June 13, 2018 • 36 mins
Today, Bridget and Yves pull up a seat at the table. At this table sit a 19-year-old who ran for city council and Stacey Abrams, who may just become the country's first black female governor.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Give us the ballot, and we will fill our legislative
halls with men of good will, and send to the
sacred halls of congress men who will not sign a
Southern manifesto because of their devotion to the manifesto of justice.
Give us the ballot, and we will place judges on
(00:25):
the benches of the South who will do justly and
love mercy. We will place at the head of the
Southern States governors who have felt not only the tang
of the human, but the glow of the divine. Give
us the ballot, and we will quietly and non violently,
(00:47):
without a ranck ord of bitterness, implement the Supreme Court's
decision of May seventeenth, nineteen fifty four. Dr King gave
this speech at the Lincoln Memorial in fifty seven years
after the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public
schools was unconstitutional. But, as to be expected in a
(01:08):
country or racism is so deeply entrenched and systematic, that
wasn't the end of the story. One well intentioned mandate
wouldn't be enough to change the hearts and minds of
virulent racists, not even want handed down by the nation's
highest court. Integration was met for resistance, and that resistance
was often violent, and the separate but equal model persisted.
(01:30):
And as King himself later said, justice too long delayed
is justice denied. That was the case of voting rights too.
Black people had gotten the right to vote, but in
practice it was impossible for many to participate in a
political system they supposedly had the right to, thanks to
very real obstacles like literacy tests and poll taxes. In
(01:51):
a swift blow of the hammer of institutional racism, white
Americans proved that just because we were able to vote,
didn't Mimi could vote. In the years after this speech,
black people will see their voice in the political process
grow louder. The Voting Rights Act of nine passed and
the amendment was ratified. Poll taxes were banned. But if
(02:12):
you've learned anything from the Civil rights era, it's at
the work never ends that brings us to today. Yes,
we're sol up against some shady and harmful practices like
gerrymandering and voter r d laws, but our hard one
right to vote was just the beginning. Now we're making
(02:34):
sure we have a seat at the table. I'm Bridget Todd,
and you're listening to afro punk solution sessions, changing the
world one talk at a time. Acro Punk is a
safe place, a blank space to freak out in and
to construct a new reality, to live our lives as
we see fit while making sense of the world around us.
Here at Acropunk, we have the conversations that matter to us,
(02:57):
and these are our solutions. If you're anything like me,
(03:22):
you've spent a generation hearing about the importance of our
participation in the political system. I grew up hearing with
the key to quality lies in black folks, flexing our
electoral political muscles, paying attention to elections, voting, running for office.
But not everyone has had that same experience. Eve's Jeff Coote,
(03:42):
our co host Will You'll Hear More from Later, has
been frustrated with how slowly the wheels of democracy turn. Yeah,
although society told me voting was important, I wasn't really
nudged or motivated to vote. Even though I do. It's
hard to keep voting, you know, write our ancestors fought
so hard to get and see only some of what
(04:03):
you hope for come to fruition, gaining justice a little
bit at a time After years of massive inequity the
story of our lives, right, But I realized that when
it comes to political office, there aren't enough people there
on our team to get more of that work done.
And there's no reason that can't change and is changing
(04:27):
right now. A lot of folks are saying that change
should look like running for office, but what really goes
into the decision to run for office? And with so
many feelings understandably disenchanted with politics altogether, is it really
the secret to getting free? The story of that. MLK
believes in the power of the black vote to achieve
(04:47):
black liberation, but today it seems like even if you
do vote, we're participating in a system that wasn't actually
set up to meet our needs. And that's a problem.
So this is a solution session. So I want to
(05:07):
start out by telling you the problem that we have,
because we have some serious problems when thinking about black
political power in this country. We are in a political crisis.
In the election cycle, one point three billion dollars were
spent on engaging voters. Less than five percent of that
(05:31):
were spent on Black people. That's Jessica Bird. She runs
three point Strategies, a firm of black women political operatives
who work with the Movement for Black Lives to elect
black radical candidates to achieve electoral justice, or, as she
would say, we are a firm entirely made up of
black women political operatives who are working every single day
(05:52):
to fuck ship up. Jessica believes in the power of
electoral politics to make change in the lives of black folks,
but she's also honest about the fact that electoral politics
hasn't always meaningfully engaged young folks of color, and when
mapping that out, which you can, because public finance is
(06:13):
a real thing, most of that money flowed to black
communities in the last month of the election. Do you
want to be talked too late or do you want
to have a real conversation with the people who want
your vote. Overall, millennial turnout increased in but young Black
(06:35):
people our vote turnout decrease. We felt less and less
that people were talking to us and that we could
see ourselves in our government. Almost ten percent of the
Black electorate is disenfranchised because of our racist voter systems.
(06:58):
So not only are our people who are locked inside,
who are in cages, not able to vote, but there
are voting systems that are intentionally keeping us from making
our voices hard. Of the elected leaders in this country
are white. Only five of elected leaders are black. People
(07:25):
of elected leaders are men. Part of Jessica's work involves
mapping out who holds political power in different states and
working to ensure that the people who hold that power
look like the communities they're representing, also known as a
reflective democracy. But in Georgia there's still a long way
to go. So when done on a power index, that
(07:51):
means that white men have almost ten times the amount
of political power as anybody else. Does that make sense?
Does that reflect this specific room? Do you think we
can change that? Obviously? Absolutely. Jessica is from Ohio, where
she grew up poor. When she speaks, she talks about
(08:13):
her brothers who work in factories. Her brothers, she explains,
work alongside people who voted for Donald Trump and in
doing so, voted against their own lives and the lives
of other people on the factory line. You were a
lifelong Democrat, yes, and you're wearing a Trump shirt? How
did that happened? If he does half of what he
says he's gonna do, it's a boost in the right direction.
