Georgia U.S. Senate Candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock Explains How Trump's Presidency Challenges His Faith
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As pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, Rev. Raphael Warnock often gets asked what it is like to preach in the same pulpit as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his response is always the same: “I don’t know what it’s like to fill his shoes because I’ve never tried.”
But one person’s shoes Warnock is sure he can replace, in fact, are those of current U.S. Senator Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), who he hopes to defeat in a special election set for later this year in November. It is important to note that, because this is a special election, Warnock was not on the ballot in Georgia’s June primary. Loeffler was appointed to finish John Isakson’s term in 2020 after he resigned in 2019 for health reasons.
Now, Warnock is campaigning against her to fill that seat with current polls showing him as the top Democratic contender in a race with 20 other candidates of both parties. If no one garners more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two contenders will face each other in a runoff in January 2021. Rep. Doug Collins, a key Trump ally, is the other top Republican in the race.
Warnock talked to The Root about how his Christian faith informs his politics around healthcare, policing, Trump the LGBTQ+ community, which he fully supports and says the church should as well, and his views around women’s reproductive rights, which he says she be protected.
Defund the Police, Explained...for the Last Time
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There are a lot of misconceptions about what defunding the police means, which, at its simplest definition, is a reallocation of resources. Everyday citizens assess their budgets on a regular basis to determine if they are wasting money and could spend their precious dollars more efficiently. As police officers continue to kill Black people across the country, activists and some forward-thinking politicians are calling for their local governments to do the same thing and reimagine what public safety looks like—and one of those calls is to stop giving cops so much money to carry out public safety measures that police fail at executing.
“When I say defunding the police, what I mean is pulling money from their expansive budget and putting that money back into the community and reducing the militarization of police, by removing some of those militarized weapons that they use to exact silence on us,” Kim Moore, an activist who organizes around the issue in San Diego, told The Root.
In Minneapolis, the city council has moved to disband the police and reconstruct it to more effectively meet public safety needs and to reallocate money to social services that help prevent crime. Here in New York City, elected officials talked a good game about defunding the cops, but ended up with a result that did little to defund the NYPD.
Generally speaking, few politicians have an appetite for reducing police personnel because they see a robust law enforcement presence as essential to maintaining the social order and don’t want to be accused of being soft on crime. Also, as several activists have explained to The Root, many residents, even Black ones, can’t see a life without police officers, according to Pew Research Center.
That requires political education and engagement. Our explainer will attempt to be a solid starting point.
What would defunding the police look like?
For starters, it doesn’t mean getting rid of all police officers—though many abolitionists ultimately would prefer that. It simply means thinking of ways to make us safe without having to rely on cops. Police officers would still be available to address violent crime, but everything else they are called to do would be reassigned to unarmed professionals and money would be reallocated from the police department to pay for those services.
Another key component of defunding would have to include decriminalizing public health issues like drug use or marijuana possession. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times says that Portugal and the United States took a very different approach to narcotics use. Portugal decriminalized hard drugs while the U.S. hunkered down on policing.
“As I found when I reported from Portugal a few years ago, the number of heroin users there fell by three-quarters and the overdose fatality rate was the lowest in Western Europe,” Kristof wrote. “Meanwhile, after decades of policing, the United States was losing about 70,000 Americans a year from overdoses. In effect, Portugal appeared to be winning the war on drugs by ending it.”
Instead of $6 billion going to say, the NYPD, take one billion of that and hire unarmed mental health professionals to deal with mentally disturbed people. And deploy more unarmed cops to deal with traffic stops than uniformed cops with guns. Equally important, scale back unneeded traffic stops and searches of Black and Latinx people who rarely are carrying the drugs and weapons cops assume they have; to the contrary, it’s white people who are most likely in possession of such items.
So far, cops are serving one main purpose.
“Their job is to manage inequality and to put people in cages,” Derecka Purnell, a civil rights lawyer and activist leading the “defund the police” efforts, told The Root. “Defunding the police is one step, just one step of a lot of different steps that is being put on the table to remove the power from police, to remove the tools from police, to remove resources from police, to start to shift them away of their ability to come into contact with people in the streets. It’s a step, it is not an end. It’s a means to do something broader, which is to abolish the prison-industrial complex and to build something much more beautiful in its place.”
Why are some politicians—and citizens—so against defunding police departments?
Lack of imagination, but mostly, it is the accusation of being soft on crime—especially for Democrats.
Most politicians are not visionaries. They simply pass the buck or are too scared of facing down powerful police unions while fearing the loss of their jobs. The Root has covered this issue extensively and most elected officials we interview bristle at the thought of defunding police forces.
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden wrote an op-ed opposing the idea of defunding the police earlier this month, instead calling for more than $300 million to be spent on community policing—which does not prevent crime or stop those same cops from killing people with impunity.
U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) appreciates the spirit of defunding police but said during a recent interview with The Root that he doesn’t fully support the idea. The Congressional Black Caucus presented a generally weak plan to address police brutality that does virtually nothing to reallocate resources.
Even though most Black people feel cops are racist, a majority of them still do not support cutting funding from police departments. Much of the trepidation over defunding the police stems from a lack of community engagement and political education, Moore said.
“I always start by talking about our community right now,” she said. “‘What are the needs in our community?’ ‘What do we see happening to our communities?’ We see police responding to calls for people in distress. ‘Why should police be responding to calls to people in distress?’ Well, we’re not sending coalitions out on these calls. ‘Why aren’t we sending coalitions out on these calls?’ ‘Do we have programs for that?’ ‘Do we have funding for that?’ When I paint a picture that way, they start to understand and see that, ‘Oh, OK. So we’re talking about putting money back into communities that have historically been divested from?’ When I approach it that way, it makes it easier to bring people around to defunding the police and why it’s so critical and how it could keep our community safe.”
Ironically, Black politicians are just as resistant to defunding the police as white ones, albeit, perhaps, for different reasons. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot gave the excuse in a recent interview that defunding its police department would cut off a pathway for people of color to the city’s middle class—as if they cannot find other jobs and she, as the Chicago’s top executive, isn’t creative enough to create jobs for Black people that don’t allow them to kill people on their ways to economic prosperity (Or maybe she isn’t). Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser has called for an increase in her department’s budget and so has Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. The Congressional Black Caucus has its own police reform bill, but it doesn’t call for defunding police departments.
