From: Michael Foster
To: Commission-Public-Records
Subject: [EXTERNAL] of course, port expansion is racist
Date: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 3:15:21 PM
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Pursue Equity and Environment at the Port or lip service
The Port recognizes the struggles of Black people in our community to break free of policing
that descends in a straight line from the slave trade. Living in this country altered how
our people perceive the world. We've grown up with it. We are all racist. Anti-racists are those
acting to set people free from the curse, often starting at home.
Today our behaviors define us in a given moment as racist or anti-racist.
Every port faces this truth: In 2020, Ports are racist descendants of colonial slave trade. The
people we displace, we exploit, and we pollute/injure are predominantly BIPOC. The spoils
and revenues go to Whites. It's how we built our country and our ports. For all the many
efforts to level the playing field, we never did. Black and brown-skinned people earning a
living wage, laboring all week in company towns like SEATAC, give up their lives with every
breath.
Who flies? Who cruises?
Who buys the tickets to visit family and vacation?
Whose frequent flyer bucket list gets longer the more places they fly and cruise to pollute?
Who lives in the deadly company towns near our shiny, optional, tourist-stoked pollution?
1 out of 3 African Americans have never been on a plane. They do not benefit from the
skyrocketing growth in travel this decade. They choke on it. "I can't breathe" with every
inhaler. The COVID-19 "injury" "lasting damage" "killing" of the "crippled" travel industry,
so "brutal" only proves the point. Those are all things you do to people, with impunity to
people whose lives matter less than ours, while the industry is not alive. Our magnificent
ability to study, understand, perceive business or jobs as alive and yet not see the invisible yet
essential BIPOC workers and neighbors who are very real, very much alive, very hurt by our
travel, and make our industries possible, is exactly what is killing us all.
Take a look at the physical conditions our Port gives residents.
Particulate pollution from air and cruise travel makes people more vulnerable to COVID-19,
hospitalization, respiratory illness and death. As Black and Brown lives are hunted and
run from racist police, they breathe air that kills them younger and injures them more.
Boeing sees brown people as the next opportunity, to exploit a new market, and looks globally
at one billion brown people with rising incomes for their growth. Boeing cripples their "new
market" (which is living breathing people who don't fly) with every new aircraft.
Whose lives are cut short by particulate pollution from wealthy (white) travel?
When you have chances to vote against expansion and create ways to regulate and reduce
emissions, you must vote for black and brown lives every single time. Anything else is an act
of aggression against their lives.
Did you often confuse good jobs at the port, with healthy lives or life expectancy near the
port? For port employees living 10 miles away in cleaner neighborhoods, our excessive travel
poisons them at work each day, mostly in jobs that don't have to exist. What kind of
community can thrive in poisoned air?
Authorize funding to convene an independent Peoples' Assembly to envision and
recommend the transformation by 2030 for the "company towns" of SeaTac and the lands
along the Duwamish into 21st century liveable communities, where health and Port facilities
serve as the backbone for real local sustainable models for transformation beyond tourism and
shipping with fuels. (There is no bridge fuel.)
Commission independent studies to verify pollution and impacts of the Port of Seattle. Act
on the results to champion de-growth. That is not heroic. That is being an "Anti-racist" to the
people who die and suffer under your watch. That is also the only responsible thing to do for
your own families, your own lives, since climate gasses crossed into emergency levels 30
years ago. Air travel pollution shot up 300% since 1990. But the IATA makes sure to tell the
world that emissions are "going down" per passenger, and how much more airlines plan to
reduce emissions... while quadrupling flights.
Skip those two steps, save more lives. Cut to the chase: quickly shutter and abandon the Port
to save lives. Sounds extreme? But look what happened to air traffic when flying was
suddenly endangering lives. 95% drop in travel? Even with all those ghost planes in the skies,
a 70% drop in fuel consumption? We never need to go back to 2019 levels. It is deadly now
and murders BIPOC forever into the future as surely as a knee on George Floyd's neck. Find
every way to stop flights and cruises to keep people living, not millions like with COVID-19,
but billions.
That's equity. That's environmental justice. There's no other way forward.
Like many colonial holdovers, flying and cruising are so racist. And they are on a timeline like
COVID-19 that doesn't care about our economy. It will crash if we don't deal with
climate pollution. You know. You have no time to waste. Please protect life, people, not stuff,
money, jobs. Jobs and stuff are fungible. Lives of the people who depend on you, not so much.
2020, the year of COVID-19, Australian bushfires, unprecedented Arctic heatwaves, ICAO
greenhouse gas baseline (postponed), and the Movement for Black Lives to end racist violent
policing, How else does a Port truly pursue Equity?
Michael Foster
(206) 999-3477
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade one never expects to sit. --Nelson
Henderson