You can only go forward with him. I don't think
(08:34):
you can go backwards, and sure as I can't stay
the same, you've lost faith with the Democratic Party. Yes,
she says growing up poor and black made her feel
like she didn't even have the right to be engaged
in the political process and like she wasn't allowed to
ask questions of the people in power. I mean, I
felt shame a lot of times throughout my life. But
but but the story that I would tell is, you know,
I grew up really, really poor, working poor in Columbus, Ohio,
(08:57):
and we lived in a predominantly black, working for our neighborhood,
and it really influenced the way that I felt like
I was allowed to ask questions about political power in
my community, because I always felt like I didn't have
enough information and that for some reason, there was something
baked into the DNA of my family that made it
so that we didn't work hard enough to get things
(09:18):
that like other people who had political power needed. I
worked on my very first campaign though, when I was seventeen,
going to a high school that was honestly just crumbling,
and we were sharing it with an elementary school, and
so it was completely overcrowded and if you could imagine
being an eighteen year old going to school with like
(09:39):
a third grader. There were some very real problems. And
I was always talking about this to my mom, and
she was like, you need to show up to your
state legislator's office again, super poor. The reason I know
how to do Auntie Chic is because I was in
those swift store stylin and I went to my very
first state legislative campaign, and I learned exactly what it
(10:02):
meant to lead a campaign, which is to take the
number of people in your community and the amount of
votes that you need to win, essentially produce a formula
and go knock on doors and ask those people to
be involved. And I became obsessed with this idea that
even though I was poor, even though I was black,
(10:24):
even though both of my parents died before the age
of twenty seven, that like I actually had a right
to ask questions of the people who were leading me.
I would say that even now, as I think about
the way that people respond to me about political power,
it isn't that we don't want to be involved at all.
It's often that we don't have enough information and so
(10:45):
we feel like that's not our right to ask questions.
What I want to say to you is to completely
destigmatize this idea that you're supposed to have some answer.
Those answers are being intentionally kept from us through a racist,
sexist political system that was designed so that our voices
(11:06):
weren't heard. So anything that you don't know about the
political system is one either google away. And also, you're
god given right by of either being born in this
country or paying fucking taxes, And so you deserve to
be asking questions about who represents your life, who represents you?
(11:28):
Think of that question, who actually represents you politically? If
you're Mary pet Hector, the answer to that question is
that no one represents you. So you do what she did,
You represent yourself. We'll hear from her after this break
and we're back. Here's Mary pat Hector at Solution Sessions
(11:50):
in Atlanta. She's so loud, angry, arrogant, bitchy. Who did
she thinks she is? And what is she wearing? I mean,
she's just asking for it. She has the audacity to
think outside the box and be more than what we
(12:12):
expect her to be. These are things women of color
have heard since the beginning of time, but These are
the things that I refused to assimilate to. That's why,
at the age of nineteen years old, I became the
youngest woman in person of color in the state of
Georgia to run for office. Well. She was a sophomore
(12:34):
at Spellman College. Mary pat fought the right to run
for elected office. She says she was fueled by anger,
anger at watching Trump when the presidential election. I can
remember it like it was yesterday, standing side by side
with my Spellman sisters as we heard the words Donald J.
Trump President of the United States of America. Mad about
(12:59):
the disturbing race relations in our country, Bitter at the
fact that as a woman, my reproductive rights were in
the hands of a man. Pissed that so many of
my peers believes that by protesting their vote it was
the only way. But while so many people didn't know
what to do or how to feel, millennials had this
(13:19):
crazy idea of a powership, a political powership, young people
all over the country running from office to bring about
progressive change, and of course we were met with opposition.
I was the most qualified person in my race. Young
people began making calls, campaigning college students from all over
the country. We're sending funds to support our efforts. On
(13:41):
January twenties, I received a call stating that my seventy
one year old opponents felt that I was just too
young to run against him or for any other elected position.
But surely I was old enough. I mean I was
old enough to vote. I was old enough for fights
for this country. I was old enough to pay taxes.
Men's said things to me such as, I think it's
(14:02):
cute that you're running for office, but public office isn't
a cute matter. As we knocked on doors, women said
things like wait your turn, what does that mean? Adults
and elders that I saw each morning that greeted me
with the smile began to criminalize me and thought that
it was just wrong that I refused to assimilate to
(14:22):
their expectations as me as a nineteen year old student.
We ended up fighting for us to stay on the
ballot because our campaign wasn't run off the premise of
us being young, but off the fact that we wanted
to see change in our community. Like Jessica, Mary Pack
got interested in activism after getting angry by the things
she saw around her. She was eleven when she organized
(14:43):
her first sit in a response that was rooted in
simmering frustration around being treated like an outsider in her
own community. I was wondering, could you tell me a
bit about that. You know, most eleven year olds are
not leading sit ins? What made you feel like that
was something that you wanted to do at a young age?
So growing up in some Mountain Georgia specifically, a lot
(15:07):
of people that I knew were turning to like guvern
vines as the answer, or like violence. My best friend
at the time ended up getting pregnant, and I realized like,
either people are dying shooting people, or they're getting pregnant.
And I felt like no one really cared about the community.
(15:28):
There was nothing for us to do after school, but
of course getting into trouble or potentially have intercourse and
end up like my best friend and and be pregnant.
And so I felt like no one was really looking
out for the young people within my community, and they
only saw s as problems instead of assets, and I
(15:48):
felt like something needed to be done or changed about it.
There were several mega churches Georgias known for mega churches
within our community that could have opened their doors and
staid they had fined in the yards and said, young people,
please don't walk on our grass. And so that was
the community that we pretty much lived in, and so
I decided to have this sit in to bring awareness
(16:10):
to the violence happening within our community and the fact
that we needed a team center. From that day, I
actually got involved in NASA Action Network, which is an
organization found about Reverndale Sharpton, which I now lead to
use the vision for I think about it now like
the fact how long though that was for me, is
how that day pretty much changed my life. But then
(16:31):
I also think about the people who were there with
me that day, like one of my best friends Dunisia.
Where are my friends Patti who are both out on
and who were both killed? And I think about how ever,
since then we were fighting for a way out, and
I'm happy to see that myself and a few others
were able to make it out, but some weren't unfortunate.
(16:53):
But I think this moment, like what happened when I
was eleven years old, and that very first cent or
thanks that pretty a few of my fire today and
really encourage me to keep going. Mary Pat's motto is
you don't have to wait to be great. You can
change the world now. She thinks the answer to building
political power and actually making a difference is more young
(17:14):
people of color feeling empowered to run for public office
and not just expecting the old guards of political power
to have our best interests at heart. I think that
too many times we look for people who have been
in this realm too make a difference. I'm sorry, but
if a person who has been in Congress from thirty
five forty five years and we're still asking them to
(17:35):
make a difference as soon that they just can't do it.
