Olympic Times

Jefferson County GOP Chairman Jon Cooke said it’s racist for the city of Seattle to hold racial sensitivity training for their white employees to the exclusion of other races.

“All of this tension is used politically to inspire more upheaval and by the basic definition of racism, what they are proposing sounds racist,” Cooke told the Olympic Times. “If they're going to have training, there should be training for everybody.”

Cooke is responding to a June 17, 2020 tweet on Twitter by Dr. Karlyn Borysenko stating, “Fun fact: The city of Seattle is asking its white employees to voluntarily spend their day off in a training about their internalized racial superiority. I’ve got the documentation on it.”

Based on @DrKarlynB’s tweet, Cooke said the union needs to stand up for its members.

If Asian, Black or Hispanic employees were asked to train to the exclusion of the white race, Cooke said the ACLU would surely intervene.

“Equal rights means equal for everybody,” he added.

Dr. Borysenko’s tweet comes on the heels of protesters occupying a six-block radius in Seattle called Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP), where police officers have not been allowed entry since June 8, 2020, according to media reports. Mayor Jenny Durkan vowed to disband the group after two shootings last week resulting in at least one fatality.

“That problem specifically is people using this unrest for their political gain but I think overall a good economy helps out everybody,” Cooke said. “The best way to help all ethnicities is to get some job creation going again.” 

The occupation in Seattle emerged after the nation erupted into “Hands Up, Don't Shoot” protests led by Black Lives Matter (BLM), an international human rights organization that demanded the arrest of Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer who pinned an unarmed black man named George Floyd to the ground and strangled him to death with his knee on May 25, 2020. 

Chauvin was finally arrested and charged with murder on the third day of rallies, some of which have turned into episodes of looting that President Trump and other government officials said were instigated by Antifa, a far-left, antifascist, network of activists who believe, among other things, that more aggressive resistance to the Nazi Party in pre-World War II Germany would have kept Adolph Hitler from coming into power, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

On June 1, it was reported in Business Insider that the extreme right-wing group, Identity Evropa, called for violence and looting in white neighborhoods on Twitter under the guise of being Antifa members. 

“There will be racist people no matter what but they are a small, small, small minority,” Cooke said. “Then you have a lot of race-baiters who like to use any opportunity they can for their political endeavors.”