Instead of fighting about it, we should listen to Boise City Council member’s message on race

It is sad that a letter posted on social media by Boise City Council member Lisa Sanchez is drawing more outrage than the subject about which she was writing: a man firing a gun at a recent Black Lives Matter rally.

The discharge of a weapon, accidental or otherwise, could have killed someone. Writing a letter is not fatal.

Further, Sanchez is expressing views that we should all be listening to right now.

The suspect in the gun-discharge incident, Michael Wallace, was booked on one count of discharging a firearm in city limits, a misdemeanor. We have heard from many readers through letters to the editor and social media who are upset that Wallace was charged with only a misdemeanor.

Sanchez, now in her third year as a Boise City Council member, wrote an acerbic letter, “To the parents (if they exist) of the white man, Michael D. Wallace.”

The premise of her letter is that Wallace got away with what he did because he is white.

At a time when people around the world are protesting because Black men in America are being killed by police officers for such things as selling cigarettes, passing a counterfeit $20 bill or falling asleep drunk in the drive-thru lane of a fast-food restaurant, it is fair to ask how a white man could fire off a gun in a crowd and be peaceably taken away and charged with a misdemeanor.

“I want to congratulate you on successfully having your son arrested, safely taken into custody by the Boise Police Department, and having him successfully bonded out of jail and home safe (not so sure about sound). You and your son won the race lottery!” Sanchez wrote in her letter.

She writes that Wallace was testing the boundaries of his white supremacy and privilege, “and now he knows what his community will allow him to do — live through the night when he was the one who could have killed innocent people.”

She signed her letter, “Love, Lisa Sanchez, Brown woman who chose not to have children for fear of their abuse and murder by white people.”

Sanchez told the editorial board last week that she stands by the strong words she used in the letter, in particular how she signed off.

“Well, I mean, all you have to do is look at the numbers,” Sanchez said. “White people are in charge of our world.”

She told the story of when she was born, the nurses gave Sanchez’s mother a different baby, a Black boy who was dark-skinned, thinking that Sanchez was too light-skinned to possibly belong to Sanchez’s mother.

“Color has been a factor in my life and my mother’s life and my father’s life since the day I was born,” she said. “I’m not trying to be provocative just to be provocative. It matters. It matters that I almost didn’t go home with my own mother.”

Sanchez became emotional when asked whether some of her statements in her letter were over the top.

“I know there’s a lot of hyperbole in what I wrote, but there’s a lot of truth in it,” Sanchez said. “And the reality is, there are people who are killed in a very dramatic fashion, unfairly. Our kids are being slowly killed at the southern border right now. … We have forgotten that children who I could have given birth to, they’re languishing. They’re being murdered. Those children are being murdered. Is somebody slicing their neck? No, they’re not killing them that way, but they’re killing them. And me knowing that, they’re killing me. So yeah, that’s why you don’t want to have kids, because I know how this country treats our children. Not like human beings, not like the promise of tomorrow. Like future field hands.”

We could fault Sanchez for not going directly to interim Police Chief Ron Winegar to ask about the circumstances surrounding the arrest and express her displeasure. As a City Council member, it’s not only her prerogative to do so, but also her duty to bring her concerns to city staff, whatever department that may be.

But if we can learn anything from the current national turmoil over race relations and the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s that we need to do more listening to the concerns of all of our citizens.

Sanchez is speaking her truth, and we need to listen. Let’s stop the recall efforts and angry social media posts. Let’s drop the seemingly constant need to fight. Rather than getting in defensive postures and coming out swinging, let’s all stop and just listen.

Sanchez points out that she appears to be the only elected official questioning how Wallace could be charged so lightly for something that was so serious.

“And I cannot believe that I am the only — as far as I can tell — I think I’m the only elected official to speak out against that in Idaho,” Sanchez said. “Why is that? Why am I the only one saying anything. ... I don’t know how I got here, but I am here and I’m not going to waste this opportunity to tell the truth. So that’s why I wrote the letter, because somebody needed to say something. It’s not about the law, it’s about what is morally right and wrong.”

Sanchez points to the fact that she was left out of the decision-making process to hire a new police chief.

“This is why I get angry, ladies and gentlemen, because I’m done,” she said. “I’m done pretending. I’m done acting nice, because acting nice gets us to where we are. And I think everybody in the country is over this.”

So while her words may have been incendiary and provocative, it’s a message that we need to hear.

“We can’t lie to ourselves anymore,” Sanchez said. “We’ve got to be honest about who we are. Yes, Boise is kind, but we cannot let our kindness, or our desire for peace, make us blind to the issues that we have.”