But that doesn't mean that you can't run against this person,
take their positions and make a change. If we encourage Samantha,
if we encourage Jonathan Justine Mary Pad, I don't know,
like to run for these positions, to run against table
three or four times their senior, and encourage them to
(17:58):
run for office, then maybe we will see it different
if they win and like have someone in these positions
of power really advancing our people. But I feel like
we've just gotten too comfortable, and the people that we've
allowed to remain in these positions have gotten too comfortable
for too long. Mary Pad is a beat, but she's
(18:19):
clear that running for office involves getting out of those
comfort zones. She says it's difficult and sometimes lonely work.
She mobilized a coalition of active supporters, mostly other young people,
who donated money to her campaign and helped her nock
doors to get out to vote. She's gracious, but sounds
genuinely exhausted with looking back on her city council race.
(18:40):
During that entire process, I felt alone, and I felt
like I was by myselone, and like I feel like
Dr Martin's been getting probably self the same way. Rose
the part has probably felt the same way. Harriet Tuppan
probably felt the same way. I felt alone throughout the
entire process of my life, and I didn't see the
bigger picture until it was all over, and I was
(19:01):
able to see the difference in which it made. And
So while you may feel alone, while you may feel
like no one understands, while you may feel like you
really want to give up, you can't because you have
to be realized to understand the bigger picture. Seeing my
eleven year old brother, who I want to be able
(19:22):
to walk to the store with the hoodie without being
shot or stops to be healed by a police officer.
That makes me push through, you know, seeing my eight
year old grandfather who became the first African American worker
at right Patter Air Force, Miss Tippy. See how proud
he is about the different things that I'm doing and
might talk to me about how you know, see you
(19:43):
to march now, I need you to resist the places
like this to spy and how proud he is of me,
And how I have all of these cousins and all
of these pieces and nephews looking at me because I'm
the only person in my family who's this involved in
this work, and they say like, I want to do
what you're doing, and I want to be more involved,
and how can I That makes me push through. We'll
(20:09):
be back with more Afropunk Solution sessions after another quick break.
Tremendous potential. I've got to know our country so well.
Tremendous potential. It's going to be a beautiful thing. Every
(20:31):
single America will have the opportunity to realize his or
her fullest potential. They've forgotten men and women of our
country will be forgotten no longer. Do you remember how
(20:53):
you felt when you woke up the morning of November nine.
Maybe you felt panicked, maybe you felt empty and numb,
or maybe you just felt angry. Both Mary Pat and
Jessica talk about how that anger showed them to get
more involved in politics. They aren't blown. Mathoni Wamboo Crawl
(21:35):
works for Emily's List, an organization that supports and trains
women to run for office. She says after the election,
a wave of piste off women of all ages decided
to do exactly what Mary Pat did. They decided they
wanted to run for office. These women, fueled by a
righteous anger, flooded the Emily's List website. At the time,
(21:57):
the site didn't even have an easy to find sign
up for them to get trained. These women founded as
if they were all following the same north star. So
I've actually heard folks at Emily's List for peat this
anecdote a lot. When you think about it, it's actually
kind of hard to find a page on a website
that isn't super public facing. That meant these angry women
really had to want to hunt this down. Yeah, they
(22:20):
put a lot of work into it. You can tell
that there were some sort of force of magnetism that
was really drawing them to take this political action that
they may not have thought about before at all in
the least bit, so they were really galvanized. So I
asked me throwning about this surge of women who were
really eager to take action and how that coincided with
(22:41):
the presidential election and the me too movement. We are
being a time where after the election of Donald Trump,
we weren't even a month later when we discovered over
a thousand names of women who had found some little
remote part of our website and end up on a
(23:01):
form that frankly, we're embarrassed to say we didn't even
realize was still up on her website and saying that
they were interested in learning how to run for office.
And we realized that we had most definitely entered a
new age and it was clearly charalleled to how women
was feeling after Hillary Clintons to see and after the
elections Donal. It turns out Anger is a pretty good motivator.
(23:27):
Anger drove these women who don't look anything like the
people who traditionally hold power in politics to want to
make change. And we have skill, we are we don't
do it women. What are some of the motivators both
personal and social that you think are compelling women of
(23:49):
color to run who maybe haven't thought about it before
or don't come from a political or an activist background.
And we've often said that women run for office because
are angry or they want to fix something, and this
is I mean, everything that is happening right now has
just bubbled to the surface. There is a lot of frustration,
(24:11):
and I think that there's been a lot of infrastructure
building that has been happening in movements that has sort
of met this moment at just the right time, like Mary,
pat and Jessica, But they only wants people to see
that if they're angry and they want to make change,
they don't have to wait until someone gives them permission
to run for office. You're probably more qualified than you think.
(24:31):
So many of us underestimate what experience really means and
what experiences actually needed when we look at running for
elected office, because there are so many of these jobs
that frankly none of us even know exists as an
elected office. It is incredibly overwhelming for a lot of
(24:53):
folks and were discouraging to sort of see themselves as
a potential candidate for elected office. Quote unquote Mathoni is
one of those people you can just tell was raised
by educators like Mary pat and Jessica. She was encouraged
to be more involved in politics at an early age.
She calls herself a movement child. But not everyone has
(25:13):
had this upbringing. Mathonis has. Some marginalized people feel shame
at not knowing enough about the political system, and that
shame drives them to disconnect from politics entirely. Mathony told
me that when people check out of politics, it doesn't
stop politics from being something that impacts their lives. She
actually shared a great quote on the subject. It's one
(25:34):
that Mayan Alice, who was a former state senator in Illinois,
used to say, and that is, if you do not
do politics, politics will still be detatio. There is something
so important about all of us in some way figuring
out how we get more engaged, and whether that is
(25:57):
running for office or helping more good pe goo to
run and therefore having some impacts on the people who
have an impact on you, is critically critically important. And
I don't you know, put all this blame on us.
There is something that has been really by design in
(26:17):
this country around leaving people in a state of struggle
that has often times led to a lot of the
disconnect and the impact of participation numbers, et cetera. But
I think we are again seeing communities rounding a corner.