In the end, it really comes down to fear of being labeled soft on crime. During the 1992 campaign, Clinton, then governor of Arkansas returned to his state to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally impaired Black man. After the execution, he was quoted as saying, “I can be nicked on a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.”
Clinton’s predecessor and 1992 opponent former President George H.W. Bush used racist soft-on-crime tactics against Michael Dukakis with the Willie Horton ad. Horton killed someone after being released in Massachusetts then-prison work furlough program.
Democrats may not call themselves law-and-order politicians—at least not in a post-Ferguson climate. But they still struggle to grapple with the reality that people are hungry for a new model of policing that doesn’t include giving them more money to engage in so-called “community policing.”
What are the origins of defunding the police?
The abolitionist framework spans decades, but it most famously comes from the scholarship of Angela Davis, who interrogates the carceral state’s jails and prison systems. Her theoretical framework establishes that our punitive approach to dealing with crime must be replaced with a restorative one, as she explained during a lecture at Harvard in 2003.
Prisons and the policing forces that put them there “relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism,” she said.
Michelle Alexander’s 2010 groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow, renewed the conversation around prisons and policing a decade ago, taking to task Democrats and Republicans who relied on racism to stoke fears in Black communities that the only way to deal with the waves of crime impacting their communities is to incarcerate their way to safety.
The 1994 crime bill, which Biden authored and still takes little responsibility for, is to blame for that. During the 2016 presidential primary, Hillary Clinton was dogged with reminders of her “superpredator” comments as first lady and struggled to shake the label. She and Biden were carceral politicians, and activists continue to remind us as much.
Mariame Kaba, police and prison abolitionist, wrote recently of law enforcement’s origins of slave patrol and that there is no real way to reform such an institution. Kaba also wrote that politicians’ solution to police brutality is to create more rules—which cops almost always break.
Kaba explains:
Look what has happened over the past few weeks — police officers slashing tires, shoving old men on camera, and arresting and injuring journalists and protesters. These officers are not worried about repercussions any more than Daniel Pantaleo, the former New York City police officer whose chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death; he waved to a camera filming the incident. He knew that the police union would back him up and he was right. He stayed on the job for five more years.
Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints over nearly two decades, culminating in the entire world watching as he knelt on George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.
Why on earth would we think the same reforms would work now? We need to change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers.
Defunding the police doesn’t mean getting rid of police departments, as Kaba notes. It means making them obsolete.
Who will be around to catch bad guys if there are no cops?
Cops really don’t prevent crime anyway.
Police officers simply respond to crime and they don’t even do that well. A recent study by the New York Times that assessed how some of America’s biggest police departments use their time reveals that only 4 percent of their resources are devoted to violent crime. Some 37 percent of an officer’s time is spent responding to non-criminal calls, according to the study.
“I’m completely sympathetic to Black people, even middle-class white people, who have been told that safety means police and that justice means conviction because that’s what we’ve been socialized to believe our whole lives,” Purnell said. “Until you’ve gone through political education until you’ve organized and studied around those concepts, it makes complete sense why people would have that impulse.
“One thing I would say to particularly middle-class black families is that most people who experienced home break-ins, for example, have incomes of less than $10,000. And most of the people who commit home break-ins are people who do it out of economic desperation. So ironically, if you’re Black and middle-class and your income is anywhere above $7,500, you’re much more likely to be safe from that violence. The people who experienced the most vulnerability to home break-ins and to violence are people who are economically oppressed and poor and black.”
According to USA TODAY, the number of police officers who have left the force per 1,000 residents nationwide has dropped over the past two decades and crime has dropped along with their departures.
How do I learn more about defunding the police?
As far as written materials, you can start with these articles. Mariama Kaba, one of the nation’s foremost prisons and jails, wrote a column about what defunding the police means and the history behind it. Eric Levitz wrote in New York magazine how defunding police is not enough. In this San Francisco Chronicle article, the difference between abolishment and defunding of the police is explained.
As far as books to read, your first one should be Angela Davis’ , which delves into the genesis of the prison industrial complex. It will provide critical foundations on which to better understand the defund movement. , by Alex Vitale is a great study of what a society without policing as we know it could look like.
Amy McGrath Wins Kentucky Democratic Primary, but the Establishment Is on Notice
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After a week of nail biting over the tight U.S. Senate race in Kentucky, Amy McGrath has now been declared the winner. Kentucky state Sen. Charles Booker was leading the race with nearly 79 percent reporting last week, but the final tally has McGrath with 45.1 percent of the vote and Booker with 42 percent.
She will face Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in November.
While McGrath snagged the victory, it was a much bigger fight than she and her supporters in Washington anticipated. With a $40 million war chest, she was supposed to steamroll Booker and the rest of the field. But the current uprisings against police brutality breathed life in Booker’s race and set him on the path to a major upset and fresh injection of cash to his coffers.
Booker may have fallen short this race, but he proved that a Black, radical progressive who boldly called for defunding the police can be competitive in Kentucky. His political career likely will not end with this loss as U.S. Sen. Rand Paul’s seat is up for grabs in 2022.
In New York, the 16th Congressional District House race has not been called officially but Jamaal Bowman has a 25-point lead (or more than 12,000 votes) over Eliot Engel and few experts expect the incumbent to make up that difference.
In the 12th Congressional District, also in New York, U.S. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney is ahead with 41.7 percent of the vote with her rival Suraj Patel, who has 40.1 percent. Maloney and Engel are waiting for mail-in votes to be counted. That race remains a toss-up, with no clear timeframe of when a winner will be declared.
Either way, this is a win for progressives. Even with Booker’s loss, we know what is possible. The South can be won by progressives if those progressives are recruited properly and get the support of the community.
Minneapolis Council VP Andrea Jenkins Explains What It Means to Defund the Police and Legislate as a Black Trans Woman
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Minneapolis City Council Vice President Andrea Jenkins told The Root in an Instagram Live interview what exactly she means when she and her fellow council members call for defunding the police.
“Defunding the police means, in my mind, creating a new public safety mechanism that doesn’t require people with a gun to be able to respond to every need that our community has,” she said. Jenkins, who is the first openly Black trans woman to win elected office in America, said that the work around creating a new safety model in Minneapolis requires political imagination—and that much of her work is showing residents and elected officials that a new reality is possible.
