My mother is a kinship care navigator in South Seattle. It's work that's supposed to serve grandmothers in their 60s and 70s raising grandbabies on a Social Security check and whatever grace the city still allows. Lately, the calls are less exclusive. People of all ages reach out, making Hail Mary asks for a bridge across a financial chasm that keeps widening in a city that claims to care. Recently, I stopped by my parents' house before a Seahawks game. On that day, every name on her list was Black.
That list has been a specter for me throughout this mayoral race between Bruce Harrell, Seattle's second Black mayor, and Katie Wilson, the white progressive challenger. It edges forward in my mind each time someone refers to "the Black community," trying to make our many voices into one neat prayer, forgetting that harmony without truth is just another form of silence.
Who, exactly, do we mean when we say "Black community"? Descendants of the Great Migration who made a home in the Central District before the tech boom shoved them south? Relatively new arrivals from Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, making the Rainier Valley's languages sound like the world? The lifelong Seattleites who remember Black Panthers serving free breakfasts, or the upwardly mobile newcomers for whom "equity" evokes stock options? Elders? Gen Z? Artists? Preachers? The uncle in Lakeridge with a mortgage, or the cousin still refreshing the Section 8 portal?
Even in my own family, the arguments are loud enough to drown out the cheers erupting from a Cal Raleigh home run. One relative scolds another for "abandoning a Black man in power" by voting for Wilson; the reply comes quickly that "Harrell's race doesn't make him immune from critique."
These are not abstract debates. They cut to the marrow of how we live in a city where the Black share of the population has dwindled, where rising housing costs shove families south to Tukwila and Federal Way, where wealth gaps mean our elders have fewer cushions and our kids fewer chances. Representation matters, yes. But what does it mean when symbolic victories don't lead to material change?
Race has shadowed this race from the start. It burst into headlines only when the messiness obliged it. First came the accusation that the Wilson campaign falsified an endorsement from retired labor activist Claude Burfect. Wilson's team countered by handing the Emerald's Mike Davis receipts: texts and emails where Burfect not only endorsed her but even told Wilson how to list his title in campaign materials. Did Burfect, who doesn't live in Seattle, change his mind, make a mistake, or get pressured into silence? We don't know because the only person he's spoken to since is right-wing provocateur Jonathan Choe.
Then the photo episode: During the Emerald's mayoral forum, Harrell claimed a Wilson-linked PAC had "darkened" his skin in a promotional image. The photo wasn't theirs at all but from Common Power, a civic group led by Charles Douglas, a Black man. Douglas didn't mince words, calling the claim "a sensationalist smear that reeks of desperation," and adding that he knew "firsthand the harm caused when racial tropes are weaponized in politics."
Mayor Harrell has had his own incidents. At a recent luncheon at the Columbia Tower Club, confirmed by a representative with the club, Harrell spoke before an overwhelmingly white audience (only three of the roughly 50 attendees were Black, according to a source) and recalled his time "helping grow Black business."
He said many aspiring entrepreneurs would come to him saying, "I'm an African American, I'm starting this, I have limited capital, yada yada. Is there a Section 8 program, or something like that?" Harrell said he'd respond: "First of all, what would you do if you're not Black? You have to compete. The fact is, we live in a meritocracy. You have to be the best at what you do. So instead of always saying, 'Give me this, give me that,' be the best that you can be first."
The remarks, captured in a recording of the Oct. 2 luncheon obtained by the South Seattle Emerald and confirmed by two attendees, reflect a familiar faith in meritocracy that often overlooks how the game itself is rigged. For a city where Black residents face widening wealth gaps and shrinking opportunity, Harrell's words sound less like tough love than a reminder of who's expected to compete from behind.
Later in the same talk, Harrell shifted from meritocracy to mixed identity, invoking his own Black and Japanese heritage. "Every freaking hand should go up," he said when asking who identified as mixed race, insisting "not one of you are pure anything." He went on to muse, "If Kamala Harris would have won, this wouldn't even be a race for me," before noting that President Donald Trump's son had publicly called Seattle a "crap hole." The moment revealed the mayor's complicated balancing act: part civic booster, part scold, and part survivor of political game, where his own success can't disguise the fact that the scoreboard still rarely favors the Black community he claims to represent. You can listen to the remarks below.