There is more self organizing going on. And it's not
(26:41):
just been inside of the women's community. It's not just
after these marches. It has been happening after too many
of our young people, you know, has suffered at the
hands of the police. H That has been happening inside
(27:03):
of these streamer communities. This is what I'm only SUPs
who's been doing for thirty years, has been this slow
build up to this moment. And again, I think we're
(27:27):
kind of at a moment right now where we are
all realizing the danger of handing over this much of
our power for somebody else to make a ton of
decisions around and not having a little bit more of
our brains and in our hands inside of what is
happening from the community level of It's probably not very
(27:52):
difficult to imagine how growing up poor would make someone
check out of politics, But for Jessica and may Pett,
growing up poor only drove them to be were invested
in shaping and understanding the power dynamics unfolding around them.
And when people who have been left out of political
conversations become the ones who are making decisions, well that's
when we's hard to see real change. I grew up
(28:12):
poor in Mississippi. I'm fairly certain there's a country song
or blue song about that. That's Stacy Abrams. Remember her name,
because they'll probably be hearing it again. We talked about
her historic campaign, which, if she wins, will make her
the country's first black female governor. Let that sink in
for a moment. I spend a lot of time talking
(28:35):
about the criminalization of poverty, because unless you've been poor,
you do not always understand what it means to have
your license taken away because you can't pay a traffic ticket.
Because a minute that happens, you can't get to work anymore,
and the job you have that's barely helping you make
ends meet disappears. If you are a person of color
(28:59):
who has experienced discrimination, then you have the ability often
to see where discrimination lies and to then counteract it.
You need diversity because diversity provides information, It also provides
ways to address issues, and that diversity in and of
(29:20):
itself creates a richer and fuller response in politics or stacy.
Running for office isn't just about her. It's about making
sure leaders and government aren't all the same, so they
can actually have a chance to understand the lived experiences
of their constituents. Why does representation and diversity matter and government?
(29:42):
We have seen what happens when you have a homogeneous
set of people making decisions. Too many people are left
out of those choices, too many people are impacted negatively
by the decisions that are made. And it isn't until
we add new voices, add new people of color, add women,
(30:02):
add differences based on sexual orientation, that we then become
aware of the impediments and the prejudices that exist in
our communities, in our in our policies. And so I
see diversity as the only way to get too good answers,
because otherwise you're trying to solve a problem without full information,
and that's both intellectually void, but it also is immoral
(30:25):
because you are not serving everyone, and that is the
responsibility of good government. Understandably, many people feel strongly about
how an effective and deceitful our current political system is,
and we'll talk to some of them next at AFRO
Funk Atlanta, Corey Oliver talked to young black people about
(30:46):
their feelings are und voting. Marissa was one of them, Um,
do you vote? What do you think that's important? I mean,
I vote because I want to make sure that I
support all the efforts if there's a cause. And you're
asking me, if you're saying you believe that if I vote,
this will make a change, then I'm gonna help you
do that. I'm not gonna negate it. I don't necessarily
(31:09):
believe in it, but yeah, I'll show up to vote.
You're asking me to do something very simple. I can
do that. I just feel that there are systems in
place that everyone is aware of. However, they're not being
fixed or attended to, and they haven't been for years.
And I just feel like it's a false narrative to
(31:29):
continue to ask people to participate in a political process
that's not supporting their community. And it's so blatant, it's
so disgusting. It's hard to really trust that me voting
is really the thing that's going to make the difference,
because clearly something's askew, and I don't believe that bureaucracy
(31:52):
is necessarily the way to fix it. Everybody I know
say they two broke the vote, and with all this
heavy slave mentality, we could have broke the vote. Nobody
cares about me, nobody cares about my family, nobody cares
about my votes, and nobody gets my vote, nobody from president.
That's my campaign slowness. Stecy Abrams gets this sentiment. She says,
(32:19):
it's a failure of leadership to meaningfully reflect the people
they serve. Too many people don't see themselves reflected in leadership.
They don't see themselves or hear themselves reflected in the
conversations around them. And this is not just for Georgia,
this is nationally and because of that, too often we
(32:40):
limit what our capacity is. I believe we ought to
do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by
on bootstraps. But it's a cruel jest to say to
a bootless man that he ought to lift himself as
on bootstraps. And many negroes, by the thousands and millions,
(33:01):
have been left bootless as a result of all of
these years of oppression, and as a result of a
society that deliberately made his color a stigma and something
worthless and degrading. When Mlka was murdered, he was organizing
the Poor People's Campaign, a campaign that would unite the
country's poor for a new march on Washington to demand better,
(33:26):
better jobs, better homes, better education, better lives than the
ones they were living. As much as he championed voting
as a means of political power, he clearly understood that
it was about more than power at the ballots. It
was about the right to demand better, not just from
(33:46):
our democratic system, but for ourselves. We deserve representatives who
look like us and understand our stories. And if we
can't find those representatives, isn't there power in taking on
that mantle ourselves like a pacted Or, as Jessica puts it,
we recognize that voting alone will not change the conditions
(34:06):
plaguing black communities, But we believe that black people deserve
a loving and strategic political home to seek transformative political change.
That's not all right. Solution Sessions envisions this home through
talks with our most celebrated thinkers and dialogue with members
(34:28):
of the acropunk community who are motivated to make a difference.
Join us, and let's create the change we want to
see with the real world Solutions What's the solution, Bridget?
Do your research. What's the solution? Bridget? Find motivation and anger.
What's the solution, Bridget. There's more to building power than voting.
What's the solution, Bridget fight back. Be sure to join
(34:48):
us next week for another deep dive into the other
black experience. I liked Obama because he was a brother
that gave a lot of racist old white men, you know,
power palpitations because you had a he had a brother
in the White House, and he was smooth, but he
was still the president of the United States that I
ever think for a second he was really gonna precipitate change.
(35:09):
So on a symbolic level, I love that. But you know,
when I'm walking down in a Huntred twenty fifty and
I see murals with m Ok, Malcolm Max and Obama,
who's a disconnect between the nineteen and six season now?
And you know the name of that goal for for
lack of better terms, neoliberalism. Afro Punk Solution Sessions is
a co production between Afro Punk and How Stuff Works.
(35:31):
Your hosts are Bridget Todd and Eve's Deep Cooke. Executive
co producers are Julie Douglas, Jocelyn Cooper and Kuan Latif Hill.
Dylan Fagan is supervising producer and Kathleen Cuillian is audio engineer.
Many many thanks to Casey Pegram and Annie Reathe for
their production and editorial oversight, and many thanks to Are
on the Ground Atlanta Crewe, Ben Boland, Corey Oliver and
(35:53):
Noel Brown. The understide of Power is performed by Algiers.
Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at Apropunk
MHM
Give us the ballot, and we will fill our legislative
halls with men of good will, and send to the
sacred halls of congress men who will not sign a
Southern manifesto because of their devotion to the manifesto of justice.
Give us the ballot, and we will place judges on
(00:25):
the benches of the South who will do justly and
love mercy. We will place at the head of the
Southern States governors who have felt not only the tang
of the human, but the glow of the divine. Give
us the ballot, and we will quietly and non violently,
(00:47):
without a ranck ord of bitterness, implement the Supreme Court's
decision of May seventeenth, nineteen fifty four. Dr King gave
this speech at the Lincoln Memorial in fifty seven years
after the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public
schools was unconstitutional. But, as to be expected in a
(01:08):
country or racism is so deeply entrenched and systematic, that
wasn't the end of the story. One well intentioned mandate
wouldn't be enough to change the hearts and minds of
virulent racists, not even want handed down by the nation's
highest court. Integration was met for resistance, and that resistance
was often violent, and the separate but equal model persisted.
(01:30):
And as King himself later said, justice too long delayed
is justice denied. That was the case of voting rights too.
Black people had gotten the right to vote, but in
practice it was impossible for many to participate in a
political system they supposedly had the right to, thanks to
very real obstacles like literacy tests and poll taxes. In
(01:51):
a swift blow of the hammer of institutional racism, white
Americans proved that just because we were able to vote,
didn't Mimi could vote. In the years after this speech,
black people will see their voice in the political process
grow louder. The Voting Rights Act of nine passed and
the amendment was ratified. Poll taxes were banned. But if
(02:12):
you've learned anything from the Civil rights era, it's at
the work never ends that brings us to today. Yes,
we're sol up against some shady and harmful practices like
gerrymandering and voter r d laws, but our hard one
right to vote was just the beginning. Now we're making
(02:34):
sure we have a seat at the table. I'm Bridget Todd,
and you're listening to afro punk solution sessions, changing the
world one talk at a time. Acro Punk is a
safe place, a blank space to freak out in and
to construct a new reality, to live our lives as
we see fit while making sense of the world around us.
Here at Acropunk, we have the conversations that matter to us,
(02:57):
and these are our solutions. If you're anything like me,
(03:22):
you've spent a generation hearing about the importance of our
participation in the political system. I grew up hearing with
the key to quality lies in black folks, flexing our
electoral political muscles, paying attention to elections, voting, running for office.
But not everyone has had that same experience. Eve's Jeff Coote,
(03:42):
our co host Will You'll Hear More from Later, has
been frustrated with how slowly the wheels of democracy turn. Yeah,
although society told me voting was important, I wasn't really
nudged or motivated to vote. Even though I do. It's
hard to keep voting, you know, write our ancestors fought
so hard to get and see only some of what
(04:03):
you hope for come to fruition, gaining justice a little
bit at a time After years of massive inequity the
story of our lives, right, But I realized that when
it comes to political office, there aren't enough people there
on our team to get more of that work done.
And there's no reason that can't change and is changing
(04:27):
right now. A lot of folks are saying that change
should look like running for office, but what really goes
into the decision to run for office? And with so
many feelings understandably disenchanted with politics altogether, is it really
the secret to getting free? The story of that. MLK
believes in the power of the black vote to achieve
(04:47):
black liberation, but today it seems like even if you
do vote, we're participating in a system that wasn't actually
set up to meet our needs. And that's a problem.
So this is a solution session. So I want to
(05:07):
start out by telling you the problem that we have,
because we have some serious problems when thinking about black
political power in this country. We are in a political crisis.
In the election cycle, one point three billion dollars were
spent on engaging voters. Less than five percent of that
(05:31):
were spent on Black people. That's Jessica Bird. She runs
three point Strategies, a firm of black women political operatives
who work with the Movement for Black Lives to elect
black radical candidates to achieve electoral justice, or, as she
would say, we are a firm entirely made up of
black women political operatives who are working every single day
(05:52):
to fuck ship up. Jessica believes in the power of
electoral politics to make change in the lives of black folks,
but she's also honest about the fact that electoral politics
hasn't always meaningfully engaged young folks of color, and when
mapping that out, which you can, because public finance is
(06:13):
a real thing, most of that money flowed to black
communities in the last month of the election. Do you
want to be talked too late or do you want
to have a real conversation with the people who want
your vote. Overall, millennial turnout increased in but young Black
(06:35):
people our vote turnout decrease. We felt less and less
that people were talking to us and that we could
see ourselves in our government. Almost ten percent of the
Black electorate is disenfranchised because of our racist voter systems.
(06:58):
So not only are our people who are locked inside,
who are in cages, not able to vote, but there
are voting systems that are intentionally keeping us from making
our voices hard. Of the elected leaders in this country
are white. Only five of elected leaders are black. People
(07:25):
of elected leaders are men. Part of Jessica's work involves
mapping out who holds political power in different states and
working to ensure that the people who hold that power
look like the communities they're representing, also known as a
reflective democracy. But in Georgia there's still a long way
to go. So when done on a power index, that
(07:51):
means that white men have almost ten times the amount
of political power as anybody else. Does that make sense?
Does that reflect this specific room? Do you think we
can change that? Obviously? Absolutely. Jessica is from Ohio, where
she grew up poor. When she speaks, she talks about
(08:13):
her brothers who work in factories. Her brothers, she explains,
work alongside people who voted for Donald Trump and in
doing so, voted against their own lives and the lives
of other people on the factory line. You were a
lifelong Democrat, yes, and you're wearing a Trump shirt? How
did that happened? If he does half of what he
says he's gonna do, it's a boost in the right direction.