During our 50-minute conversation, Jenkins also discussed her frustration over the dearth of attention Black trans women receive when compared to Black men who are killed by police. We spoke about how she gets along with faith leaders and Black male activists who may not accept her because she is trans.
For her part, Jenkins says she gets along fine with community leaders because she comes as herself and is uncompromising with what her values are.
Jenkins shared memories of the night she won her council seat in 2017 and the responsibility that feels to pave the way for other Black trans women who want to enter a career in politics.
Now We Wait: With Mail-In Ballots Yet to be Counted, Here's What We Know So Far From Tuesday's Primary Races
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It is very likely that former middle school principal Jamaal Bowman may have unseated 31-year-incumbent Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel in Tuesday’s New York primary, but the full results of the race will not be known for some days because mail-in ballots still need to be counted. Though Bowman delivered a victorious speech in Yonkers, N.Y., last night, it is unclear when his victory will be certified by election officials.
We are no longer in the days when we will get election results confirmed on the same night.
That is our new reality for elections during COVID-19, and after New York, Virginia and Kentucky primaries on Tuesday, election officials in those states are wading through an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots that could take weeks to tally. Here’s what we know so far.
New York
The biggest upset in the making so far comes from the 16th Congressional District with Bowman leading Engel with 65 percent of the vote. It doesn’t appear that Bowman will lose much ground as mail-in ballots come in.
The Democratic establishment rallied around Engel with endorsements from Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and much of the Congressional Black Caucus—and he still is getting his ass kicked. The race has not been called for Bowman yet, but this feels like a forgone conclusion.
It is fair to say that if Bowman is the presumptive Democratic nominee, he will cruise to victory in November, as the district tends to vote Democrat.
Incumbent U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke is leading the field in the Ninth Congressional District with 62.3 percent of the vote over Adem Bunkeddeko, who is a distant second with 17.9 percent of the vote. Bunkeddekko lost by six points to Clarke in the 2018 primary.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her 14th Congressional District race in a landslide victory, earning 72.6 percent of the vote. Her closest competitor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera was able to pull together 19.4 percent of the vote.
No surprise there.
Up in the 17th Congressional District, progressive Mondaire Jones is leading the competition by nearly 25 percentage points and it doesn’t appear that he’ll lose any ground. If he wins he would be the first openly gay Black member of Congress.
In the 15th Congressional District, New York City Councilman Ritchie Torres, a 2019 Root 100 honoree, is leading state Assemblyman Michael Blake and fellow councilman and extreme homophobe Ruben Diaz. If elected, Torres would join Jones as another openly gay Black man in Congress.
Kentucky
The most controversial primary comes out of Kentucky where state Rep. Charles Booker is making Amy McGrath fight for her political life in the Democratic U.S. Senate race. She was supposed to cakewalk to the nomination to face off against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in November, but the recent uprisings have lifted Booker into the national spotlight in ways few observers in Kentucky and Washington, D.C., anticipated. As of now, McGrath is leading by roughly seven points, according to the Lexington Herald Ledger.
But that lead could dwindle, as mail-in ballots come in. Per Politico: “The exact number of votes left to count isn’t clear, but the 58,000 tallied in early returns doesn’t include anything from the state’s two largest and most Democratic counties, Jefferson and Fayette—home to Louisville and Lexington, respectively.”
Local officials say they won’t be tabulating those votes until June 30, so be ready to wait for results from this race.
The most troubling aspect of this primary is how the state closed hundreds of polling stations in the most populous areas. Usually, there are 3,700 polling stations across the state. Tuesday, that number was cut to 170, leading to long lines of people being cut off from voting.
Black Voters Matter, a civil rights organization that organizes black people to vote around the country, is on the ground in Kentucky and has been tweeting about people waiting in line for hours at polling stations, only to be locked out.
But people refused to leave and stayed until they got a chance to vote. But a court order filed by the Booker campaign allowed voters to receive more time to vote.
Virginia
Down in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District, which the New York Times describes as “Republican leaning,” Cameron Webb is the winner of the Democratic primary for that race. The Roanoke Times reports that Webb, an internal medicine doctor and director of health policy and equity at the University of Virginia, earned more than 26,800 votes or 68 percent of the vote. Almost all of the precincts have reported results.
If Webb wins in November, he will be the first black physician to have a vote in the U.S. Congress, according to the Times.
Sen. Cory Booker breaks down what ‘Defund the Police’ means to him
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U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told The Root during an Instagram live interview on Juneteenth that he agrees with the spirit of the “defund the police” movement but is not for an all-out abolishment of law enforcement. He also delved into what exactly defunding the police looks like from his perspective and how getting rid of qualified immunity in the case of police officers accused of killing people would bring more accountability to policing.
Sen. Booker also discussed LGBTQ+ rights, the recent SCOTUS rulings, COVID 19 relief efforts in the Senate and much more during his hourlong interview with The Root. Check out the video above.
With challengers on her Left, NY Rep. Yvette Clarke says she is more than Progressive enough to lead
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BROOKLYN, N.Y.—U.S Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) and a group of faith leaders are marching down Church Avenue here in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn behind a huge banner that reads, “#LETMEBREATHE,” referencing the police killing of George Floyd.
A faith leader on the back of a truck speaks loudly into his megaphone.
“No Justice, no peace! No Justice, no peace!”
“Say his name: George Floyd!”
“Say her name: Breonna Tayler!”
The march of more than a hundred people was organized by local pastors who have a very specific message against police brutality and gun violence that doesn’t antagonize the police. But Ace Burns, a protester unaffiliated with the protest, roller skated around the marchers with other ideas.
With his own megaphone in hand, he interjected with his own cadence.
“When-I-say-police, you-say-mur-de-rers!”
Some of the marchers repeat the words and continue doing so until the faith leaders regain control. Burns fell into the background. I approached him and asked what he felt about the organizers muffling his chants and if he feels Clarke represents his views for changes in policing and her policies in general.
“I’m a radical,” he said. “I’m one of these guys who has been watching the prayers and the silent vigils and the kneeling. I’m tired. I can’t bend down anymore. I love Yvette Clarke, but she’s been around for a long time. And [New York Gov. Andrew] Cuomo been around and [New York City Mayor Bill] de Blasio been around. Everybody’s been around for a long time and nothing has changed. We need something different.”
