Unity event changing focus
Spokane has come a long way toward welcoming people of color, say participants in Unity in the Community, the annual celebration of diversity, but the city has a long way yet to go.
“We have been focusing on the morality of diversity,” said Ben Cabildo, executive director of AHANA, a minority business and professional association. “We must now focus on the economics of diversity.”
By and large, the community has embraced people of color because it is the right thing to do, Cabildo said. In this regard, “Things have improved in Spokane. The business community is very well aware of why diversity is vital to economic development.”
But the city is still having trouble recruiting high-end companies that have a diverse work force, he said. Their employees’ families often don’t feel welcome here.
Yet Cabildo, whose group is organizing the 12th Unity in the Community this Saturday in Spokane’s Liberty Park, is optimistic about the community’s future. It is a sentiment shared by his allies struggling for a more culturally diverse and vibrant community, including the NAACP and the Native Project, an urban Indian advocacy group that serves all races, ethnicities, sexual orientations and religions.
“I think the people of Spokane are getting it, that it’s good business to have an ethnically diverse community,” said Toni Lodge, executive director of the Native Project and Native Health of Spokane. “In the last year I have come to believe that there are people I’ve really underestimated.”
That is because she saw the community come together this year in support of Native Health, a clinic that serves nearly 6,000 mostly low-income patients. It was one of 34 clinics nationwide that were threatened when the Bush administration sought to eliminate funding for urban Indian health care in the 2007 budget.
Largely because of public pressure, Lodge said, Congress voted to restore approximately $30 million to keep the clinics running.
In good economic times, she said, it is easier to recognize the needs of minorities, the poor and the disenfranchised. “In hard times, we find out where the priorities really are.”
In many ways, Lodge said, last year’s hurricane that devastated New Orleans and disproportionately hurt the poor and the elderly was “a gift” to all of us.
“Any city in this country could be a Katrina disaster,” she said. “It ripped back the curtain on poverty, and by the way, they were people of color.”
She believes the hurricane revealed that the marginalization of minorities still exists in America.
Initiative 200, which passed in 1998 and prevents preference in contracting on the basis of race, ethnicity or gender, set back efforts to bring diversity to the state, Cabildo said. In recent years, state contracts with minority businesses have declined from 5 percent to less than 1 percent, Gov. Christine Gregoire has written.
“Many minority contractors have given up on the state,” Cabildo said.
Spokane does not have many minority policy-makers, such as CEOs or board members, he said.
“Where corporations have minority board members, it has made a difference,” Cabildo said.
But, he said, Spokane has taken positive steps. Among them: Avista and Gonzaga University diversity workshops, Eastern Washington University’s diversity initiative, the annual Race Relations Congress, the Spokane Regional Chamber of Commerce’s diversity breakfasts, Unity in the Community and Native American powwows.
It is hard to measure improvement, Cabildo said, “because we have not set goals for ourselves,” like increased graduation rates among minority students. Currently, fewer than half of Hispanic students graduate from high school.
Overt acts of racism are mercifully few, said V. Anne Smith, president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, who grew up in West Virginia at a time when such racism was common.
“Here in Spokane, it is more subtle,” she said, but discrimination still exists. She bemoaned the fact that there are not more black professionals in Spokane businesses or more black officials in local government.
Spokane city government, she said, should be setting an example for the rest of Spokane. Instead, the city’s equal employment and contract compliance office was terminated in 2004 and its officer, Vince Lemus, laid off by the late Mayor Jim West, who also considered eliminating the city’s Human Rights Commission, according to e-mails previously reported by The Spokesman-Review.
Smith noted that Spokane once had a black mayor in Jim Chase.
“Blacks have a history here,” Smith said.
Smith said the NAACP’s relationship with local law enforcement is better now than in the late 1990s, “a time when young blacks were stopped because their shoes looked like gang shoes.”
Lodge noted that outgoing Police Chief Roger Bragdon and former Sheriff Mark Sterk both supported the Safe Start initiative, a pilot program to reduce the risk of violence to children. And she praised the police response to the racially motivated attack last August on Bonnie Joseph, a Flathead Indian, and her family. In June, Andrew C. Lovelace, 25, and Daniel G. Wilson, 29, were convicted of seven counts each of malicious harassment in the attack and sentenced to 43 months in prison.
But Smith said she has made it known to Anne Kirkpatrick, the recently appointed Spokane police chief, that racial profiling is still a problem. And Lodge agreed.
“The guys down here don’t get to meet the people of color who work and contribute to the community,” Lodge said. “It’s the same for us. We don’t get to meet cops unless it is in a negative context.”
Smith sees the appointment of Kirkpatrick as a chance to move forward on minority-police relations. She said a Seattle-area NAACP official gave the Federal Way chief the thumbs-up.
Cabildo, Lodge and Smith said Spokane should be a place where future generations can find jobs in their chosen professions, and where skin color will have no importance.
“One day we won’t be a white Spokane or black Spokane,” Smith said. “That’s what I am hoping, that we will be neither minority, nor majority, just Americans.”