Park Slope Reader

election

Doug Schneider: On Rebuilding & Reform

By Filed Under: Community, Feature Tagged With: , , ,

Meet the Civil Rights Attorney and Democratic Community Leader Running to Represent Brooklyn’s 39th District 

“When people see politicians with children, they often assume that the children are being used as props. For me, bringing them to work is a necessity and a reality,” said Doug Schneider, over the phone. He regularly brings his children to work, including in the political arena. His seven-and-a-half-year-old son is a 1st grader at PS 107; his daughter is four. Schneider is transparent about the challenges of being a politician and equal caregiver; and, after a year of overseeing remote learning for his son, among countless other pandemic-related complications, he makes a strong case for normalizing children in the workplace— including on the campaign trail.  

In the fall of 2020, Doug Schneider, a civil and criminal defense litigator and Democratic District Leader for the 44th Assembly District, announced his candidacy to represent City Council District 39 in the upcoming Democratic primary election. District 39 includes Park Slope, Gowanus, Carroll Gardens, Columbia Waterfront, Cobble Hill, Windsor Terrace, and portions of Borough Park and Kensington. Schneider joined the primary for term-limited Councilman Brad Lander’s seat, while Lander himself is in the running for City Comptroller. Recently, Schneider’s campaign received the endorsements of 39 community leaders, including support from other District Leaders, PTA leaders, climate activists, worker’s rights advocates, and activists for transportation and street safety. 

“As we face a post-pandemic recovery, we need experienced leaders with a proven record of results,” Community Leader, Dorothy Siegel, told Bklyner in a statement. Siegel is the founder of ASD Nest, a community-focused program that specializes in serving the needs of children living with an autism spectrum disorder. Siegel is right— City Council needs an experienced leader with both a history of community leadership and an agenda to ensure a full economic recovery. 

In addition to historic economic fallout, the novel coronavirus pandemic exposed some of our nation’s deepest inequalities. In New York City, once the center of the global outbreak, many low-paid workers were forced to continue working in unsafe conditions, without proper PPE or adequate salary. When schools shuttered, women disproportionately left their careers to become full-time caregivers, and now struggle to reclaim footing in the job market. Those from historically underserved communities have experienced the highest rates of eviction, viral infection, and death. For these reasons and more, Schneider is committed to not only rebuilding District 39 but also plans to address the longstanding discrimination that has hindered minority communities. 

The focus of Schneider’s campaign platform is: 1) Transportation and Street Safety, including reimagined sidewalks and bike lanes, accessible public transportation, and the expansion of traffic safety enforcement and speed cameras; 2) Economic Recovery for small businesses, women and working parents, and out-of-work New Yorkers; 3) Education, including updated school infrastructure, expanded after-school programs, a pandemic-response taskforce, and substantial investments in higher education; and 4) Constituent Services, providing a broad range of services to constituents, including information on government programs and affordable housing resources, and an expansion of language access at the polls.  

Schneider’s ties to Brooklyn—and more specifically, to Park Slope— predate his plans to run for City Council. Though his parents are both from Brooklyn, Schneider and his siblings were raised in New Jersey. After graduating from law school and marrying his wife Joni, the couple decided to settle in South Slope, where they have resided for almost 15 years. Around the time of the 2016 presidential election, Schneider began to consider his run for City Council, as he did not like where the Trump Administration was leading the country. 

“I always had an interest in politics but never saw myself as someone who could get elected,” said Schneider. His involvement in volunteering for political campaigns goes back to 1999. After graduating from college, he worked as a congressional aid before attending law school. In recent years, he has served as a Trustee to the Park Slope Civic Council and has previously held a seat on the District Committee for Brad Lander’s participatory budget initiative.

“I saw where things were headed and I didn’t like where they were going. I began to think that I could make a difference,” Schneider said. He thought about the leading issues of the Brooklyn Democratic Party and the need for greater transparency. “I decided to run on issues that were at the forefront because they matched with the things that I have always been passionate about,” he told me. Schneider then shared his lived experiences as a small business owner, attorney, and activist. 

Schneider’s law practice focuses on civil and criminal cases, including employment discrimination and business litigation, and occasionally, pro-bono representation for street safety activists. He has worked with clients on cases related to employment discrimination, including a technician who was fired for a disability and a personal assistant who was wrongfully fired for being pregnant while she was on approved maternity leave. Schneider has also represented individuals charged with state and federal crimes, in addition to individuals under investigation by the federal government and the State of New York. 