He declined to tell me who he was voting for, but he made one thing clear: Anybody but who is in office now. That includes Clarke.
Burns isn’t the only Brooklynite—or voter across America, for that matter—who feels this way. A lot of people are unsatisfied with the incumbents representing them.
Across the nation, young political upstarts at every level are challenging Democratic incumbents they feel are no longer legislating on the progressive bona fides that got them elected into office. Emboldened by the success of Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, a new crop of progressive challengers are pushing incumbents to speak to the urgency of the national uprisings that have come as a result of recent police killings—or be ready to lose your seat.
There are several key national races across the country, including in Kentucky where state representative Charles Booker is making what was supposed to be an inevitable win for Amy McGrath a closely contested U.S. Senate Democratic primary race; the state has cut more than 95 percent of polling places, in what election rights observers are calling a clear case of voter suppression. In The Bronx, Jamaal Bowman is aiming to unseat Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) in what experts say is a race that is currently trending in Bowman’s favor. Both Kentucky and New York, along with Virginia, are holding primaries Tuesday to determine those races.
Here in Brooklyn, Congresswoman Clarke is facing that very challenge with three primary challengers of her own, all claiming that she has lost touch with her district and lacks the political imagination to advance the current needs of her district.
I’m on the corner of Church and Nostrand Avenues at the beginning of the march with Clarke as she and a group of pastors. Most of the people don black tops in solidarity for peace and justice and surgical masks to stave off COVID-19. Most of the hundred or so people are Clarke supporters who are carrying her campaign flyers and placards urging people to support her. These are her roots: civic organizations, church folk, some young folk. The consistent theme across each demographic: black women.
She will need all of them to support her in Tuesday’s New York primary.
Her toughest opponent, Adem Bunkeddeko, came within 6 points of defeating her in the 2018 primary. Isiah James, an Army vet running on a Democratic Socialist platform, has consistently hammered home the message that she is a “fake progressive.” Chaim M. Deutsch, a New York City council member, has name recognition, but, as the New York Times notes, has run a campaign based on fear-mongering.
Clarke is still the favorite to win. But the generational battle of ideas and political outlook amid the current climate the “defund the police” movement and a more crowded 2020 primary field than 2018 may very well endanger her chances to earn the seniority in Washington, D.C., she and her loyal constituents covet.
A primary defeat for Clarke will also mean the New York congressional delegation will lose its only black female representative. If Bunkeddeko or James wins, a younger voice with the urgency of now will represent the district in Washington. If Clarke loses, a very important, but older and, perhaps, more conservative constituency, will lose the voice they trust and have to grapple with a shift in political outlook that they aren’t prepared to fully embrace.
I spoke with Clarke on Saturday via a Zoom conference call and we talked about the accusations that she is not a progressive. She smiled and walked me through her own political evolution. She spoke of her mother who immigrated from Jamaica to Brooklyn and became a city councilwoman and power broker in New York politics. She told me about her grandfather on her mother’s side who was a follower of Marcus Garvey’s form of Black nationalism. All of those personal threads in her family tree shape her politics.
I told her that her opponents feel she lacks the political imagination for today’s climate and that she needs to step aside for fresher, younger leadership, as Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez made clear in 2018.
“I’m for the democratic process,” she told me. “I’m not discouraging anyone from running for office. What I’m doing is presenting to the community my lifelong record of commitment support, of engagement on the ground. Ultimately, it’s the voters that make that determination. You spoke about those young women, those sisters that came into the House of Representatives. But I’m also serving with Eddie Bernice Johnson, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee. I’m serving with a whole host of sisters, Barbara Lee, very progressive sisters that have been in this body since before I was in the body. I’m not looking at this as a generational thing.”
What makes Clarke’s primary complicated and different from Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez’s races is that both of those women ran against white men in a year that challenged the Democratic establishment to make room for the black female elected leadership and to reward black female voters who keep the party competitive in local and national races. Presley’s win, in particular, was a victory for black women. But a primary loss for Clarke means there will be no black female representation from New York City, which has the largest population of black people in the country.
We have to also consider that candidates like Bunkeddeko and James can be bolder now because the politics of this era allow them to. “Black candidates in general have not had the same latitudes regardless of what space they have been in to be able to stand bolder,” Anoa Changa, a political activist and staff writer at Prism said.
She added that while the national progressive wave against incumbents—especially black women—should be conducted with care because the upstarts running as progressives today are doing so because the people they are challenging paved the way for them to do so.
“I don’t think that there has been necessarily the same level of understanding from strategists and campaign staff who are supporting primary challengers, even when it’s black candidates, when it goes into why they’re making the case in the community,” Changa said. “I think people aren’t accounting for the sentimental value of having particular people as their elected officials. They don’t consider what that person has done and the way they may have shown up in the community—even if they have not shown up on the policies that could benefit the community. The way they have physically been present and shown up in the community still matters.”
Bunkeddeko and James have very clearly called for defunding the police. Clarke told me she supports the spirit of the defund movement, but uses more careful language that doesn’t call for all out abolition, like James, for example. But she definitely rejects any narrative that suggests she isn’t in sync with the urgency of the current uprisings against police violence.
“With the talk I’m hearing on Capitol Hill right now, engaging with my colleagues right now. These folks, they are ready for systemic change in the House of Representatives. Remember, we have one of the most diverse House of Representatives in the history of the House of Representatives. We can pass everything we want to pass. Now we got to turn our sights to that senate. We got to change that senate. We got to flip that Senate, we got to flip the White House.”
Two of her opponents do not think she should be there when either of those flips happen.
Bunkeddeko said he has strengthened his campaign apparatus to pull him over the hump today. His endorsements from The New York Times, Justice Democrats and other progressive groups have energized his base here in central Brooklyn in ways that may benefit him precisely because of the national uprisings.
“We are at a moment of reckoning about how we think about race in this culture,” Bunkeddeko said in a phone interview. “I think it took a pandemic, no entertainment, no sports for us to fully concentrate and see, ‘Look: this is a country in which we have clearly two systems of justice and that is not how we’re going to be able to function as a society going forward or as a people.’ And so, back to this whole removing a couple of bad apples, no. It is about systemically changing and removing the tree and the soil from which these apples are coming from and that requires us to really confront some difficult issues that maybe folks like Miss Clark were just not willing to push the ball forward on.”
