The Stranger must believe Tanya Woo poses a serious threat to CM Morales. Look for more hit pieces like this as elections approach.

“They mail it to your house. All you have to do is circle it and put it in the mail.”

The Stranger has not always agreed with that sentiment. In fact, it has described that very process as so incredibly onerous, it calls into question the very validity of an election:

“When you get your hands on that ballot, rip open the envelope, fill out the "Recall No" bubble, slip it in the nearest drop box before December 7 at 8 pm, and then curse the Recall Sawant campaign for this goddamned tedious waste of time and energy.”

(https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2021/11/17/62897727/vote-no-on-the-kshama-sawant-recall)

I was too busy to read this, so she won't get my friends votes

Ha! Couldn't even bother to vote for Obama? Lame.

If this is TS's big gotcha for Woo they better start digging deeper. It didn't seem to matter much to them when Nikkita Oliver admitted to the same thing. I'll give credit to Woo for even speaking to SECB. She has to know there is zero chance she'll receive any type of favorable press from them so it shows a willingness on her part to at least engage with constituents who disagree with you unlike Morales who only listens to those in her idealogical bubble.

I guess Woo isn’t the “right” kind of BIPOC for Hannah / TS because as @5 points out, they have typically only made an issue of non voting when it came to the privileged (https://www.thestranger.com/news/2015/04/20/22079863/hey-howard-wright-wondering-if-you-voted-in-seattle-in-2013-you-didnt).

I too hope this points to the strong candidacy of Woo - here’s to hoping she gives Morales a challenge.

@9 the funny thing about that is Morales is literally a multi millionaire but I guess that’s ok too if your politics are aligned

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2019/10/29/41823797/from-zero-dollars-to-26-million-heres-the-net-worth-of-seattles-city-council-candidates

@9 Ha! $3,000,000 (+/-) in non-real estate assets is a "standard middle class portfolio?" Must be nice.

Can't say I've ever encountered any politicians worth voting for either.

@5 -- So you are saying that Oliver and Woo are both good candidates?

Holy shit, people, this is embarrassing. Voting is the absolute minimum thing you can do. Yes, I understand why you get busy, but even back when you had to vote in person, people did it. This is just narcissism, as people go from "I'm too busy to vote", to "I have all the right answers -- I should be the one in charge", without skipping a beat.

The reason The Stranger is writing about this is the Seattle Times Editorial Board just endorsed her! Never mind the candidate, the board has egg on their face. They have endorsed their share of right-wingers, but usually those people have some level of competence -- some minimum level of previous civic engagement. You know, like voting.

How did I know halfway through reading this article it was written by Hannah Krieg?

@14 No. Oliver was a toxic, ideological disaster and we did well to reject her twice. I’m merely pointing out TS really didn’t care about voting when it came to her. Ideally Woo would have been engaged civically and taken time to vote but nowadays in politics we are rarely given a candidate that checks all the boxes. While her not voting is certainly a mark against her when you compare it against Morales doing things like saying looting is morally justified and sponsoring the train wreck that was black brilliance project it seems trivial. Hopefully the voters in D2 see it the same way.

Given the amount of time The Stranger has spent pretending the 2021 general election didn’t happen, you’d think they would view not voting in it as a positive rather than hit piece fodder.

@14: ‘….people go from "I'm too busy to vote", to "I have all the right answers -- I should be the one in charge", without skipping a beat.’

As already noted, the Stranger had nothing but praise for Nikkita Oliver doing just that, and they effectively endorsed her twice, once for mayor (!) and once for council. So this hit piece doesn’t hit as hard as the Stranger or you might want. I won’t make excuses for not voting, but the voting record most under consideration will be that of CM Morales in Council, not anyone else’s private voting record.

“The reason The Stranger is writing about this is the Seattle Times Editorial Board just endorsed her!”

That may be the proximate reason, and/or may explain the timing of this hit piece, but Tanya Woo had already angered the Stranger. She led the C/ID’s opposition to the homeless megaplex, and the Stranger always, always, always supports the homeless encampments against everyone else. Worse yet, she was successful at stopping the construction of yet another sprawling homeless encampment in the C/ID area, and the Stranger holds utter disdain for the inhabitants of that part of town.

The Stranger supports minorities. Just not, you know those kinds of minorities.

@19 if we concede that The Stranger has been inconsistent or even hypocritical on this issue, would you agree that Woo's historical lack of engagement in local politics is a red flag against her candidacy?

@21: As I wrote @19, I will make no excuses for not voting. That said, voting is not the only way to engage with one’s local politics or community, and I think the voters of District 2 should consider Woo’s background in their local communities when deciding between candidates.

I believe a comparison of Woo’s previous engagement with communities in District 2 with Nikkita Oliver’s engagement with Seattle’s communities would demonstrate nicely why a lack of voting, in and of itself, can be excused in one case but not the other — and that the Stranger got those cases exactly backwards.

... so like the main issue is she went from disenfranchised to enfranchised? I think you just accidentally wrote a piece about oppressed voices trying to become unoppressed and then showed evidence about the headwinds they get from the community at large for standing up.

Worse, it's written a narrative that attempts to convince people they should join in the oppressing using white ignorance of racial harm nuance to take a moral high ground.

Like seriously.

The Stranger really should not validate this variant of systemic racism for ethnicities that do not fit squarly in the "black" or "white". If you don't get that, go spend some more time to understand the harm you are doing. "Minor Feelings" by Cathy Park Hong would be a nice start. Or just someone onto your editorial staff that already understands this stuff as sanity check cause if you can publish this w/o a check, you're missing representation.

