believe that there was an endless era of Black victimization.”

That is one very odd description of a book that has been critiqued as a “white savior” narrative, and which offers the strong, true, white hero of Atticus Finch.

Perhaps Scott and the substitute teacher haven’t read the book. Or any other.

Scott also relayed concerns that Idaho schoolchildren were learning about too many “non-white race” writers.

“And the English class, (the substitute teacher) said it is more riddled with authors, like our founding historical fiction books and the books that kind of talk about the founding of this country, she said it’s been riddled with writings from third-world experiences by authors that are completely unheard of, but they are non-white race,” Scott said. “So any non-white author is basically being given priority over the historical readings.”

Just imagine the sea of white hoods, nodding with fervent agreement in the firelight.

I was taught “To Kill A Mockingbird” by a very good teacher who did not seem to be an anti-white Marxist. She taught us other great works with race as a theme, such as Faulkner’s “Intruder in the Dust” and Shakespeare’s “Othello.” I remember she told us that her own high school teacher had discussed the latter play entirely without mentioning that Othello the Moor – referred to frequently with such terms as “black ram” – was dark-skinned.

We all thought that was so funny and dumb. It might represent the future of teaching Othello if the Idaho Legislature gets it way.

As a teenager I responded to “To Kill A Mockingbird” in relatively straightforward terms as a tragic story with clear-cut moralities about racism in America. As I grew older, I began to see my experience of the novel – and the movie – in a more complicated light: as a story that let young, white Americans like me understand racism as a vestige of another time and place, a historic injustice now put to rest. My only remaining responsibility was to understand how bad it had been, and to feel righteous about my recognition of that.

I don’t know if this is the fault of the novel so much as the way in which it has been embraced as one of our main national stories about racism – a tragedy about racism that is ultimately very comforting to white people.

It’s obvious that most members of the Idaho Legislature are just deeply unfamiliar with any classroom anywhere. It’s clear, when they become panicked about anti-white indoctrination in preschool, that they have departed the real world altogether.

Left-wing indoctrination in Idaho schools is a mirage. It’s a MacGuffin meant to drive a narrative of white, racist overreaction attempting to produce actual indoctrination and destroy academic freedom.

It’s a whitewash. Bob Ewell would be proud.