Like James and Clarke, Bunkeddeko, 32, also comes from immigrant roots. His parents immigrated to the United States from Uganda to escape a civil war. He grew up in Queens and later moved to Brooklyn where he became a community organizer and, quickly, Clarkes’ political opponent.
I asked him about the Congressional Black Caucus and how much they value incumbency over primary challengers because of how coveted seniority is in Washington—especially for black elected officials who have historically been blocked from earning it.
His response is that he is more than willing to build coalitions in the CBC, but that Clarke lacks the “imagination” needed to consider what is possible and that her time in office hasn’t yielded much for central Brooklyn.
“What has she done with that seniority and experience? That’s the question I always ask,” Bunkeddeko said. “We got folks, this is the epicenter of the nation’s housing crisis. For over a decade. Ms Clark said nothing about housing till we ran on housing. That’s when she started talking about housing. Now, to me, that is imagination. Getting people to move in a direction that they didn’t think was even possible or should have been possible. And, to me, that’s the kind of work that we need to do in Washington, is moving people who didn’t think this thing was workable into a place that is workable, but part of it is you have to believe. So when people say Ms. Clark has had seniority or experience, I often ask them, ‘What has that translated there for us in this community?’ And there’s nothing, no legislation, no resources back to the community. Her tenure has really been a failure, I believe.”
During our Zoom call, Clarke struck back against those allegations, aiming at Bunkeddeko. She cited that she is fighting for refugees and went to Tijuana to help black refugees seek refuge in the U.S. “This brother’s parents were refugees and were given asylum in America. I haven’t heard him say one thing about that, other than the fact that he’s the child of refugees,” she said. “But what are you doing about it? Where’s your bona fide in terms of your progressivism?”
She added: “It’s interesting to hear people spin their narratives out there when they themselves ... It’s gas lighting, it’s gas lighting of our community. I think that that’s very disingenuous and should not be happening, not in a black community, not in this moment where we need unity in our community.”
James isn’t buying it. A retired Army vet who was born and raised in Brooklyn, he said during a phone interview that part of what makes Clarke no longer fit to serve the Ninth District is what he says is her dated politics.
“To see this community slide down the tubes under black leadership is abysmal,” he told me. “ This is Shirley Chisholm’s old district. The fact that Shirley Chisholm was such a bold advocate for change. Even Yvette Clarke’s own mother just came out and said that she’s not as vocal as she would like her to be. Her own mother said that in the Times yesterday. I think the moment is calling for bold reformational leadership and change. I hope to be that change in Washington.”
Back at the march, Clarkes’ support is strong and vibrant as they walk down Church Avenue into East Flatbush. Her supporters are walking up to folks on the sidewalks and the bodegas encouraging them to vote, passing out flyers.
After making some short remarks atop a truck leading the march, she stepped back down to the streets and told me how she was feeling about her election chances and about the movement in general.
“I’m extremely optimistic,” she said. “I’ve seen how the people who have stayed in the streets have made a substantive difference in legislatures across the country. Already, we’re seeing movements around the policing in communities. Some have gone to the extremes of reimagining what their police departments should look like: disbanding their police departments and demanding a human-centered policing strategy. That’s what these people are asking for right now.”
U.S. Sen. Cory Booker talks ending Qualified Immunity in policing and more with The Root on Instagram Live
Read on The Root
U.S. Sen. Corey Booker’s support for ending qualified immunity for police officers is one of the strongest calls for tackling police brutality by a high-profile elected official yet and he will join The Root on Instagram live Friday, June 19, at 2 p.m. ET to explain his stance in detail.
Qualified immunity shields public servants from civil legal proceedings for actions done on the job. You can read my write up on it here.
The national uprisings stemming in reaction to police killings of black people across America have pushed lawmakers into drafting policies with real teeth and re-allocating resources away from police departments and into social service programs that can actually help address public safety. Booker (D-N.J.) will share his thoughts on the defund the police movement, the power of police unions, and if law enforcement can actually be reformed out of its racism foundation.
I also will ask the senator about incumbency and when it is appropriate to primary someone or not.
Booker will discuss COVID-19 recovery efforts, particularly current legislation in the Senate that would provide extended economic relief to Americans beyond the first $1,200 stimulus checks that were distributed earlier this year.
Dozens of New Jersey towns, many of which are predominately black, have some of the worst drinking water in the country, so Booker will discuss how he’s addressing this. Our conversation will explore what election protection looks like for November and much more during our 50-minute interview.
NY Congressional Candidate Jamaal Bowman has establishment Democrats losing their shit
Find this article on The Root
The Bronx, N.Y—
Jamaal Bowman is feeling good—like, really good.
He and his campaign manager are standing atop the Van Cortlandt Park-242nd Street subway station platform handing out his campaign flyers to commuters rushing to make the train. The stop is one of those elevated stations that’s outside, where you can see the street down below and the horizon before you. Some of the commuters nod without making much eye contact and take a flyer as most New Yorkers usually do as a defense mechanism to avoid eager people trying to sell them their mixtape or something.
Then came Joe Hernandez, who was getting off at the front of the train almost exactly where Bowman was passing out flyers. Bowman went into his pitch.
“Hello. I’m Jamaal Bowman and I’m running for Congress and..”
Bowman, a former middle school principal who grew up in Manhattan, didn’t have to say much else because Hernandez knew who he was and said he was supporting him.
“I like [Eliot] Engel,” Hernandez told Bowman before giving him a fist bump. “I used to vote for him. But I heard he was away during this virus. If he’s not going to be here with the people, to hell with him.”
“I appreciate that, man,” Bowman replied.
“You’re going to win,” Hernandez said.
Since U.S. Rep. Engel made his disastrous hot mic comments a few weeks ago at a Bronx press conference addressing the unrest connected to the police killings of black people across the country, the 16-term Democratic incumbent has been playing defense in ways neither he nor his colleagues in Washington ever imagined. During the press conference with Bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr., Engel said, “If I didn’t have a primary, I wouldn’t care,” after Diaz refused to allow him to speak because he worried it would politicize the event.