You can only go forward with him. I don't think
(08:34):
you can go backwards, and sure as I can't stay
the same, you've lost faith with the Democratic Party. Yes,
she says growing up poor and black made her feel
like she didn't even have the right to be engaged
in the political process and like she wasn't allowed to
ask questions of the people in power. I mean, I
felt shame a lot of times throughout my life. But
but but the story that I would tell is, you know,
I grew up really, really poor, working poor in Columbus, Ohio,
(08:57):
and we lived in a predominantly black, working for our neighborhood,
and it really influenced the way that I felt like
I was allowed to ask questions about political power in
my community, because I always felt like I didn't have
enough information and that for some reason, there was something
baked into the DNA of my family that made it
so that we didn't work hard enough to get things
(09:18):
that like other people who had political power needed. I
worked on my very first campaign though, when I was seventeen,
going to a high school that was honestly just crumbling,
and we were sharing it with an elementary school, and
so it was completely overcrowded and if you could imagine
being an eighteen year old going to school with like
(09:39):
a third grader. There were some very real problems. And
I was always talking about this to my mom, and
she was like, you need to show up to your
state legislator's office again, super poor. The reason I know
how to do Auntie Chic is because I was in
those swift store stylin and I went to my very
first state legislative campaign, and I learned exactly what it
(10:02):
meant to lead a campaign, which is to take the
number of people in your community and the amount of
votes that you need to win, essentially produce a formula
and go knock on doors and ask those people to
be involved. And I became obsessed with this idea that
even though I was poor, even though I was black,
(10:24):
even though both of my parents died before the age
of twenty seven, that like I actually had a right
to ask questions of the people who were leading me.
I would say that even now, as I think about
the way that people respond to me about political power,
it isn't that we don't want to be involved at all.
It's often that we don't have enough information and so
(10:45):
we feel like that's not our right to ask questions.
What I want to say to you is to completely
destigmatize this idea that you're supposed to have some answer.
Those answers are being intentionally kept from us through a racist,
sexist political system that was designed so that our voices
(11:06):
weren't heard. So anything that you don't know about the
political system is one either google away. And also, you're
god given right by of either being born in this
country or paying fucking taxes, And so you deserve to
be asking questions about who represents your life, who represents you?
(11:28):
Think of that question, who actually represents you politically? If
you're Mary pet Hector, the answer to that question is
that no one represents you. So you do what she did,
You represent yourself. We'll hear from her after this break
and we're back. Here's Mary pat Hector at Solution Sessions
(11:50):
in Atlanta. She's so loud, angry, arrogant, bitchy. Who did
she thinks she is? And what is she wearing? I mean,
she's just asking for it. She has the audacity to
think outside the box and be more than what we
(12:12):
expect her to be. These are things women of color
have heard since the beginning of time, but These are
the things that I refused to assimilate to. That's why,
at the age of nineteen years old, I became the
youngest woman in person of color in the state of
Georgia to run for office. Well. She was a sophomore
(12:34):
at Spellman College. Mary pat fought the right to run
for elected office. She says she was fueled by anger,
anger at watching Trump when the presidential election. I can
remember it like it was yesterday, standing side by side
with my Spellman sisters as we heard the words Donald J.
Trump President of the United States of America. Mad about
(12:59):
the disturbing race relations in our country, Bitter at the
fact that as a woman, my reproductive rights were in
the hands of a man. Pissed that so many of
my peers believes that by protesting their vote it was
the only way. But while so many people didn't know
what to do or how to feel, millennials had this
(13:19):
crazy idea of a powership, a political powership, young people
all over the country running from office to bring about
progressive change, and of course we were met with opposition.
I was the most qualified person in my race. Young
people began making calls, campaigning college students from all over
the country. We're sending funds to support our efforts. On
(13:41):
January twenties, I received a call stating that my seventy
one year old opponents felt that I was just too
young to run against him or for any other elected position.
But surely I was old enough. I mean I was
old enough to vote. I was old enough for fights
for this country. I was old enough to pay taxes.
Men's said things to me such as, I think it's
(14:02):
cute that you're running for office, but public office isn't
a cute matter. As we knocked on doors, women said
things like wait your turn, what does that mean? Adults
and elders that I saw each morning that greeted me
with the smile began to criminalize me and thought that
it was just wrong that I refused to assimilate to
(14:22):
their expectations as me as a nineteen year old student.
We ended up fighting for us to stay on the
ballot because our campaign wasn't run off the premise of
us being young, but off the fact that we wanted
to see change in our community. Like Jessica, Mary Pack
got interested in activism after getting angry by the things
she saw around her. She was eleven when she organized
(14:43):
her first sit in a response that was rooted in
simmering frustration around being treated like an outsider in her
own community. I was wondering, could you tell me a
bit about that. You know, most eleven year olds are
not leading sit ins? What made you feel like that
was something that you wanted to do at a young age?
So growing up in some Mountain Georgia specifically, a lot
(15:07):
of people that I knew were turning to like guvern
vines as the answer, or like violence. My best friend
at the time ended up getting pregnant, and I realized like,
either people are dying shooting people, or they're getting pregnant.
And I felt like no one really cared about the community.
(15:28):
There was nothing for us to do after school, but
of course getting into trouble or potentially have intercourse and
end up like my best friend and and be pregnant.
And so I felt like no one was really looking
out for the young people within my community, and they
only saw s as problems instead of assets, and I
(15:48):
felt like something needed to be done or changed about it.
There were several mega churches Georgias known for mega churches
within our community that could have opened their doors and
staid they had fined in the yards and said, young people,
please don't walk on our grass. And so that was
the community that we pretty much lived in, and so
I decided to have this sit in to bring awareness
(16:10):
to the violence happening within our community and the fact
that we needed a team center. From that day, I
actually got involved in NASA Action Network, which is an
organization found about Reverndale Sharpton, which I now lead to
use the vision for I think about it now like
the fact how long though that was for me, is
how that day pretty much changed my life. But then
(16:31):
I also think about the people who were there with
me that day, like one of my best friends Dunisia.
Where are my friends Patti who are both out on
and who were both killed? And I think about how ever,
since then we were fighting for a way out, and
I'm happy to see that myself and a few others
were able to make it out, but some weren't unfortunate.
(16:53):
But I think this moment, like what happened when I
was eleven years old, and that very first cent or
thanks that pretty a few of my fire today and
really encourage me to keep going. Mary Pat's motto is
you don't have to wait to be great. You can
change the world now. She thinks the answer to building
political power and actually making a difference is more young
(17:14):
people of color feeling empowered to run for public office
and not just expecting the old guards of political power
to have our best interests at heart. I think that
too many times we look for people who have been
in this realm too make a difference. I'm sorry, but
if a person who has been in Congress from thirty
five forty five years and we're still asking them to
(17:35):
make a difference as soon that they just can't do it.