In a phone call after this column was originally published, Mayor Harrell said his remarks were meant to emphasize that Black entrepreneurs should prioritize excellence in their endeavors above all else, noting that he has given similar speeches to groups of Black business owners in the past.
However you read these flare-ups, either as genuine missteps or the typical election-year smear and conjecture (I lean toward the latter), they are trivial against the question that should tower over this campaign: How are Black Seattleites actually doing? And will City Hall's choices leave us better off, not just this election cycle, but for years to come?
I put that question to Black Seattleites who've spent decades holding a mirror to this place, refusing its easy myths. They haven't declared for either candidate, but their answers don't fit on a flyer or a hashtag. They tell a truth this city still struggles to hear.
Aaron Dixon cofounded and captained the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party at 19. He remembers a segregated city that forced Black people into one part of town — and, paradoxically, a community fortified by proximity and a shared value system. "We had strong community values. We stuck together, and we were much more powerful than we are today," he told me. "The most important part of our community was the children. Everybody looked out for the children." Back then, he says, "we had communalism, not individualism," and a dense web of Black institutions — from pharmacies to cleaners to a newspaper — that made daily life feel held.
So what does it mean that today we have more Black faces in elected office, three on Council and a Black mayor, while so many of our people are spread across the region, paying more for less? Dixon doesn't romanticize representation for its own sake. "Our political leaders have bought us into this era of greed," he told me, his critique stretching far beyond Seattle. "People celebrated the first Black president, but Obama really didn't do very much," he said, pointing to deportations and drone strikes.
His point wasn't to reopen old debates. It was to pierce a dangerous illusion: that a Black face automatically equals Black prosperity. "We need people truly dedicated to the interests of the community," he said. "Not just the Black community but all communities. All power to the people."
Agree with his politics or not, Dixon isn't wrong. We've seen identity be both compass and shield, with Black leadership presiding over both progress and policies that harm Black people. Two years ago, as Seattle voted to criminalize drug possession, a coalition of critics (many of them Black) warned what would come next: disproportionate enforcement in Black neighborhoods, without the promised surge of treatment. A recent report suggests they were right about both. The lesson isn't that race doesn't matter; it's that race without discernment becomes performative: ostentatious and empty. Loving our people means asking harder questions of those who claim to speak for us, even when we share a skin tone.
Political strategist Crystal Fincher, who's spent years organizing with and for underrepresented voters, starts with the basic truth this city keeps forgetting: "When we say 'the Black community' in Seattle, it's not the same community it was 10, 20, 30 years ago." Displacement dispersed families across South King County. Migration diversified our Blackness. "We're more diasporic than we've ever been," she said. "So a barrier is just being seen for who we are — not a monolith, not tokenized endorsements." She's weary of campaigns that put a Black face on a platform and call the work done. "Leaning too heavily on representation, on tokenization … to act like there is a Black face, therefore Black people are taken care of — it's just not reality."
Fincher's frustration isn't performative; it's practical. Policy in this city, she says, is routinely crafted as if Black people are a special-interest silo: Talk "Black issues," and folks jump straight to criminal justice and social services, ignoring how we're on the front lines of climate harm, economic shocks, and educational inequity. "All issues are our issues," she told me. Solve for us, and you tend to solve for everyone. We're the canaries who warn the whole mine.
Fincher argues that "best case" policy is a step, not a panacea. That means listening after the electoral victory; it means naming the harms your policy will cause and mitigating them, instead of pretending costless progress exists. It also means refusing the political habit of having us on speed dial when convenient (say, on increased surveillance in our neighborhoods) but losing our number when things go awry. "They always want our voice, but they don't want to protect our bodies," she said. Accountability, in other words, is not a one-time photo op. It's a practice.
University of Washington sociologist LaShawnDa Pittman places today's debates in a longer arc of belonging and dispersal. "I believe in policymaking informed by lived experience," she said, "and we don't get nearly enough of that among our politicians regardless of race." Identity and issues aren't separable for her. "The social problems plaguing our deeply unequal city shape identity," which is why she wants candidates to show "how their identity is borne out of the struggle and/or their demonstrated commitment to fighting for those most impacted by it."
