It's a funny thing growing up in the cow town that Seattle used to be, where unlimited hydroplane racing once was one of only two sources of professional sports (University of Washington football being the other).
It meant familiarity with brands like Atlas Van Lines, Budweiser, and Pay 'n Pak — aka, boat sponsors — that had no relevancy to a kid growing up in the South End. It meant dragging wooden model hydroplanes behind your bicycle for "races" at the wide intersection down the street. And it meant a kind of validation of your weird fandom that three of the four channels on the family television beamed all-day coverage of the event.
Unlimited-hydroplane racing would continue to hold an impactful place for me into young adulthood as covering it was my first beat at The Seattle Times. I grew up and still live near the race site and under the airshows that comprise the Seafair Weekend Festival.
For at least the past couple decades, the event has felt to me like Seattle's big annual middle finger to its communities of color.
I've lived so close to the Blue Angels' flight path that I've taken photos in which the pilots are clearly visible. But since I've become older, wiser, and more aware, the warm and fuzzy feeling that Seafair used to bring to my stomach has been replaced by a nauseating churn.
Because as Seattle has changed and grown, the propriety of its annual exhibition of martial might and ecological plunder has eroded considerably.
After all, Seattle is the first U.S. city to institute a program, the Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI), aimed at dismantling institutional racism. It is also one of the first to launch a localized Green New Deal, focused on addressing climate and environmental injustice (i.e., the first and disproportionate impacts on frontline communities of color).
Progressives also most recently triumphed over moderate candidates for mayor, attorney general, and three city council seats in a city already considered one of the top two to five left-leaning municipalities in the country.
This all hardly seems like an appropriate foundation for Seattle's midsummer bacchanal, where carbon-spewing aircraft roar over the most environmentally challenged and triggered immigrant neighborhoods in the city, while kerosene-chugging vessels bounce along South Seattle's only shorelines and sensitive habitat, and people from all over clog our streets, then leave their garbage but not their dollars at our local businesses.
The worst part for residents is waking up the next morning to discover that your street resembles a battle zone, littered with half-empty beer bottles and half-eaten junk food, discarded fireworks and clothing, trampled gardens, and an almost-disdainful lack of value and respect.
What does this have to do with Seafair? Everything.
South Seattle is one of the places where we were initially segregated by redlining, discriminatory rental practices, and other institutionalized tools of oppression, and where we now are compressed by the process of dispossessing the places to which we were relegated, commonly referred to as gentrification.
In Seattle's own Racial and Social Equity Index, which is supposed to inform and guide city policies, South Seattle dominates the most vulnerable census tracts. That means neighborhoods with the highest percentages of people of color, those who are foreign born, live below the poverty line, and experience health maladies, as well as people who face lower life expectancies. The picture is much the same in the state's Environmental Health Disparities Map.
Seafair serves as a stark reminder that South Seattle has been treated for decades upon decades as the city's ashtray. Beacon Hill and South Park, two of the city's most polluted neighborhoods, are hemmed in by freeways and major roadways and under the flight paths of two airports and, without tree canopy and other mitigation, are showered by noise and particulates.
In "celebration," Seafair presents the Blue Angels, which a Navy planning document says a Thursday-to-Sunday show requires 58,000 gallons of jet fuel for the six demonstration jets. Burning that amount of fuel would produce about 566 metric tons of carbon dioxide — roughly equivalent to the annual electricity use of 118 average U.S. homes. That amount of carbon dioxide would require about 566 acres of average U.S. forests one year to sequester, an area about 1.9 times the size of Seward Park. The unlimiteds burn roughly 4 gallons of kerosene per minute, meaning eight boats in a typical race produce the equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 1.3 gasoline-powered cars. And that doesn't even include the Grand Prix, junior, and vintage hydro races, as well as fan and equipment transportation, plus support craft.
And the noise … A study of EA-18G Growlers, the sibling aircraft to the Blue Angels' F/A-18 Super Hornets, at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island estimated that more than 74,000 people were exposed to aircraft-noise levels associated with adverse health effects, including high levels of annoyance, sleep disturbance, hearing impairment. The study also found that six schools were exposed to levels associated with delays in reading and oral comprehension.
And the noise … South Seattle, compared to the rest of the city, is home to a higher percentage of immigrants, many from countries where the thunder of jet engines meant airborne hellfire from which it was too late to run. This is similar to the concerns expressed about retraumatizing gunfire heard in shell-shocked Rainier Beach from a firing range in neighboring Tukwila.
A measure of almost reverse, equity-driven NIMBYism is a factor in all of this too, I suppose. It's like the city banished its people of color to a geographical location it did not value. Yet it also reserved the right to pounce upon and exploit any subsequently discovered treasure for the pleasure of everyone everywhere else.
This is the source of the insensitivity displayed by Mayor Katie Wilson's expansion of Bicycle Weekends by gating off of Lake Washington Boulevard, then inviting in the rest of the city every weekend of the summer like a landlord conducting weekly parties in the backyard of your rental home. None of us in South Seattle are saying "no trespassing"; we just want other neighborhoods to share the sacrifice of hosting the city's recreation. All of this was yet another reminder of a long history of the power structure's ignoring and usurping the needs and desires of communities of color.
It's time for Seafair Weekend, as composed, to fly, fly away. It's time for the politicians and other leaders, whose supposed mission and mandate is to break the yoke of capitalist inequity. It's time for the Further Left to consider the plight of the Left Behind.
Pull the plug on the annual environmental pillaging and redistribute the funds and burdens to hatch a truly citywide celebration. As part of that shift, empower South Seattle to, say, conduct an annual, powered-up version of the Columbia City Night Market. Vendor access can be subsidized and BIPOC-, women-, and queer-led businesses can share in the economy of summer fun.
In a political sense, "left," during much of my lifetime, used to mean hope. It used to signal a path for racial, social, and environmental justice. It used to be a sanctuary for your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Or, in South Seattle's case, to just breathe.
Glenn Nelson is a Japanese American journalist and lifetime South Seattle resident who founded The Trail Posse and has won numerous national and regional awards, including for the Emerald, for his writings about race.
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