South King County: A melting pot of cultures

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Hanging on the walls of a SeaTac house are reminders of home - images of mosques and verses from the Koran weaved into designs of ornamental rugs.

Somali immigrant Khadija Jama lives there with five of her children, ages 5 to 16, and husband Mohamed Dirie. Like other Somali parents, she tutors her children about respect - for Allah and their neighbors.

"In our country," Jama says through an interpreter, "we teach our children to not disturb our neighbors. We want our neighbors to be happy. Happy neighbors do not become enemies."

Like many other immigrants, Jama lives in South King County because it offers the region's most affordable housing. Most of her neighbors look, dress and eat differently from her. That's fine with her as long as everyone gets along.

In South King County, everyone means everyone these days.

According to the 2000 census, South King County underwent a more dramatic shift in racial makeup than any other part of the Puget Sound region in the past 10 years. The population of blacks, Asians and Hispanics increased 2-1/2 times. Each of four South King County cities - Tukwila, SeaTac, Renton and Federal Way - now has a higher percentage of non-whites than Seattle.

But despite their growing numbers, minorities remain relatively invisible in the public life of South King County. Social and cultural outlets still are centered in the more established minority communities of Seattle and Tacoma. Blacks, Asians and Hispanics have a negligible presence in local politics, on police forces and, to a lesser extent, in schools:

• Thirty-four of the 38 mayors and city-council members representing Federal Way, Kent, Renton, SeaTac and Tukwila are white. SeaTac, whose population is 43 percent minority, has had only one nonwhite council member since it became a city 10 years ago.

• All 28 top police officials in the five cities are white. Kent has a minority population of 32 percent, but only 10 members of its 127-member police force are nonwhite.

• Only two of the 24 state lawmakers who represent South King County are nonwhite. Both live in South Seattle.

• The Highline School District's student population is 47 percent nonwhite, yet only 70 of its 882 teachers are minorities. One-third of Federal Way's students are nonwhite, but fewer than 10 percent of the district's principals and teachers are minorities.

"The walls have been up for a long time, and we have to keep chipping away until they come down," says the Rev. Wilbur Vincent, senior pastor of Center of Faith, a Pentecostal church on Kent's East Hill with 350 to 400 active parishioners, almost all of whom are black.

"In the next five years, we must have people in visible positions sitting on boards and councils."

Kaleidoscope

Kent plans to celebrate its diversity next month with its first-ever cultural festival, "Kaleidoscope." Bagpipers, a Ukrainian brass band and a Polynesian dance troupe will perform. Classes will be taught in Irish dance and piñata-making. Children's art from Kent's sister cities will be displayed.

Kaleidoscope is an idea of the city's diversity advisory board. But former board member Lawrence Lombard, who is black, says that's about the extent of attention the city pays to its minorities.

"The city council doesn't pay attention to us because we don't have any power," he says.

Neither SeaTac Mayor Shirley Thompson nor longtime Councilman Joe Brennan can identify a city leader who is an advocate for blacks, Asians or Hispanics.

"We don't have one," Brennan says. "If you come to a council meeting, you won't see any minorities in the audience. I'll give you odds on it."

Longtime Kent Mayor Jim White is stumped by a similar question. He identifies Vincent as the city's most visible black leader - though he has to look up his name to remember it. Vincent says he supports White's re-election but the two rarely interact.

"It comes to a point where we have to do what is necessary to shake city leaders into the awareness that we are here and we have something to contribute," Vincent says.

When White is asked to identify a Kent Asian leader, he names a Korean-American businessman in town - who also is the mayor of Federal Way, Mike Park.

First generation

Park, who emigrated to the United States about 25 years ago, has seen Federal Way's Korean community go from bud to blossom. Yet the community tends to keep to itself. He suspects that will change as the children of the first-generation immigrants integrate.

"I am unique in that I am a first-generation Asian immigrant who has become involved in the city," he says. "I had no formal education in this country. My English still isn't perfect. When I talk to Asian-American youngsters, I tell them they don't have the barriers like I had so there is nothing stopping them from doing better than me."

Phyllis Byres, who sits on the Highline School Board, says some minority leaders are beginning to emerge on education issues, particularly advocates for immigrants.