As an experienced attorney and fierce advocate for civil rights issues and criminal justice reform, Schneider is also committed to bringing police reform to City Council by passing legislation to hold officers accountable for misconduct, and reallocating resources to invest in underserved communities. 

In July of 2020, after months of school closures across the country, Schneider organized a DOE town hall meeting to discuss NYC’s re-opening plans and devised strategies for creating long-term solutions to safely re-open schools. Subsequently, Schneider organized a protest outside of City Hall in November, demanding that New York City schools stay open. Despite the city’s increasing positive test rate for COVID-19, the positive test rate in schools was under 1%. 

“There was a path to doing this effectively, but the plan to fully re-open schools couldn’t be waiting until COVID completely disappeared,” Schneider told me. “We knew that we would eventually get to a point like today, where we are vaccinated, but we had to act before then.” He explained the lag in long-term planning and its negative effect on the mental and emotional health of students.  

In addition to the implementation of the Pandemic Response Emergency Plan (PREP), Schneider’s multi-step solution to long-term pandemic planning, he also plans to expand after-school programs, restore arts curriculum, and address the longstanding racial divides within New York City’s school system. Schneider has pledged to end the school-to-prison pipeline by replacing law enforcement with social workers and mental health professionals.

I asked Schneider how he and his family were managing to recover after a year of such intense devastation. 

Quietly, I wondered how a politician like Doug Schneider—with his extraordinary record of experienced leadership and Herculean efforts to rebuild his community— was able to hold down a day job AND be an equal caregiver. His answer was remarkably, human. He told me that his family survived in 2020. They continued to persist one day at a time— albeit still adjusting and still making mistakes, like “too much screen-time on some days.”

“We have to forgive ourselves for our mistakes made during the pandemic that allowed us to get by,” he told me. “New Yorkers are resilient and communal […] and we all did what we had to do to survive.” 

Maya Wiley Runs for Mayor of New York City

By Filed Under: Feature, Part of the Solution, Sally Kohn Tagged With: , , ,

“We all see the world from the prism of our experience. The question is: How broad are our experiences? How deep are they?” Maya framed this fundamental question over the phone in the Fall of 2020, just weeks after announcing her groundbreaking – and unconventional – candidacy to be the next mayor of New York City.

Maya Wiley framed this fundamental question over the phone in the Fall of 2020, just weeks after announcing her groundbreaking — and unconventional — candidacy to be the next mayor of New York City. Wiley is a human rights activist and civil rights attorney with a decades-long record of leadership at the forefront of movements for social, economic, and racial justice. She is many other things, too. A black woman. A Brooklyn mom. A child of political icons.  

But what Maya Wiley is definitely NOT is a politician. Which is probably both her greatest asset and her greatest challenge in the mayoral contest.

Wiley was born in 1964 in Washington, D.C., to politically active parents who met in Syracuse. In many ways, her birth was a testament to the complexities of our nation, then as now. Wiley’s father, George, was a professor of organic chemistry who became a leading figure in the civil rights movement. He rose to national leadership in the Congress of Racial Equality and then founded the National Welfare Rights Organization. As a Black man organizing mostly women of color to agitate for dignity and justice in public assistance, he was an early pioneer of what we now call intersectionality — how gender and race and class compound and connect.  Wiley’s mother, Wretha, was a white woman from a Texas town Maya describes as “all white and very racist when she was growing up” who understood the injustice of exclusion and myopia and left to blaze a different path. I should clarify here that Maya Wiley is my friend from years of movement work together, and I met her mom several times before her passing. I can’t help but think that Maya’s candidacy to be the first Black woman mayor of the City of New York represents their daughter but also their hopes for our nation — that we could be the kind of place, the kind of people, who would choose their daughter to lead. 

