Racism and Ableism in the New Washington State Permanent Supportive Housing Advisory Committee, Part 1

Hi, I’m Galena White. I don’t always write essays in the first person (using words like ‘I’ and ‘me’), but I’m involved in the events I’m about to describe, so I hope that the context of my experience helps the reader understand what happened. The thoughts opined here do not represent those of Northwest Hospitality as an organization.

I grew up in an emotionally/physically abusive household, was moved to foster care where abuse continued, then ended up homeless at 17. At 22 I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and moved into a supportive housing studio apartment building, where there was always a person in the office downstairs to help residents. Then, because I wanted to attend school at South Seattle Community College, I was able to obtain a Housing Choice Voucher and move to West Seattle into an apartment owned by a private landlord. I was excited by Barack Obama’s call to volunteerism in 2008, so when I noticed the need, I started a grocery cooperative in our local food desert with the help of friends and neighbors. I learned a lot about nonprofits and social justice.

During this personal era, I keyed a letter of support for permanent supportive housing as an op-ed in the West Seattle Blog, in defense of the new Downtown Emergency Services Center (DESC) building for unhoused people who require supportive housing, which was going to be built in my neighborhood in West Seattle. I wrote from my viewpoint as someone for whom supportive housing was pivotal in being removed from homelessness. Current Washington State House Representative Nicole Macri was at that time not a Representative and was employed at the DESC, working on the team which was actualizing that building. She later thanked me for standing up for supportive housing.

You know that scene in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, when the star queens tell John Leguizamo’s character that he/she is not a drag queen, he is just a boy in a dress, until he/she can complete the steps to becoming a Queen? That’s how my politics were when I was around 28. I was dressed up in similar clothes to someone who cared about social issues, but like many of such ilk, I was unaware of how ignorant, lazy activism can hurt the ones it’s supposed to help. If someone were to ask me at that time if I was antiracist, I would have paused for a second - not knowing the word - and then said that, yes, I was! But I was clumsy and unaware enough that when I asked a colleague of mine who was racialized as ‘Black’ for ideas of where to volunteer in the community, she asked me to attend a free workshop on antiracism, telling me that I would be creating value by doing so. She was targeting-laser accurate on that! What I learned in that beginner’s group started my very long journey in antiracism. Once I realized that racism was still a problem, I was 100% on board to destroy it. I always thank her in my heart for helping me learn that.

Later, I was less involved in community work for a while in order to start a family. It was a relief, because I always had a hard time being in leadership. People tend to feel in their gut that I am untrustworthy or that I dislike them in some way. I sometimes speak too loudly, my body language is ‘off,’ I have a hard time looking people in the eye, I fidget a lot, I stutter, I often say the wrong thing and appear to be trying to insult people when that is not my intention, and I sometimes lose the ability to speak at all. I had heard of some symptoms of autism, but I always assumed that any similarities to my own life were incidental because it seemed that my situation wasn’t as disabling as that of “most people with autism.” However, that was simply an incorrect stereotype which I believed because of ignorance; and when a friend told me about discovering her autism, I decided to get tested myself. It turned out that I have Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1, the ‘lowest’ level.

This explained a lot of my life so far. A common experience for autistic people is for it to be extremely difficult to make and keep friends, and to be very much disliked by most people because of misunderstandings caused by body language, confusing communication, trouble practicing social niceties, and many other autistic discrepancies with so-called ‘normal’ behavior. Now I can understand that people weren’t treating me poorly because I deserved it, but because I didn’t behave in the way that their subconscious told them was “just right.” It wasn’t my fault that people disliked me! The relief of that weight leaving my psyche is greater every day. In light of all this, in the last year-and-a-half  since my diagnosis, I have been studying disability rights and how social situations are often to my disadvantage - and how this can be ameliorated, especially in organizations of which I’m a part.

When the pandemic started, the mountains of suffering in the world drove me to social action again. I attended BLM rallies and tried to start an organization to match people who were made homeless by losing their jobs to COVID, to people who could temporarily host and house them for free (it didn’t work out). I focused on educating myself about housing issues, while taking advantage of the new political energy toward antiracism and attending as many free antiracism Zoom seminars as I could.

Before I go on, I want to explain that some things I’ll talk about regarding racism and ableism will be hard to engage with if you haven’t been learning from the minds at the leading edges of social justice. Autistic people have mental habits called ‘special interests.’ Those are basically hobbies or research obsessions that an autistic person is dedicated to such a degree that it has a noticeable effect on the rest of their life. Obsession with trains is a common example; an autistic person may be so captivated with writing down the time and headcode (the number of the train on front of the engine) of a passing train that they may forget that they are sitting in their vehicle at the crossing long past the time when the crossing arms raised. One of my special interests has been ‘intersectional antiracism’ for the last 14 years.

