Olympia kicks off Town Hall series on racial justice this week
Weeks after impassioned protests against racism and police brutality broke out on Olympia streets, city officials have organized a series of online conversations that they hope will help create lasting change.
The first of four city-sponsored virtual town halls on racial justice is set for 4 p.m. Thursday. Subsequent panels are scheduled for each of the three following Thursday afternoons.
Each town hall will center on how racial justice applies to one of four topics: the justice system, economic opportunity, the healthcare system, and the education system.
Kellie Purce Braseth, strategic communications director for the city of Olympia, has led the effort to organize the public conversations to give Black voices with relevant personal and professional experiences a platform on which to speak to and hear from the community at large.
Each town hall will feature a discussion moderated by Purce Braseth, followed by a question-and-answer period using submissions from the public. Members of the Olympia City Council and city staff are expected to attend and participate in the dialogue.
“There has been a lot of energy around the Black Lives Matter movement in Olympia,” Purce Braseth said. “There was a lot of heat and a lot of well-intentioned energy, and the city needed to find its voice and place in this conversation. Something I saw myself was a lot of noise and heat, but not a lot of Black voices cutting through the noise to be heard. So that’s what this is going to be — a beginning to a conversation.”
All of the panelists slated to participate in the town halls are African-American, as is Purce Braseth. Most of the speakers have long been involved in the fight for racial justice and equity in and around Olympia.
A common theme Purce Braseth heard when reaching out to prospective panelists was that the protest movement borne out of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has brought issues such as racial inequity and police brutality front and center for white members of society. The past two months have been the first time many white people have paid close attention to what has tilted the scales against their Black counterparts.
Thursday’s opener features four people with a wealth of experience at the intersection of racial justice and the justice system: Donta Harper, senior administrator for the Southwest Region of the Washington State Department of Corrections; Thelma Jackson, co-founder of the Black Alliance of Thurston County; Larry Jefferson, supervisor of the felony unit for Thurston County Public Defense; and David B. Owens, lead attorney and staff member for The Exoneration Project based out of the University of Chicago Law School.
Jackson, who has served on boards for local organizations ranging from the Olympia YWCA to the Washington Alliance of Black School Educators, will also be on the panel on racial justice and the education system. She chose to participate in hopes that the town halls can stimulate new conversations while furthering the ones borne out of the demonstrations taking place in downtown Olympia.
Asked what she thought might give the current protest movement more staying power than other flashpoints of recent years, Jackson pointed to another ongoing crisis.
“It’s interesting how the COVID pandemic played into this with everyone at home, watching TV and witnessing some of the things on video. I’ve had a number of people comment to me that they had no idea about some of the injustices we face, so if it had not been for the pandemic, I’m not sure how much more consciousness would have been raised,” she said.
The impact of COVID-19 figures to be a common thread throughout the series. Rampant economic distress coupled with a virus that has killed more than 140,000 U.S. citizens so far this year has exposed wide swaths of the population to inequities they might have understood to exist, but never experienced within their own circles.
Jackson singled out the struggles low-income families and people of color go through to seek health care, child care and stable employment as examples of structural injustices broadcast to a wider audience via the pandemic.
“It exposed the soft underbelly of American society,” Jackson said. “All of that has been there the whole time, but all of a sudden, it became apparent to people for the first time. It exposed the gross inequities that have been interwoven into our society and become the norm. People just didn’t know, but now they do, so what are they going to do with that knowledge? What kind of changes are they willing to be part of?
“Prejudicial treatment has become part of the entire system. There’s no one thing, but a lot of individual things that contribute to the system of criminal justice in our county and must change. Where people are considered less than and aren’t able to use their constitutional rights the way others do has to change.”
Town Hall schedule
All events are scheduled to begin at 4 p.m. Visit www.olympiawa.gov for more details.
- Thursday, July 23 -- Racial Justice and the Justice System
- Thursday, July 30 -- Racial Justice and Economic Opportunity
- Thursday, Aug. 6 -- Racial Justice and the Healthcare System
- Thursday, Aug. 13 -- Racial Justice and the Education System