Engel tried to apologize, but the damage was done. The Atlantic’s piece outlining his absence away from his district during the pandemic certainly hasn’t helped, either. The incumbent who was considered very safe may now be dangerously close to losing his seat.
I asked Bowman if he felt Engel had gotten too comfortable and didn’t see him coming.
“Not just comfortable but content in the way like, ‘I’ve had this job 31 years, people keep voting me into office.’ Sixteen times so far. I guess he feels that he’s entitled to the position,” Bowman told me as he greeted commuters through his surgical mask. “That sense of entitlement is what came through in that statement and how he’s taken the voters of this district for granted for decades. That’s unacceptable and unforgivable. The gentleman who mentioned once he found out he’s not here for the people during the pandemic, it captures the same sentiment, you know?”
In politics, moments often define the course of a campaign, either shifting momentum in your favor or against it. Sometimes, it’s a national tragedy that requires the candidate to dig deep inside of themselves for moral clarity to help navigate people through the labyrinth of hurt and pain they’re experiencing. We saw politicians’ shine bright or dimmer during 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Ferguson, Mo., and, more recently, uprising against police brutality amid a global pandemic. Campaigns have risen or fallen on the capacity of a candidate’s ability to rise to the occasion—or not.
In the case of Bowman, it’s been the uprisings, a pandemic and, perhaps more consequential, Engel really fucking up. The insurgent feels he can pull an upset in the 16th Congressional District race in next week’s New York primary Tuesday, June 23.
Engel’s colleagues in Washington, D.C., know it. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn and Rep. Adam Schiff endorsed Engel on Sunday and so did Hillary Clinton. Bowman has his own heavyweight endorsements from Washington, with U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) both backing him. Two of the U.S. Senate’s most liberal members, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) are also throwing their support behind the former school teacher.
That so many big names are jumping into a primary race with an incumbent of Engel’s standing is a sign that the incumbent is in serious trouble.
“The fact that you have Schiff and Clyburn and these other folks running to consolidate behind Engel at the last minute is such a clear message that Engel is scare and other centrists and moderates are scared of losing power to the left,” said Tiffany Cabán, who has endorsed Bowman and is a progressive public defender who lost her race in 2018 for Queens district attorney by a mere 55 votes. “My message is if they are running scared, it means we’re winning.”
New York State Sen. Gustavo Rivera told The Root he was standing just 10 feet away from Engel when he made those comments. He didn’t overhear them in real time, but he was very troubled once he heard the audio played in local media. Rivera wasn’t going to endorse anyone during the primary but changed his mind once he heard Engel’s comments.
“When that audio became public, it encapsulated for me that, ‘You have served well, but it is time to have somebody that can actually show a true commitment to who we are today and who the Bronx is right now,’” Rivera told The Root.
Rivera added: “Eliot is a good dude. I have nothing negative to say about the job that he’s done, except that it’s past tense. It is the moment to move forward.”
There isn’t much polling in this race. The last poll was in October, when Data for Progress, which is aligned with Bowman, showed Engel with 29 percent of the vote versus just 10 for Bowman. The takeaway was that 60 percent of voters were undecided. A newer poll released Wednesday from the same organization shows Bowman leading by a 10-point margin.
During my hourlong conversation with Bowman on the Van Cortlandt Park-242nd Street subway platform, he made it clear that the main problem with too many mainstream Democrats is that they are unwilling to move forward on the more radical changes America needs to make for the marginalized communities they claim to represent. For example, he supports defunding the police and says he is committed to articulating what that exactly means so people are able to reimagine what public safety means with armed cops.
“It means a reallocation of resources,” he said. “Right now, they are funding lethal training, military arms, limited education and aggressive tactics. That’s where funding in training is located. We need to raise standards for police. They need to earn a bachelor’s degree and have continuing education for you to remain a police officer, number one. No. 2, police aren’t military. We need to take away the military equipment that we see police use. No. 3, we need non-emergency responses to cases that happen all over the country. Like Atatiana Jefferson in Texas, for example. That was a non-emergency situation. Officer came, shot through the window and killed her. So it means reallocation of resources towards public health and investing in jobs, investing in housing, investing in education, investing in mental health support. That’s what communities and police need more than anything else.”
More specifically, what Bowman is calling for is a new social order. The ways in which we govern human behavior is based on neoliberalism, which, in large part, centers individualism over the group and favors free markets that often abuse those who are at the bottom. A key component of neoliberalism is profiting from imprisonment. Activists forced Hillary Clinton and other politicians over the years to reject campaign contributions from private prison companies.
In Bowman’s vision for public safety, he wants to take that sentiment further by making restorative justice the norm in the American criminal legal system.
“It’s restorative,” he said. “In a school, two kids have a fight. If instead of suspending the child from school and sending them home you bring the two children together and you have a conversation, mediation, you get an understanding of the back story related to the fight. You develop an understanding of how that fight caused harm to not just those two but to the community around them. Most of the time other children are involved as well. After that discussion, the community is restored. Without restorative justice, we have a punitive system. In that punitive system, children and individuals are discarded and dismissed. Restorative keeps them in the community and makes the community stronger because we collectively learn from the issue that’s in front of us. There’s no learning happening in our criminal justice system right now. It’s recidivism, it’s crime and punishment, crime, jail time.”
Bowman feels that while Democrats are doing a better job of serving black and brown people than Republicans, they are too tethered to moderate politics that acquiesce to corporate interests that undermine progress and allow injustice to thrive.
The most recent electoral revolt against neoliberal elites took place in 2018, when Reps. Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Pressley (D-Mass.) joined a national wave of insurgent progressives in upsetting well-established and otherwise progressive incumbents in their primaries. Upon entering Congress, “The Squad,” which includes Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) made it clear to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that it was no longer business as usual on the Hill.
One of the issues with Engel and his black and Latinx constituents in the Bronx is that the current national uprisings reveal the incumbent’s disconnect with calls for abolishing and defunding the police. In districts with large minority communities that have endured international, news-making police killings like Eric Garner and others, that spells trouble for people like Engel and those who are considered to not have responded to those killings appropriately.
“The reality is that the collective Democratic Party has not advanced an equitable safety package that specifically speaks to communities of color—even more so the experiences that black bodies and brown bodies face with their local law enforcement agencies,” said Ify Ike, a political strategist and founder of the social equity firm Pink Cornrows. “In a city like New York, that’s very important.
