We all must embrace the ideals behind Gov. Inslee’s executive orders on racial equity

Our state has flipflopped repeatedly on affirmative action.

In 1998, it was banned by 58 percent of voters when they passed Initiative 200, sponsored by the now-disgraced initiative entrepreneur Tim Eyman. In 2018, the legislature reinstated it in response to a pro-affirmative action initiative. In 2019, voters repealed that decision by just 25,000 votes.

This month, Gov. Jay Inslee didn’t quite reinstate it, but in two executive orders, he recommitted Washington to eliminating racial disparities in contracting, state employment and education. The executive orders were partly in response to a new and more relaxed interpretation of Initiative 200 by current Attorney General Bob Ferguson.

They leave in place a ban on decisions in hiring, contracting and education based solely on race, gender or other protected status.

But in 2020, the Governor and the Legislature committed Washington to becoming “an anti-racist state,” which is a far bigger and more ambitious goal than any affirmative action program. The executive orders are just one step toward achieving it.

The executive orders are just one of many welcome signs that state government is shifting significantly toward racial justice — a shift that has accelerated in the last couple of years. The Legislature itself has become much more diverse, and Democratic majorities and a Democratic governor have responded to their ever-more-diverse constituents and their allies.

In 2020, the murder of George Floyd supercharged an already growing wave of civic energy to redress racial inequity that was left unchanged by the civil rights movement of the 1960s, or lost in the backlash to that era’s progress.

This new wave of civil rights activism has fostered a deeper dive into American history, especially the history of systemic discrimination in the century and a half following the Emancipation Proclamation. This has led to a new understanding of the legacy of a racial caste system that denied homeownership, higher education, employment and health care equity to far too many Black and brown people.

In the 1960s, racism was viewed as a problem Black and brown people had; the more recent civil rights movement has made it clear that racism is a problem white people have. The uncomfortable but accurate term “white privilege” entered our lexicon. And the ultimate white privilege, it seems, has been ignorance — ignorance of what Black and brown people experience, and until very recently, ignorance about much of the history of our own country.

Reflecting on all that has led to the dawn of another new understanding: What we have now is a system that has upheld affirmative action for white people for the whole of our nation’s history. Becoming an anti-racist state expresses the intention to end it.

That is a tall order. And it’s not as if no one has been trying. People have been toiling in this vineyard for decades. But the governor’s new executive orders are just one of many signs that equity in state government is finally being given a high priority, an infusion of time and resources, and a focus on outcomes rather than compliance with requirements.

A new statewide Equity Office is drawing up a strategic five-year plan to share anti-racist resources and coordinate efforts across every agency and in every nook and corner of state government. Among the Equity Office’s charges are to “support state agencies in our commitment to be an anti-racist government system,” to “serve as a tool to root out racism and other forms of discrimination in state government,” and to “publish and report the effectiveness of agency programs on reducing disparities using input from the communities served by those programs.”

We look forward to reading those reports.

Karen Johnson, who directs the Office of Equity, says the goal is “to make equity and justice for all part of the DNA of state government.”

For that to succeed, it will need to become part of the DNA of state voters too.

This story was originally published January 23, 2022 at 5:00 AM.