"There are natural leaders within those groups," says Byres, who is white. "But I don't think many of them are aware of the avenues to get involved."

Byres says Puget Sound minority-advocacy groups are too focused on Seattle and too slow to acknowledge the changes in South King County.

"They have been kind of tunnel-visioned up there," she says. "We need as much as we can get down here. A lot of the communities in South King County are frightened by the changes and are concerned about what's happening. But as far as I'm concerned, it's enriching for us to be exposed to all of these different cultures."

In Kent, 91 percent of City Hall employees, including 70 of the 73 top administrators, are white.

White, the Kent mayor, says he wants the work force to reflect the city's diversity, but "for us, the challenge has been how to recruit minorities." He says the city's diversity advisory board is one way to encourage minorities to get more involved.

Vincent partially blames the apathy of minorities. But Lombard also blames the social detachment of blacks in Kent.

"Kent is a place to lay our hats, a place to park our cars and sleep," he says. "The women go to Seattle or Tacoma to get their hair done. There is basically one black church here and no black businesses."

Jumble of cultures

South King County's minority population is a jumble of races, ethnicity and cultures.

Blacks, for example, are a mix of African immigrants from Somalia and Ethiopia and families who have migrated from Seattle, Tacoma or other U.S. cities. Although the census groups them together under the same racial category of "black," they have little in common culturally.

Even their places of worship separate them. Most recent immigrants are Muslim, while most of the blacks whose families have been in the United States for generations are Christian.

"The people living here a long time are Americanized," says Jama, the Somali immigrant. "They are different from us."

The rising immigrant population in South King County is most evident within the schools. The Kent School District leads the state in the number of languages spoken by its students: 76. Even the little Tukwila School District reports 36 foreign languages spoken among its 2,500 students.

About 2,600 Kent students, accounting for 10 percent of the district, are enrolled in classes for students with limited English skills, and the numbers are on the rise, says Nadine Lana, the district's special assistant for English as a Second Language (ESL). At Kent's Pine Tree Elementary, 20 percent of students are not proficient in English. Seventeen primary languages other than English are spoken there.

Pine Tree's ESL students have drawn their self-portraits complete with mini-bios declaring where they were born. They hang in the hall near a display case filled with figurines, ceramics and other mementos from Ukraine that a few children brought from home.

Recently released census figures, which cover only race and not ethnicity, fail to reveal that many whites in South King County also are recent immigrants. In the Kent district, Ukrainian is the primary language for about 570 children and Russian for 250. At Pine Tree, 25 students consider Ukrainian their primary language.

Livonia Scenic started teaching at Pine Tree 28 years ago, long before Kent had an ESL program. She says the mixture of cultures and languages in her first-grade classroom is a gift but also a challenge.

"My job is more difficult now," she says. "You can't get through lessons as quickly. If I ask students to take out their journals and turn to a certain page, there may be one child who does not know what I am saying. So I have to demonstrate. It's all show-and-tell."

Teachers often rely on classmates to interpret for students from the same country who have just arrived in the United States. Lana says when Kent began teaching students from Sudan a couple years ago, the district could not find any local interpreter for a native language, Nuer.

"The only way we could communicate with the kids and their parents was by calling Minnesota to do a conference call," she says.

Growth expected

South King County's minority population likely will increase. In Tukwila, for example, 61 percent of the population under age 18 is not white, compared with 41.2 percent for those 18 and over. Many area schools are reporting dramatic changes in their racial composition over the past 10 years. At Bow Lake Elementary in SeaTac, for example, the percentage of white students went from 89 percent to 37 percent from 1990 to 2000.

In a section of SeaTac, a mile or so from where Jama lives, councilman Brennan lives in the same house he built on a vacant lot 41 years ago. The 68-year-old retired firefighter who grew up on Chicago's blue-collar South Side raised five kids in the house with his wife, Betty. Pictures of their smiling children - and their children - cover the walls.

It used to be everyone in Brennan's neighborhood was as white as he is. Not now. The new next-door neighbors are from Somali. "If a black family had moved into that house 20 years ago, I wouldn't have been delighted," Brennan says. "That's just the way society was then. But as soon as the new neighbors moved in, I went over there with my wife to introduce ourselves."