“Bowman presents the baton pass that’s necessary for communities to start building with leaders that aren’t afraid of voicing their issues from jump as candidates, instead of banging their heads against the status quo of the establishment,” Ike added.
Ike made clear that there are people in Washington who are considered “establishment,” but aren’t as closed-minded to radical politics as many assume. She cites Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), who were both Black Panthers. But when Bowman talks about the establishment, he also speaks in a cooperative tone that allows for give and take without conceding his core values.
One body he is especially looking forward to working with if he wins is the Congressional Black Caucus.
“I know there are people within that space that agree with me on many things,” he said. “There’s a lot that needs to be done in this country to deal with poverty, to deal with institutional racism, to deal with sexism, genderphobia, classism, housing, education. There’s so much work to do and there’s so many people, Republican and Democrat, who are serious about doing that work sans the noise. So let’s block out the noise, let’s stay rooted in our thinking. Let’s stay rooted in the needs of the people of the country and let’s do the work.”
After an hour or so passing out flyers, we exited the platform and made our way to street level. Speaking about why he decided to run against Engel in the first place, Bowman said the math was in his favor.
“In the last primary, there were 30,000 total votes—which is about 9 percent of the district and he got 22,000 votes,” Bowman told me.
(Engel got 22,160 votes and his other three primary opponents garnered a total of 7,918 votes, per Ballotpedia)
“I realized, ‘Damn. I could get 22,000 votes.’ You know what I’m saying? You have someone with a chair on the Foreign Affairs Committee making trillion-dollar decisions on behalf of our community that doesn’t benefit our community at all and he got 22,000 votes and he’s doing that? That’s unacceptable. Not just here, but anywhere in this country.”
Terrell talks to Kentucky Senate Candidate Charles Booker
Watch the video on The Root
Kentucky State Rep. Charles Booker (D-Louisville) told The Root that momentum is moving in his favor and he doesn’t have to change his tone or adjust how he articulates his progressive brand of politics for white folks, either.
Amy McGrath, the Democratic Party establishment’s favorite in the June 23 Kentucky primary, was supposed to cakewalk her way to the nomination for a November face-off against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). But the national uprisings and Booker’s presence at local protests have elevated his profile to upset-candidate status.
During his hourlong interview on Instagram Live with The Root, Booker called for defunding the police and laid out a detailed definition of what that could look like from a policy standpoint, as well as sharing his belief that white Kentuckians support his outlook on policing because they are being abused and killed by cops, too.
He opened up the interview expressing how Louisville, Ky., resident Breonna Taylor’s killing by police impacted him personally and how it made him reflect on raising two daughters. We also spoke extensively about LGBTQ+ rights, Medicare for all, the Green New Deal and reining in America’s military spending.
Booker also told us he is not running for re-election for his state House seat because the seat “belongs to the people.”
NY Congressional Candidate Jamaal Bowman Has Establishment Democrats Losing Their Shit
Read the article on The Root
The Bronx, N.Y—Jamaal Bowman is feeling good—like, really good.
He and his campaign manager are standing atop the Van Cortlandt Park-242nd Street subway station platform handing out his campaign flyers to commuters rushing to make the train. The stop is one of those elevated stations that’s outside, where you can see the street down below and the horizon before you. Some of the commuters nod without making much eye contact and take a flyer as most New Yorkers usually do as a defense mechanism to avoid eager people trying to sell them their mixtape or something.
Then came Joe Hernandez, who was getting off at the front of the train almost exactly where Bowman was passing out flyers. Bowman went into his pitch.
“Hello. I’m Jamaal Bowman and I’m running for Congress and..”
Bowman, a former middle school principal who grew up in Manhattan, didn’t have to say much else because Hernandez knew who he was and said he was supporting him.
“I like [Eliot] Engel,” Hernandez told Bowman before giving him a fist bump. “I used to vote for him. But I heard he was away during this virus. If he’s not going to be here with the people, to hell with him.”
“I appreciate that, man,” Bowman replied.
“You’re going to win,” Hernandez said.
Since U.S. Rep. Engel made his disastrous hot mic comments a few weeks ago at a Bronx press conference addressing the unrest connected to the police killings of black people across the country, the 16-term Democratic incumbent has been playing defense in ways neither he nor his colleagues in Washington ever imagined. During the press conference with Bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr., Engel said, “If I didn’t have a primary, I wouldn’t care,” after Diaz refused to allow him to speak because he worried it would politicize the event.
Engel tried to apologize, but the damage was done. The Atlantic’s piece outlining his absence away from his district during the pandemic certainly hasn’t helped, either. The incumbent who was considered very safe may now be dangerously close to losing his seat.
I asked Bowman if he felt Engel had gotten too comfortable and didn’t see him coming.
“Not just comfortable but content in the way like, ‘I’ve had this job 31 years, people keep voting me into office.’ Sixteen times so far. I guess he feels that he’s entitled to the position,” Bowman told me as he greeted commuters through his surgical mask. “That sense of entitlement is what came through in that statement and how he’s taken the voters of this district for granted for decades. That’s unacceptable and unforgivable. The gentleman who mentioned once he found out he’s not here for the people during the pandemic, it captures the same sentiment, you know?”
In politics, moments often define the course of a campaign, either shifting momentum in your favor or against it. Sometimes, it’s a national tragedy that requires the candidate to dig deep inside of themselves for moral clarity to help navigate people through the labyrinth of hurt and pain they’re experiencing. We saw politicians’ shine bright or dimmer during 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Ferguson, Mo., and, more recently, uprising against police brutality amid a global pandemic. Campaigns have risen or fallen on the capacity of a candidate’s ability to rise to the occasion—or not.
In the case of Bowman, it’s been the uprisings, a pandemic and, perhaps more consequential, Engel really fucking up. The insurgent feels he can pull an upset in the 16th Congressional District race in next week’s New York primary Tuesday, June 23.
Engel’s colleagues in Washington, D.C., know it. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn and Rep. Adam Schiff endorsed Engel on Sunday and so did Hillary Clinton. Bowman has his own heavyweight endorsements from Washington, with U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) both backing him. Two of the U.S. Senate’s most liberal members, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) are also throwing their support behind the former school teacher.