Seriously. For a liberal paper, you gotta do better.

@23 I think you need to check the definition of "disenfranchised"

@27 apparently you don't know what the word means either

@25 I have checked it and I do know the meaning. Rather personally. I'm going to afford you the courtesy that you did not afford me and assume that you are read up on most of these topics.

My position is that the overgeneralization of "asian" is itself an endemic problem of the current progressive movement. While we have successfully attempted to "enfranchise" some groups, it has oddly become "okay" to disenfranchise or oppress others because the historical harm is less understood by the general social consciousness. For the "Asian" experience of this, in the social justice movement, statements like yours has the same feeling as "all look same" and believes the unconscious bias of the Model Minority stereotype. The fact that no one on this comment thread is jumping on you or Hannah Krieg for being racist is the method by which the Model Minority damages. It takes Allies and allows them to become the oppressors while shrouding them in the armor of social justice terms.

With that background, if I look at Tanya Woo as someone who comes from a family with roots in the railroard workers that were shoved into economic instability partially by the opiates epidemic engineered-and-pushed-via-military-force by the british, that were then hoodwinked to come to america for building a railroad where each mile laid cost multiple chinese lives, whose family then wasn't allowed to own land or bring females over due to explicitly racist policies, and then whose generational wealth was geographically concentrated on an area (cause city policy disallowed other options) that has through the decades been degraded by explicit city policy for the "greater good" (I-5 cut, Kingdome, etc) where the government and community tends to respect to advocacy with "but you're all doing fine...look at this [someone with similar skin tone and possible nationality but no actual connection to cultural history becuase societally all asians are treated the same]... Then yeah, I can call that person oppressed and disenfranchised. And then if I look at this piece, what I see is ignorance followed with selective enforcement of standards (see other comments about Nikkita Oliver) and shaming for someone starting to get engaged. Like huh? This doesn't even makes sense.

So I reassert my point: Please educate yourself about Model Minority issues.

To Hannah Krieg and the Stranger Editorial board. You're being systemically oppressive because you've fallen into the Model Minority myth. This is a common mistake people make. But being one the two largest influencing papers on Seattle, I think you have a duty to do better. Help advance the social justice movement another step forward by understanding this nuance and educating the rest of us. You've done this for other causes. We, the city, need you to help on this topic as well.

@30... erp... I was responding to thirteen12 not you. I appreciated your comment and history summary! Please don't apologize!

@29 "disenfranchised" means denied the right to vote, which is a related but distinct issue from the broad systemic racism she and/or her ancestors faced as a minority group in a racist country. Woo wasn't denied the right to vote she just chose not to, so to answer the question in your original reply, no, the main issue is not that "she went from disenfranchised to enfranchised."

@32: Nikkita Oliver, 2017:

“…our communities who have already faced many systemic barriers to voting.”

(https://www.thestranger.com/politics/2017/08/29/25376532/in-defense-of-endorsements)

The Stranger seemed to accept this as an explanation for Oliver’s non-voting record. So, perhaps the headline of this post needs to recognize this wasn’t Woo’s fault until at least 2017? ;-)

@32: Thanks for the clarification. I can see why you were disagreeing with my statement. If we want to get pedantic about it, even though you are right that the primary meaning is denying the right to vote all of Merriam-Webster, Cambridge Dictionary, and Dictionary.com have an expanded meaning with only Oxford English Dictionary keeping the definition exclusively to what you are saying. M-W's first definition talks about being denied privilege with voting being second and Cambridge Dictionary even specifically has this entry + example:

(2) having no power to make people listen to your opinion or to affect the society you live in:
Example:
"The most common shared characteristics among Florida's 175,000 disenfranchised voters were income and education."

But that's getting way too far into the weeds.

Is the content of my post -- that the stranger here has, perhaps unwittingly, reenforced systemic oppression against a group that it doesn't understand -- largely agreeable? Like if were to swap out the word to say "disempowered" instead would it be okay?

Cause that's the point I want to really drive home. It somehow has become okay to be progressive yet systemically anti-asian and we need to do better.

@34 changing the wording doesn't address the ultimate issue with your argument, which is that you've drawn no causal connection between this country's long history of anti-Asian discrimination and wealthy landowner Tanya Woo's choice not to vote and then to misrepresent her voting record. Your accusation that The Stranger, by reporting on said failures, is "validating systemic racism" and encouraging people to "join in the oppressing" is similarly unsupported. It really seems like your invocation of this country's disgusting racial history is merely a cynical attempt to deflect criticism from a politician you support, which I find insulting to the numerous legitimate victims of systemic racial oppression. In my opinion it's not The Stranger but rather you who's "gotta do better."

35 happy to disagree then. Again, I will do the courtesy for you that you didn't for me and avoid the personal attack.

The trail of comments above comparing vs Nikkita Oliver shows the double standard here already. Folks can judge themselves if my arguments make sense about the need to flatten asians who are ascendent as "white", defend (factually correct) attacks on asians when excusing similar situations for others to create a double standard, and then use the economic ascendance to ignore other dimensions of racism -- especially systemic ones across the communities they might be part of or representing.

The stranger board really does need to do better. I think, on asian descrimination, it's where our city was years ago before works like White Fragility came out. I want it to be on the leading edge. I say this having been reading thes tranger since the 90s. It's currently behind.