But that doesn't mean that you can't run against this person,
take their positions and make a change. If we encourage Samantha,
if we encourage Jonathan Justine Mary Pad, I don't know,
like to run for these positions, to run against table
three or four times their senior, and encourage them to
(17:58):
run for office, then maybe we will see it different
if they win and like have someone in these positions
of power really advancing our people. But I feel like
we've just gotten too comfortable, and the people that we've
allowed to remain in these positions have gotten too comfortable
for too long. Mary Pad is a beat, but she's
(18:19):
clear that running for office involves getting out of those
comfort zones. She says it's difficult and sometimes lonely work.
She mobilized a coalition of active supporters, mostly other young people,
who donated money to her campaign and helped her nock
doors to get out to vote. She's gracious, but sounds
genuinely exhausted with looking back on her city council race.
(18:40):
During that entire process, I felt alone, and I felt
like I was by myselone, and like I feel like
Dr Martin's been getting probably self the same way. Rose
the part has probably felt the same way. Harriet Tuppan
probably felt the same way. I felt alone throughout the
entire process of my life, and I didn't see the
bigger picture until it was all over, and I was
(19:01):
able to see the difference in which it made. And
So while you may feel alone, while you may feel
like no one understands, while you may feel like you
really want to give up, you can't because you have
to be realized to understand the bigger picture. Seeing my
eleven year old brother, who I want to be able
(19:22):
to walk to the store with the hoodie without being
shot or stops to be healed by a police officer.
That makes me push through, you know, seeing my eight
year old grandfather who became the first African American worker
at right Patter Air Force, Miss Tippy. See how proud
he is about the different things that I'm doing and
might talk to me about how you know, see you
(19:43):
to march now, I need you to resist the places
like this to spy and how proud he is of me,
And how I have all of these cousins and all
of these pieces and nephews looking at me because I'm
the only person in my family who's this involved in
this work, and they say like, I want to do
what you're doing, and I want to be more involved,
and how can I That makes me push through. We'll
(20:09):
be back with more Afropunk Solution sessions after another quick break.
Tremendous potential. I've got to know our country so well.
Tremendous potential. It's going to be a beautiful thing. Every
(20:31):
single America will have the opportunity to realize his or
her fullest potential. They've forgotten men and women of our
country will be forgotten no longer. Do you remember how
(20:53):
you felt when you woke up the morning of November nine.
Maybe you felt panicked, maybe you felt empty and numb,
or maybe you just felt angry. Both Mary Pat and
Jessica talk about how that anger showed them to get
more involved in politics. They aren't blown. Mathoni Wamboo Crawl
(21:35):
works for Emily's List, an organization that supports and trains
women to run for office. She says after the election,
a wave of piste off women of all ages decided
to do exactly what Mary Pat did. They decided they
wanted to run for office. These women, fueled by a
righteous anger, flooded the Emily's List website. At the time,
(21:57):
the site didn't even have an easy to find sign
up for them to get trained. These women founded as
if they were all following the same north star. So
I've actually heard folks at Emily's List for peat this
anecdote a lot. When you think about it, it's actually
kind of hard to find a page on a website
that isn't super public facing. That meant these angry women
really had to want to hunt this down. Yeah, they
(22:20):
put a lot of work into it. You can tell
that there were some sort of force of magnetism that
was really drawing them to take this political action that
they may not have thought about before at all in
the least bit, so they were really galvanized. So I
asked me throwning about this surge of women who were
really eager to take action and how that coincided with
(22:41):
the presidential election and the me too movement. We are
being a time where after the election of Donald Trump,
we weren't even a month later when we discovered over
a thousand names of women who had found some little
remote part of our website and end up on a
(23:01):
form that frankly, we're embarrassed to say we didn't even
realize was still up on her website and saying that
they were interested in learning how to run for office.
And we realized that we had most definitely entered a
new age and it was clearly charalleled to how women
was feeling after Hillary Clintons to see and after the
elections Donal. It turns out Anger is a pretty good motivator.
(23:27):
Anger drove these women who don't look anything like the
people who traditionally hold power in politics to want to
make change. And we have skill, we are we don't
do it women. What are some of the motivators both
personal and social that you think are compelling women of
(23:49):
color to run who maybe haven't thought about it before
or don't come from a political or an activist background.
And we've often said that women run for office because
are angry or they want to fix something, and this
is I mean, everything that is happening right now has
just bubbled to the surface. There is a lot of frustration,
(24:11):
and I think that there's been a lot of infrastructure
building that has been happening in movements that has sort
of met this moment at just the right time, like Mary,
pat and Jessica, But they only wants people to see
that if they're angry and they want to make change,
they don't have to wait until someone gives them permission
to run for office. You're probably more qualified than you think.
(24:31):
So many of us underestimate what experience really means and
what experiences actually needed when we look at running for
elected office, because there are so many of these jobs
that frankly none of us even know exists as an
elected office. It is incredibly overwhelming for a lot of
(24:53):
folks and were discouraging to sort of see themselves as
a potential candidate for elected office. Quote unquote Mathoni is
one of those people you can just tell was raised
by educators like Mary pat and Jessica. She was encouraged
to be more involved in politics at an early age.
She calls herself a movement child. But not everyone has
(25:13):
had this upbringing. Mathonis has. Some marginalized people feel shame
at not knowing enough about the political system, and that
shame drives them to disconnect from politics entirely. Mathony told
me that when people check out of politics, it doesn't
stop politics from being something that impacts their lives. She
actually shared a great quote on the subject. It's one
(25:34):
that Mayan Alice, who was a former state senator in Illinois,
used to say, and that is, if you do not
do politics, politics will still be detatio. There is something
so important about all of us in some way figuring
out how we get more engaged, and whether that is
(25:57):
running for office or helping more good pe goo to
run and therefore having some impacts on the people who
have an impact on you, is critically critically important. And
I don't you know, put all this blame on us.
There is something that has been really by design in
(26:17):
this country around leaving people in a state of struggle
that has often times led to a lot of the
disconnect and the impact of participation numbers, et cetera. But
I think we are again seeing communities rounding a corner.
There is more self organizing going on. And it's not
(26:41):
just been inside of the women's community. It's not just
after these marches. It has been happening after too many
of our young people, you know, has suffered at the
hands of the police. H That has been happening inside
(27:03):
of these streamer communities. This is what I'm only SUPs
who's been doing for thirty years, has been this slow
build up to this moment. And again, I think we're
(27:27):
kind of at a moment right now where we are
all realizing the danger of handing over this much of
our power for somebody else to make a ton of
decisions around and not having a little bit more of
our brains and in our hands inside of what is
happening from the community level of It's probably not very
(27:52):
difficult to imagine how growing up poor would make someone
check out of politics, But for Jessica and may Pett,
growing up poor only drove them to be were invested
in shaping and understanding the power dynamics unfolding around them.