Because who Maya Wiley is is central to understanding what kind of mayor she would be. After graduating from Columbia Law School and then clerking in Philadelphia, Wiley moved to Brooklyn in 1991 where she’s lived ever since. She held positions at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the ACLU, in addition to being a Senior Advisor on Race and Poverty at the Open Society Foundations, advancing human rights and justice around the globe. But perhaps the defining role in Wiley’s career was the one she created for herself when in 2002 she founded the Center for Social Inclusion, one of the nation’s first action-oriented think tanks focused on dismantling structural racism and inequity. With a tiny bit of seed money and, initially, running the organization without paying herself a salary, Wiley created applied research projects led in partnership with communities of color to develop and document transformative policy solutions in housing, food systems, technology access, and more. Yes, Wiley was also a prominent legal analyst for MSNBC and NBC until recently, a Senior Vice President and professor at The New School. Wiley may not be a conventional candidate but she is keenly aware of how city government works, how to manage within it, and what needs fixing to make us fairer and more just. She obviously has the chops to do the job.  She served as the first Black woman to be Counsel to a New York City Mayor, serving early in  Bill de Blasio’s administration. And after leaving in 2016, Chaired the NYC Civilian Complaint Review Board, sending the case of the officer who killed Eric Garner, former Officer Daniel Panteleo, to the NYPD to get him off the force.

But the formative part of Wiley’s career was spent not just talking about bold solutions to our biggest problems — but actually developing them.  When most politicians were still struggling to use words like “intersectional” in a sentence, Wiley was working with grassroots communities and leading innovators to actually put intersectionality into practice — and policy.

And that deep track record from her past shows up in her campaigning today. “I am running because this city can and must do more than recover from Covid,” she told me over the phone when we spoke. “It must reimagine itself as a place where we can all live with dignity. That means a place where we develop without displacement. That means a place where we put the public back in public safety. That means a place where the government is a partner and not a pariah. That means a place where communities of concern get the investments they need in order to become whole.”  

All of which Wiley insists is possible if we stop making bad choices forcing unnecessary trade-offs between helping affluent New Yorkers and Wall Street versus everyone else. “We can be a city that holds onto what we all love about New York,” Wiley says. “We love the fact that New York City is one of the most diverse cities in the world. That brings so much culture and innovation and makes us a place everyone wants to be. We have to hold onto that. But we can’t do that unless we reimagine the city as something that can include everyone.” In other words, Wiley argues, we don’t have to choose between fairness for all versus opportunity for some. There’s another way, where we “come together and have a real, honest conversation about what will make us stronger, what will make us more fair and more just… and bring this city back even stronger.” Wiley points to examples where we can make the city government more principled and more efficient and effective, invest in innovative affordable housing strategies and infrastructure investments that benefit us all.

But can we really do both?  Yes, insists Wiley with her characteristic mix of gumption and faith. “That’s why we need a non-traditional leader. Because we always could do both. We just haven’t had that option.”

Women of color in particular, Wiley explains, have never had the luxury of just “sticking with the status quo or reacting to it. We’ve always had to create.” She makes the case for why we need more diverse and inclusive leadership not just based on principle but practice — the real, concrete difference that leaders with broader perspectives bring to the table.

“I don’t embody every other,” Wiley explains, “but there’s a recognition when you are forced by society, the way we’ve structured society, to have to see many different experiences. Not everybody is forced to do that, but if you are black and female and have been fortunate enough to see what it’s like to be in a segregated, overcrowded, underfunded public school and to see what it’s like in a private school with small classrooms… to have the privilege of living in a black neighborhood where folks could barely get by and living uptown where people are living in mini-mansions… you have a sense of what other experiences are like.”  Which, to Wiley, is the point. We have constructed a society in which some of us, especially those of us often represented in positions of leadership, are distinctly less likely and even insulated from the experiences of others in our society. Electing Black women leaders isn’t just important because it makes our government look more like the people it represents but because diverse leaders can actually understand the lives and needs of all our communities.  When we talk about leadership and say “experience matters,” we also have to broaden our understanding of experience. Actually having lived the plights of ordinary New Yorkers should be a political prerequisite for any leader professing solutions for those plights. 

Which also may be the doorway to a different type of leadership altogether.  Wiley isn’t just positing herself as some sort of singularly unique and therefore singularly able savior, in the vein of ego-centric messiah-like political figures before her. She wants to bring her intersectional experiences and ideas into governing but she doesn’t want to stop there; she also wants to reimagine governing to be inherently more inclusive, participatory, and transparent. To this end, as part of her campaign, Wiley is organizing “People’s Assemblies” that bring wide ranges of New Yorkers together to discuss their priorities and needs and challenges and concerns — ”no matter which candidate they support,” Wiley notes — and come up with shared solutions. “So we’re not just telling folks, ‘Here’s what we’ll do for you.’  We’re starting a democratic practice of coming together and having these conversations.”  

