Port Angeles’ deputy mayor just told council that “respect and decorum” are artifacts of a white male heterosexual society. The commissioner whose campaign she runs says his most important job is building trust with tribes—then steers federal money toward an enterprise that already spends half a million a year on holiday lights. The guilt is the point. It never gets paid off. It only gets converted into the next grant.
Decorum, recoded
On September 15, Port Angeles Deputy Mayor Navarra Carr was not talking about potholes. She was talking about who is allowed to define manners.
Council was discussing respect and decorum. Carr said the city probably does not want people whose “backgrounds… would be not in line with city values.” Then she explained whose values she meant:
“A lot of times the words respect and decorum come at the expense of… cultural norms and a lot of times the people who are left out of those conversations about what constitutes respect and decorum are people of color, queer people, women… I want to make sure that when we’re talking about those things that we’re not unintentionally creating an environment that limits people’s freedom of speech… and ability to adequately serve based on sort of artificial norms that really come out of a very white male heterosexual centered society.”
She added that “disrespect” is subjective, that court cases protect the public’s right to curse at council, and that she is “concerned” about councilmembers “limiting our own ability to speak freely to one another.”
So: norms of courtesy are coded as white, male, and straight. Objecting to that framing is the problem. The solution is to treat those norms as optional “guidelines.”
The campaign manager is not a side character
Carr is not a random commenter. She is Mike French’s campaign manager. French is running for a second term as Clallam County commissioner. In 2022, his campaign’s largest expenditure was $3,000 to Carr for “management and consulting.” He later put her in charge of the reelection. He was one of the biggest donors to her city council run, donating $1,000. When Carr calls “respect and decorum” a product of a “white male heterosexual centered society,” she is not freelancing. She is French’s campaign manager, speaking from the deputy mayor’s chair.
Trust the tribes. Charge the taxpayer.
French’s own answer to that charge is not to reject racial scorekeeping. It is to keep the books.
At a Clallam County Democrats debate with Jake Seegers, French said elected officials must think about “the broad spectrum of our community,” and pointed to Recompete: a project “to serve our underserved regions… rural areas like tribal areas.” French added, “I’m a white man in modern America that has had a very blessed life.”
At the Calico Cat Club forum, he went further:
“The most important thing I think for the board of commissioners is for us to build trust with our tribes.”
Not the most important thing for public safety. Not roads, not the jail, not the budget. Trust with tribes. The vehicle to build that trust is Recompete, the $35.6 million federal grant whose coalition he chairs. One tangible way trust gets built is through purchasing machinery: a hydroseeder and a mini excavator for the Jamestown Tribe so it can expand enterprises that already run on more than $100 million a year.
That is the conversion. White privilege, once confessed, becomes a white savior. The term is not a slur invented on this site. It is the name for the move: the guilty party purchases moral credit by delivering other people’s money to the approved identity.
Half a million in lights, then a grant for a hydroseeder
The lights tell you the scale of the need.
Right now the Jamestown Corporation and 7 Cedars are hanging the annual display—three to four million LED lights across Blyn, the campus, the clinic, the golf course, the Railroad Bridge. Jerry Allen and local press have put the budget at about $400,000 to $500,000 a year. Crews start in the fall. Installation alone is thousands of man-hours.
An organization that can spend half a million dollars every winter wrapping birch trees in LEDs is not too poor to buy a hydroseeder. It is too well-positioned to let a commissioner who needs to “build trust” charge the federal taxpayer for the next piece of the white guilt starter kit. French does not have to write a personal check. He chairs the coalition. The guilt does the rest.
The local dialect
The supporting chorus is not subtle.
Rae Hesselbach, French’s appointee to the Developmental Disabilities Advisory Committee and an Indivisible regular, told the public that “we all need to be vigilant because the wealthiest white men are a greater threat to safety than the unhoused.”
Paula Allen, listed as Director of Leadership at 7 Cedars, posted that “white people are a problem” and that they think they are “superior to the bottom of my shoe.”
Former Sequim Councilmember and Jamestown descendant Vicki Lowe told colleagues that the phrase “high quality” is “a dog whistle for white people.”
Charter Review Commissioner Nina Sarmiento, wordsmithing a Water Steward problem statement, said the county had been managing water “ever since white people set foot on this land.”
A Jefferson County Conservation District interview asked a resident how she would “deal with privileged white males.”
None of that is hidden. It is the local dialect of a national script: one racial category is the original sin; every institution must perform repayment; the debt has no payoff date.
Wear orange. Don’t ask about the graves.
Wednesday, Peninsula College will host Orange Shirt Day on the Robins Green—remembrance of children taken to residential and boarding schools, co-sponsored by the First Nations Club and the House of Learning.
Wear orange if you want. The schools were real. The removals were real. The grief is real.
What is not proven is the 2021 Kamloops headline: 215 children in a secret mass grave. Radar found disturbed soil. No graves have been dug up to match the number.
The country still treated it as a closed case. Churches burned. Names came off buildings. Professors who asked for bones lost their jobs. The woman who inspired the orange shirt has told CBC that “denialism” should be written into the criminal code—so a T-shirt that says “dig deeper” is not an argument. It is a charge sheet.
The League already wrote the assignment
Washington’s League of Women Voters does not wait for a grave. Its land acknowledgment says the state sits on homelands of peoples who have “long resiliently resisted the ongoing harms of colonialism,” and that the League will “amplify the voices of Indigenous people,” partner with tribes on policy, and “respect the sovereignty of tribes.”
That is not a history footnote. It is a political instruction: one set of governments is owed perpetual deference; the rest of the public is the guest.
After the lights, the refuges
Where does it end?
It does not end at Christmas lights. It does not end at a hydroseeder. The Jamestown Corporation is now pursuing legislation to move Dungeness and Protection Island National Wildlife Refuges from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service management into tribal trust. Local and federal allies are working to make that transfer happen. After that there will be another one. There always is.
Ron Allen, longtime chair and CEO of the tribe, is three-quarters European by ancestry. The racial ledger still lists him on the creditor side. Carr still lists “white male heterosexual centered society” on the debtor side. French still lists Recompete as the payment plan.
A penance office with a till
Guilt works because it never closes. If “respect” is a white norm, then enforcing it is oppression. If a corporation can light half the highway and still qualify as underserved, then the grant is justice. If a county commissioner's most important job is tribal trust rather than the people who elect him, then the taxpayer is not a constituent. He is an ATM with a conscience.
The question is not whether history was ugly. It was. The question is whether Clallam County intends to run itself as a county—or as a penance office with a $35.6 million till and a $500,000 light bill.
PABA Forum Tomorrow: District 24, Live at 7:30 a.m.
Port Angeles Business Association’s next meeting is tomorrow, September 29, 7:30–8:30 a.m. at Jazzy Joshua’s Restaurant & Lounge and is open to the public. The group is hosting a forum for 24th Legislative District candidates. Kaylee Kuehn and Marcia Kelbon will appear in person.
