On a cold February night, Mary Jane Pepper Lawson was walking outside an apartment building on Union Street on Seattle’s First Hill. According to charging documents from the King County Prosecutor’s office, Lawson heard a man hurling the N-word at her. Lawson described him leaping over a railing and running toward her. Before she could react, she told first responders, the man hit her, knocking her to the ground. While she was down, she said, he continued to punch and kick her before retreating into his apartment. Lawson reported the incident to law enforcement, and responding officers documented visible injuries consistent with an assault.
The assailant has since been charged with a hate crime in connection with this attack. Prosecutors, citing the severity of the assault and the threat he poses to public safety, have requested bail be set at $20,000.
The implications of this attack extend far beyond one man’s violent actions. It is a grim reminder that despite its liberal self-image, that violence is not an anomaly. It is the logical consequence of a system that continues to devalue Black and Indigenous lives in ways both explicit and insidious.
For years now, studies and reports from government agencies have acknowledged the proliferating threat posed by white supremacist extremists. Nationwide, from high-profile mass shootings like Charleston and Buffalo to everyday acts of harassment, the examples are numerous. Yet, this danger has not been met with the same urgency in political and media discourse as foreign terrorism or the war on drugs. The never-ending failure to meaningfully address this racialized violence has not only allowed it to spread but has also reinforced the very systems of oppression that sustain it.
In 2012, the Seattle Police Department was placed under federal monitoring after a Department of Justice investigation—sparked by the killing of First Nations woodcarver John T. Williams—revealed a pattern of excessive force and biased policing. Four years later, in 2016, Seattle was identified as one of the cities with the worst Black-white education achievement gap in the country. Meanwhile, since 2017, the Seattle metro area has consistently ranked as having the third-worst homelessness crisis in the nation, a crisis that disproportionately impacts Black, Indigenous, and other people of color.
And despite the myth we continue to tell ourselves about this city, the racism here is not merely systemic, but overt.
Just before the new year, Sonya, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, had been given the responsibility in her Seattle apartment complex of having cars towed for unauthorized parking. When a neighbor complained about a resident’s truck blocking a space, Sonya arranged for the vehicle to be towed. The truck’s owner was a repeat offender, so while Sonya anticipated some pushback, she didn’t expect what happened next.
The truck’s owner erupted in rage, directing his anger at both Sonya and the Black on-site manager. The next morning, she discovered one of her tires had been slashed, and a “Trump 2024: Take America Back” sticker had been placed on her car’s rear windshield. Now nearly 70 and living alone, the elderly music teacher is gripped by fear. “I’m talking because something needs to be done,” she said tearfully. Her fear, she said, is compounded by a deep sense of responsibility to create a safer world for her students.
Upon reporting the incident to the police, she made it clear that she believed she was targeted because of her race, and that the vandalism intended to intimidate her. The language on the sticker evokes a sense of unease for those who white nationalists consider “threats” to their vision of an America, rooted in racial dominance. Yet reporting the incident brought little relief. “I’m sleeping odd hours—I’m on edge,” Sonya said. She now feels an unfamiliar vulnerability in a city she’s called home her entire life.
Sonya’s story isn’t an isolated incident. Since 2012, the earliest year of reported bias and hate crime data on the SPD dashboard, anti-Black hate crimes have exceeded all other types of racially biased incidents. This comes even as Black residents make up a dwindling portion of the population. It’s likely the real numbers are even higher; Black communities have historically been less likely to trust the police, let alone call them for help.
Seattle’s police department—tasked with addressing these crimes—is itself mired in a well-documented history of racial bias. A 2021 report found Black people in Seattle are seven times more likely than white people to experience police use of force and five times more likely to be stopped and questioned. In contrast, during a similar period in neighboring Portland, Black people were 1.45 times more likely than white people to experience police use of force, according to 2019 data. For children and young adults, the disparities are even greater. Black youth make up 7% of the city’s population but account for the majority of cases involving police use of force against minors.
While the bigotry we’re witnessing has by no means started with Trump, he has become a symbol of strength for the white nationalist movement, with incidents of overt racism often co-occurring with his rise to prominence. His inauguration featuring Elon Musk twice doing a Nazi salute—a gesture celebrated by far-right extremists and yet to be directly denied by Musk—serves to fan the flames of this alarming trend.
It’s impossible to pinpoint a single moment that triggered this most recent wave of undisguised intolerance. The United States is, after all, a white supremacist nation, built on genocide and chattel slavery. Racism has always been woven into its fabric. However, if we are to examine the roots of this current wave, Barack Obama’s presidency immediately comes to mind. While conservatives farcically blame Obama for creating racial tension, his presidency, coupled with mass demonstrations in defense of Black lives, did create a palpable backlash. Between the beginning and end of his first term, the number of hate groups in the US rose by 755%, and Black Americans were the primary targets of racial hatred. Trump’s presidency, far from being the start, has served to amplify attitudes reflecting clear reversal of social progress, and normalized expressions of desires to “Take America Back.”
Sonya’s story is not just about one act of violence; it is about a nation that has long chosen to look away. Despite the lack of resolution in her case, she knows what has sustained her—the community that has helped her cope with the fear and anxiety that have followed the incident. Because history tells us that no progress is made without collective will. It is in how we protect the most vulnerable among us, how we refuse to accept bigotry as the cost of doing nothing, how we hold ourselves accountable—not just in moments of crisis, but in the quiet, everyday choices that shape the world we live in.
Seattle and Washington state may have resisted Trump’s rightward pull, but resistance is not absolution. We are in no way separate from the forces that deepen inequality—we see them in the way we police, in the way we criminalize poverty, in the way we allow white nationalist rhetoric to fester unchecked. The question is not whether hate exists here, but whether we will continue to tolerate it.
Marcus Harrison Green contributed reporting to this article.
Gennette Cordova is a writer, organizer, and social impact manager. She contributes to publications like Teen Vogue and Revolt TV and runs an organization, Lorraine House, which seeks to build and uplift radical communities through art and activism.