A lot of the viewpoints I have researched from scholars who study racism, and leaders in antiracist political activism, won’t become zeitgeist-accepted dogma for a decade, if ever. Making public statements about racism based on those (sometimes polar-opposite) ideas can be very risky. Someone claiming to be an antiracist can be “canceled” if they appear to support any tiny part of a right-wing idea. The point of this paragraph is to inform the average reader that one *might* only halfway understand many of the following claims, or may consider them absurd; but those impressions are probably caused by ignorance. Some ideas have to marinate to be understood. Of course, my opinions are not necessarily the final form that social justice will take - I reserve the human right to be ignorant or otherwise wrong, and to apologize afterward and be forgiven! So I entreat: if you don’t understand something I say here, or if you have other related thoughts, please look them up or contact me so we can exchange ideas!

On 9/12/22 a friend at one of the organizations I’ve volunteered for sent me a link to apply to be a member of the brand-new Washington State Permanent Supportive Housing Advisory Committee, the legislation for which (HB1724) was sponsored by, among others, present Representative Nicole Macri. Unfortunately, the application was only in English and appeared to be available only in written format. This is a problem because any committee claiming to represent ALL the residents of Washington State should have an application to join that is accessible to people who don’t speak English and people who may be better at representing themselves in other ways than the written English word.

USA society has a problem with structural racism, insidiously present in every hierarchy. Let’s consider an organization as if it was a five-story building. Accessing the top floor would give one the ability to change the culture of the company. To even get in the door, one would have to speak English; so everyone who didn’t speak English would be prevented from applying. In a country which claims to welcome immigrants and which specifically has no national language in order to prevent discrimination, denying entry based on language is clearly discriminatory. From the bottom floor, to get to each higher floor, tests would be given in written English. The test-graders might have a hard time understanding the written answers of people for whom English is a second language (ESL). Studies have shown that in-person or video interviews allow ESL candidates a better chance to represent their abilities and personality. Body language and other compensatory advantages help to even the odds. That’s why limiting candidates to written English is racist.

With every application which also serves as an American English test in an organization, the following populations will be more likely to be sifted out and become more rare at every level:

• people who speak English as a second language
  people who speak African American Vernacular English

• people who were denied an education and do not write well

• autistic people who emphasize language with their hands

• blind people for whom reviewing text for submission is very difficult

• people who don’t speak English at all - the USA has no official language, and should not, because it would be contrary to the spirit in which we were formed: to welcome every person from any nation!

• Indigenous people who for reasons of moral objection refuse to use the language of the people who stole their land

• and many more

While Human Resources limited themselves to choosing only from society’s pool of English-speaking applicants for the first floor, on the second floor, internal promotions would have *two* restrictions: only English-speaking applicants and only people whose managers *believed* they were skilled at their work. The appearance of competence is often drastically underestimated when the worker is autistic, an ESL speaker, or is disabled - despite better performance. With each higher floor of our structurally-racist building, the chance of underrepresented populations being ignored increases. The drive for ‘competence’ becomes more strenuous with success in USA organizations, so that applicants for higher positions are required to conform to ever-tightening definitions of ‘professionalism,’ leaving those who have inconvenient disabilities or cultures behind, often dismissed because “they just don’t fit in.” What managers perceive as ‘not fitting in’ is often just the structural culture of the organization not making room for people with different abilities.

When I talk about white privilege, I’m not trying to say that people racialized as ‘white’ never have problems. Beside my white privilege, my sex is female and my gender is non-binary (for me, those are not mutually exclusive), I’m mentally disabled, bi, physically disabled, grew up poor, have been homeless as a child and adult, was abused as a child, have been sexually assaulted multiple times, am a victim of domestic violence, was not able to achieve higher education because disability accommodations were not provided to me, and I am currently poor, fat, and an elder. My two main privileges are my skill with English and the color of my skin. I gained my reading and writing comprehension because I was the child of people racialized as ‘white’ who were well-off enough to keep my grandpa at home so he could teach me to read and write all day when I was very young. Without those privileges, I would not have been selected, based only on my written English application, to become a member of the brand-new Washington State Permanent Supportive Housing Advisory Committee. Even with everything I have working against me, I easily climbed the grade because the application was made with the convenience of people like me in mind.

End of Part 1