That so many big names are jumping into a primary race with an incumbent of Engel’s standing is a sign that the incumbent is in serious trouble.
“The fact that you have Schiff and Clyburn and these other folks running to consolidate behind Engel at the last minute is such a clear message that Engel is scare and other centrists and moderates are scared of losing power to the left,” said Tiffany Cabán, who has endorsed Bowman and is a progressive public defender who lost her race in 2018 for Queens district attorney by a mere 55 votes. “My message is if they are running scared, it means we’re winning.”
New York State Sen. Gustavo Rivera told The Root he was standing just 10 feet away from Engel when he made those comments. He didn’t overhear them in real time, but he was very troubled once he heard the audio played in local media. Rivera wasn’t going to endorse anyone during the primary but changed his mind once he heard Engel’s comments.
“When that audio became public, it encapsulated for me that, ‘You have served well, but it is time to have somebody that can actually show a true commitment to who we are today and who the Bronx is right now,’” Rivera told The Root.
Rivera added: “Eliot is a good dude. I have nothing negative to say about the job that he’s done, except that it’s past tense. It is the moment to move forward.”
There isn’t much polling in this race. The last poll was in October, when Data for Progress, which is aligned with Bowman, showed Engel with 29 percent of the vote versus just 10 for Bowman. The takeaway was that 60 percent of voters were undecided. A newer poll released Wednesday from the same organization shows Bowman leading by a 10-point margin.
During my hourlong conversation with Bowman on the Van Cortlandt Park-242nd Street subway platform, he made it clear that the main problem with too many mainstream Democrats is that they are unwilling to move forward on the more radical changes America needs to make for the marginalized communities they claim to represent. For example, he supports defunding the police and says he is committed to articulating what that exactly means so people are able to reimagine what public safety means with armed cops.
“It means a reallocation of resources,” he said. “Right now, they are funding lethal training, military arms, limited education and aggressive tactics. That’s where funding in training is located. We need to raise standards for police. They need to earn a bachelor’s degree and have continuing education for you to remain a police officer, number one. No. 2, police aren’t military. We need to take away the military equipment that we see police use. No. 3, we need non-emergency responses to cases that happen all over the country. Like Atatiana Jefferson in Texas, for example. That was a non-emergency situation. Officer came, shot through the window and killed her. So it means reallocation of resources towards public health and investing in jobs, investing in housing, investing in education, investing in mental health support. That’s what communities and police need more than anything else.”
More specifically, what Bowman is calling for is a new social order. The ways in which we govern human behavior is based on neoliberalism, which, in large part, centers individualism over the group and favors free markets that often abuse those who are at the bottom. A key component of neoliberalism is profiting from imprisonment. Activists forced Hillary Clinton and other politicians over the years to reject campaign contributions from private prison companies.
In Bowman’s vision for public safety, he wants to take that sentiment further by making restorative justice the norm in the American criminal legal system.
“It’s restorative,” he said. “In a school, two kids have a fight. If instead of suspending the child from school and sending them home you bring the two children together and you have a conversation, mediation, you get an understanding of the back story related to the fight. You develop an understanding of how that fight caused harm to not just those two but to the community around them. Most of the time other children are involved as well. After that discussion, the community is restored. Without restorative justice, we have a punitive system. In that punitive system, children and individuals are discarded and dismissed. Restorative keeps them in the community and makes the community stronger because we collectively learn from the issue that’s in front of us. There’s no learning happening in our criminal justice system right now. It’s recidivism, it’s crime and punishment, crime, jail time.”
Bowman feels that while Democrats are doing a better job of serving black and brown people than Republicans, they are too tethered to moderate politics that acquiesce to corporate interests that undermine progress and allow injustice to thrive.
The most recent electoral revolt against neoliberal elites took place in 2018, when Reps. Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Pressley (D-Mass.) joined a national wave of insurgent progressives in upsetting well-established and otherwise progressive incumbents in their primaries. Upon entering Congress, “The Squad,” which includes Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) made it clear to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that it was no longer business as usual on the Hill.
One of the issues with Engel and his black and Latinx constituents in the Bronx is that the current national uprisings reveal the incumbent’s disconnect with calls for abolishing and defunding the police. In districts with large minority communities that have endured international, news-making police killings like Eric Garner and others, that spells trouble for people like Engel and those who are considered to not have responded to those killings appropriately.
“The reality is that the collective Democratic Party has not advanced an equitable safety package that specifically speaks to communities of color—even more so the experiences that black bodies and brown bodies face with their local law enforcement agencies,” said Ify Ike, a political strategist and founder of the social equity firm Pink Cornrows. “In a city like New York, that’s very important.
“Bowman presents the baton pass that’s necessary for communities to start building with leaders that aren’t afraid of voicing their issues from jump as candidates, instead of banging their heads against the status quo of the establishment,” Ike added.
Ike made clear that there are people in Washington who are considered “establishment,” but aren’t as closed-minded to radical politics as many assume. She cites Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), who were both Black Panthers. But when Bowman talks about the establishment, he also speaks in a cooperative tone that allows for give and take without conceding his core values.
One body he is especially looking forward to working with if he wins is the Congressional Black Caucus.
“I know there are people within that space that agree with me on many things,” he said. “There’s a lot that needs to be done in this country to deal with poverty, to deal with institutional racism, to deal with sexism, genderphobia, classism, housing, education. There’s so much work to do and there’s so many people, Republican and Democrat, who are serious about doing that work sans the noise. So let’s block out the noise, let’s stay rooted in our thinking. Let’s stay rooted in the needs of the people of the country and let’s do the work.”
After an hour or so passing out flyers, we exited the platform and made our way to street level. Speaking about why he decided to run against Engel in the first place, Bowman said the math was in his favor.
“In the last primary, there were 30,000 total votes—which is about 9 percent of the district and he got 22,000 votes,” Bowman told me.
(Engel got 22,160 votes and his other three primary opponents garnered a total of 7,918 votes, per Ballotpedia)
“I realized, ‘Damn. I could get 22,000 votes.’ You know what I’m saying? You have someone with a chair on the Foreign Affairs Committee making trillion-dollar decisions on behalf of our community that doesn’t benefit our community at all and he got 22,000 votes and he’s doing that? That’s unacceptable. Not just here, but anywhere in this country.”