Demeaning the homeless of Seattle: Our new Jim Crow

Madina Jafari pushes a stroller with her two young sons in it down Bell Street from the Mary's Place day center to the shelter where they have been living for the past few months. Madina and her husband Ebrahim met and married at a refugee camp in Kenya, before moving to Seattle, by way of Buffalo, New York. Madina was nine months pregnant when they arrived and gave birth to her son while living in the Mary's Place shelter. After spending three days in the hospital, they were back out on the street, newborn in tow, where they spent their days between the hours of 8 am and 4:30 pm when the shelter is closed to residents. less Madina Jafari pushes a stroller with her two young sons in it down Bell Street from the Mary's Place day center to the shelter where they have been living for the past few months. Madina and her husband ... more Photo: GENNA MARTIN, GENNA MARTIN, SEATTLEPI.COM Photo: GENNA MARTIN, GENNA MARTIN, SEATTLEPI.COM Image 1 of / 18 Caption Close Demeaning the homeless of Seattle: Our new Jim Crow 1 / 18 Back to Gallery

Pictures and videos of Seattle's squalid homeless encampments, regularly posted by my Facebook "friends," reawaken memories of an ugly time that I foolishly thought was in the dustbin of American history.

It was the Jim Crow era when a population of poor Americans, in this case African-Americans, were set up as targets to be shot at -- often literally -- by those just above them on the income scale.

Instead of looking up, at those who who made and kept the South backwards, low-income whites were encouraged to dump on those lower down, the "shiftless" folk who lived in shacks at the ends of town.

The encouraging was done by aristocratic rulers of the region, multimillionaire Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia talking about "massive resistance" to school desegregation, Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia vowing (privately) to resist "mongrelization" of the races.

How does that stack up with what's happening across the country 60-odd years later?

The anti-homeless rants, the pictures on Safe Seattle's Facebook page, display "a very ugly, very real side of Seattle" in the words of writer Paul Constant.

The latest dose of daily demeaning, courtesy of radio host Kirby Wilbur and Safe Seattle, shows a woman in crisis with the caption: "Clearly messed up on drugs, she was pacing and gesturing for about 10 minutes, but she was totally silent the whole time, and that made it even creepier."

Calls come from self-identified "decent people" that the homeless be "removed," with the KOMO "Seattle Is Dying" program suggesting that the drug addicted be shipped to an internment camp at the old McNeil Island prison.

The anger is being channeled down and away from the top.

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I watch and read a lot of right-wing media: I hear not a peep of anger directed at the Fortune 500 drug makers and distributors who set off the current drug crisis by aggressively marketing highly addictive opioid pain killers. Corporate drug pushers get a bye.

Fear is fueled by false rumors. In amplifying crime, Safe Seattle recently fixed on an alleged "drug related" beheading behind a Beacon Hill homeless camp. The social media post was shared by District 2 City Council candidate Ari Hoffman.

Only later did Seattle Police disclose that a body had been found several blocks away, but that the death was not a homicide.

Once fueled, fear and resentment can be directed at manipulators' targets of choice.

The discovery and filming by KOMO of a trashy encampment beside the Green River in Tukwila prompted radio pundit John Carlson to blame the greens: "So why aren't environmental groups like the Sierra Club and other activists demanding an end to these illegal trespassing homeless camps?"

Homeless camps are found in America from Bar Harbor to Grays Harbor, yet Fox News is fixated on West Coast cities. Republican legislators in Olympia, with camps and "pill mills" in their own backyards, sought to exploit the image of Seattle created in the KOMO program.

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"Lock 'em up!" is a convenient cry against those upon whom you look down, and the demons who allegedly defend them.

Words of Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best, at last week's City Club forum, come to mind: "We are not going to arrest our way out of homelessness. We don't want to conflate the issue of crime and homelessness. They are not the same thing."

Looking down on people, even those living below freeways, is something we later regret.

Seattle cheered the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. Four decades later, a Seattle congressman, Mike Lowry, championed apology and compensation.

Our biggest banks were redlining when Rev. Samuel B. McKinney arrived to take the pulpit at Mt. Zion Baptist Church. As late as the mid-1970s, The Central Seattle Community Council Federation was penalized by the United Way for making a protest. Dr. McKinney later helped found a bank.

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We saw a hater-packed meeting on homelessness in Ballard last May. A homeless woman tried to speak and was shouted down. People shouted obscenities at Seattle City Council member Mike O'Brien. As related by journalist Erica C. Barnett, one man said of the mentally ill and addicted: "Let's have a highly publicized event where we round up some of them."

Empty drums bang loudly, but we are better than that.

My prediction: Those fanning resentment at the homeless will have their heads handed to them in this fall's City Council election, in Seattle and elsewhere. Seattle has drawn candidates that speak of a better Council to come.

A saying used against the South's dead-enders comes to mind: Any damned fool can burn down a barn, but it takes talent to build one.