And when people who have been left out of political
conversations become the ones who are making decisions, well that's
when we's hard to see real change. I grew up
(28:12):
poor in Mississippi. I'm fairly certain there's a country song
or blue song about that. That's Stacy Abrams. Remember her name,
because they'll probably be hearing it again. We talked about
her historic campaign, which, if she wins, will make her
the country's first black female governor. Let that sink in
for a moment. I spend a lot of time talking
(28:35):
about the criminalization of poverty, because unless you've been poor,
you do not always understand what it means to have
your license taken away because you can't pay a traffic ticket.
Because a minute that happens, you can't get to work anymore,
and the job you have that's barely helping you make
ends meet disappears. If you are a person of color
(28:59):
who has experienced discrimination, then you have the ability often
to see where discrimination lies and to then counteract it.
You need diversity because diversity provides information, It also provides
ways to address issues, and that diversity in and of
(29:20):
itself creates a richer and fuller response in politics or stacy.
Running for office isn't just about her. It's about making
sure leaders and government aren't all the same, so they
can actually have a chance to understand the lived experiences
of their constituents. Why does representation and diversity matter and government?
(29:42):
We have seen what happens when you have a homogeneous
set of people making decisions. Too many people are left
out of those choices, too many people are impacted negatively
by the decisions that are made. And it isn't until
we add new voices, add new people of color, add women,
(30:02):
add differences based on sexual orientation, that we then become
aware of the impediments and the prejudices that exist in
our communities, in our in our policies. And so I
see diversity as the only way to get too good answers,
because otherwise you're trying to solve a problem without full information,
and that's both intellectually void, but it also is immoral
(30:25):
because you are not serving everyone, and that is the
responsibility of good government. Understandably, many people feel strongly about
how an effective and deceitful our current political system is,
and we'll talk to some of them next at AFRO
Funk Atlanta, Corey Oliver talked to young black people about
(30:46):
their feelings are und voting. Marissa was one of them, Um,
do you vote? What do you think that's important? I mean,
I vote because I want to make sure that I
support all the efforts if there's a cause. And you're
asking me, if you're saying you believe that if I vote,
this will make a change, then I'm gonna help you
do that. I'm not gonna negate it. I don't necessarily
(31:09):
believe in it, but yeah, I'll show up to vote.
You're asking me to do something very simple. I can
do that. I just feel that there are systems in
place that everyone is aware of. However, they're not being
fixed or attended to, and they haven't been for years.
And I just feel like it's a false narrative to
(31:29):
continue to ask people to participate in a political process
that's not supporting their community. And it's so blatant, it's
so disgusting. It's hard to really trust that me voting
is really the thing that's going to make the difference,
because clearly something's askew, and I don't believe that bureaucracy
(31:52):
is necessarily the way to fix it. Everybody I know
say they two broke the vote, and with all this
heavy slave mentality, we could have broke the vote. Nobody
cares about me, nobody cares about my family, nobody cares
about my votes, and nobody gets my vote, nobody from president.
That's my campaign slowness. Stecy Abrams gets this sentiment. She says,
(32:19):
it's a failure of leadership to meaningfully reflect the people
they serve. Too many people don't see themselves reflected in leadership.
They don't see themselves or hear themselves reflected in the
conversations around them. And this is not just for Georgia,
this is nationally and because of that, too often we
(32:40):
limit what our capacity is. I believe we ought to
do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by
on bootstraps. But it's a cruel jest to say to
a bootless man that he ought to lift himself as
on bootstraps. And many negroes, by the thousands and millions,
(33:01):
have been left bootless as a result of all of
these years of oppression, and as a result of a
society that deliberately made his color a stigma and something
worthless and degrading. When Mlka was murdered, he was organizing
the Poor People's Campaign, a campaign that would unite the
country's poor for a new march on Washington to demand better,
(33:26):
better jobs, better homes, better education, better lives than the
ones they were living. As much as he championed voting
as a means of political power, he clearly understood that
it was about more than power at the ballots. It
was about the right to demand better, not just from
(33:46):
our democratic system, but for ourselves. We deserve representatives who
look like us and understand our stories. And if we
can't find those representatives, isn't there power in taking on
that mantle ourselves like a pacted Or, as Jessica puts it,
we recognize that voting alone will not change the conditions
(34:06):
plaguing black communities, But we believe that black people deserve
a loving and strategic political home to seek transformative political change.
That's not all right. Solution Sessions envisions this home through
talks with our most celebrated thinkers and dialogue with members
(34:28):
of the acropunk community who are motivated to make a difference.
Join us, and let's create the change we want to
see with the real world Solutions What's the solution, Bridget?
Do your research. What's the solution? Bridget? Find motivation and anger.
What's the solution, Bridget. There's more to building power than voting.
What's the solution, Bridget fight back. Be sure to join
(34:48):
us next week for another deep dive into the other
black experience. I liked Obama because he was a brother
that gave a lot of racist old white men, you know,
power palpitations because you had a he had a brother
in the White House, and he was smooth, but he
was still the president of the United States that I
ever think for a second he was really gonna precipitate change.
(35:09):
So on a symbolic level, I love that. But you know,
when I'm walking down in a Huntred twenty fifty and
I see murals with m Ok, Malcolm Max and Obama,
who's a disconnect between the nineteen and six season now?
And you know the name of that goal for for
lack of better terms, neoliberalism. Afro Punk Solution Sessions is
a co production between Afro Punk and How Stuff Works.
(35:31):
Your hosts are Bridget Todd and Eve's Deep Cooke. Executive
co producers are Julie Douglas, Jocelyn Cooper and Kuan Latif Hill.
Dylan Fagan is supervising producer and Kathleen Cuillian is audio engineer.
Many many thanks to Casey Pegram and Annie Reathe for
their production and editorial oversight, and many thanks to Are
on the Ground Atlanta Crewe, Ben Boland, Corey Oliver and
(35:53):
Noel Brown. The understide of Power is performed by Algiers.
Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at Apropunk
MHM
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