The gentrification of the Central District, she notes, "hurts us all regardless of class." Here, linked fate — the idea that my life chances are bound up with yours — must expand to meet our actual demography: African immigrants, Black women, Black queer and trans people, formerly incarcerated folks, caregivers doing invisible labor. The "Black vote," if it's to mean anything, has to hold all that.
Pittman makes me wonder about the gap between the two people vying to lead this city: a millionaire mayor with a reported net worth of $15 million, and a challenger whose disclosures list roughly $250,000. What does representation mean in a city where wealth, not just race, increasingly decides who gets to stay, who gets to speak, and who even gets heard?
Meanwhile, the class tension inside "Black Seattle" keeps asking inconvenient questions. Arif Gursel, founder and CEO of Pan-African Center for Empowerment (PACE) and the mind behind the SEA619 incubator for Black entrepreneurs, calls out the ways capital quietly decides who gets to stay, and who gets to speak. "Many people that are 'community leaders' are actually capitalistic puppets," he told me. "I've been knee-deep, 10 toes down on both sides of the table — corporate and community. I'm typically the first Black executive in the room, and the first one to go, because I'm the one that's going to see the stuff that doesn't work for our community in these halls and voice it. I'm going to sacrifice myself for the way, not the dollar."
That double vision gives him little patience for performative politics. "The thing that has hurt our community more than anything — both locally and nationally — has been this anticipation that whatever the Democratic Party says, we go do," he said. "They jump, and we say how high. They put a Black candidate in front of you, you clap. They announce a Black-led organization that's been around a hundred years, and suddenly it's the voice of us. These things are broken, and we don't realize how much capitalism has influenced community conversation." For him, the word community has lost its teeth: "Black communities feel more like concentration camps without walls. They're places we were placed, and we act as refugees inside them."
That's why he refuses the language of empty solidarity. "One term I don't let people use around me is 'ally,'" he said. "You can't be an ally of mine — I don't even know what that means. I need to see an alliance agreement. Microsoft doesn't walk into Apple and just say, 'We allies.' They write an agreement. It tells you what you're doing, what you're not doing, and when that alliance ends. It's an alliance to a purpose, not just our presence."
His critique doesn't come from cynicism but a firm reminder that no candidate can redeem what a city refuses to repair. There are no saviors here, only stewards. Manna won't fall from heaven, no matter who occupies the mayor's office on the fifth floor of City Hall. The struggles facing Black Seattle long predate either of the current campaigns, and will outlast them if we mistake leadership for deliverance.
That's not how history works. As Dixon put it, "It's the conditions that determine how people are going to act." Conditions can be changed. We have changed them before. The Panthers created free breakfast because children were hungry; cities followed. We could build child care like that. Treatment beds like that. Worker protections like that. Tenant power like that. Or we could keep telling ourselves that a few Black people with seats at the table are all we need.
But what does it matter if they're at the table while the rest of us go hungry? Our politics keeps mistaking the menu for the meal. We need something else our moment keeps rationing: discernment.
Discernment sounds like this: Yes, race matters. And so do class, gender, diaspora, disability, and moral character. It acts like love, not flattery. Love that tells the truth. Love that demands more.
If Katie Wilson wants our votes, she owes us real answers about equity and accountability — who she'll be responsible to, and how we'll know. And guess who else owes us those same answers? Bruce Harrell. If he truly seeks another term, he must offer more than his presence, and memories of Garfield High. He owes us a record that can stand in the daylight, on the very ground we're still struggling to hold.
So here is the invitation to all of us, and the charge to the next mayor, whether your name is Harrell or Wilson. If you want to talk about the Black vote, bring discernment. Bring policies that move material conditions, not just your polling crosstabs. Share power. Count harms. Course-correct in daylight. Don't just ask to sit at the table. Expand it, and build more.
Because if the choice before us is a few Black seats at the table while the rest of us go hungry, then our politics have confused proximity with nourishment. We don't need more invitations. We need sustenance, whoever is serving it up.
Marcus Harrison Green is the South Seattle Emerald's editor-at-large.
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