In the first of these People’s Assemblies on the subject of gun violence, participants ranged from an Afro-Latina woman who grew up in public housing and a white man who was a former cop. The conversation — just the fact of them coming together and talking, and the shared struggles and solutions they and others were able to connect over — was, as Wiley describes it, “fantastic.” Several more People’s Assemblies will be organized by the campaign in the coming weeks and months.

“We’re not just asking for votes, we’re asking for community, we’re asking for folks to be in conversation,” Wiley adds. In this sense, Maya Wiley isn’t just a transformational candidate, she’s also running a transformational campaign.  

Which in so many ways makes sense given Wiley’s community organizing roots. In 2014, as Wiley was preparing to work in the de Blasio Administration — where she would ultimately experience how the transformative potential of city government could be wasted under an ineffective, visionless mayor — Wiley spoke to then Politico-reporter Maggie Haberman about the move. “You could have gone and made a million dollars,” Haberman noted, asking why Wiley wanted to work in city government instead.

In response, Wiley shared a memory from her father. “[A] friend of his once asked him, when do you stop, George And his answer was, ‘When no one else is hungry. And his friend said, Well, that’s never going to be the case. And he said, Well then you never stop.’”

Let’s hope Maya Wiley never stops fighting to bring her transformative experiences and ideas — and the experiences and ideas of all New Yorkers — to the fore. If that fight ultimately takes her to City Hall, we’ll be a better city and a better community because of it.

Brooklyn For Warren: She’s Got a Plan

By Filed Under: Community Tagged With: , , , ,

Brooklyn for Warren members meet Elizabeth Warren in New Hampshire

If you support Elizabeth Warren, what is your plan? She’s got a plan; what’s yours?“

This is the mantra of grassroots organization, Brooklyn for Warren, a group of Brooklyn- based activists who are ALL IN for a Warren- 2020 Presidency. The preliminary idea for the canvassing chapter began in April 2019, not long after the Massachusetts Senator brought her presidential campaign to Long Island City. This is the same city where Amazon withdrew its plans to build a corporate campus, a decision Warren supported. Founder of Brooklyn for Warren, Milo, began holding sessions in his Brooklyn home, inviting the public to join in conversations regarding the need for structural change. These conversations led to the discussions of a future- America under a Warren Presidency. Networking with the digital community of “All In for Warren” quickly spread the word to Warren supporters living in the five boroughs, that a local group was organizing. By June the small group was visible to the public, in ways of canvassing, marching in parades, hosting happy hours events, and spreading their work throughout Brooklyn. They are also visible on multiple social media platforms and are recognized for crafting “Elizabeth Warren’s Comprehensive Meme Plan,” a database of appropriated images that pair Warren’s policies with pop culture references.

“We are all about creating visibility,” says Milo. “Warren appeals to ALL people and protects ALL people. This is why we are building a community of her supporters. We want to help her become the next President of the United States.”

We connected with the leaders of Brooklyn for Warren’s Policy and Social Media Teams to discuss the fundamentals of grassroots organizing, and to learn more about Warren’s plans for structural change. We wondered how her plans might affect the five boroughs.

As a note, Brooklyn for Warren is not part of Senator Warren’s official campaign and cannot speak directly for her or her campaign. They do not have insider knowledge of policies that have not already been made public. The following questions and answers include policy proposals that Warren has publicly discussed.

A local member of Women with Warren and Brooklyn for Warren outside the Park Slope Food Co-op

In a little over four months’ time, Brooklyn for Warren has grown from an idea to a dynamic grassroots organization with seven teams, 17 team leaders, and an email list with over 1,300 subscribers. Can you tell me how the policy team evolved? 

I attended the second house party hosted by Milo, back in April. As we began to grow, we developed our “Policy of the Week” segment for our biweekly happy hours. These sessions teach volunteers about one of Senator Warren’s policy proposals and give them talking points for how to discuss them when they are out canvassing, phone banking, or tabling. As the program quickly developed, it became clear that we should have a dedicated policy team, which I now co-lead. We organize the policy of the week segments and are working on additional tools to give volunteers easily digested summaries of Warren’s policies.

What is the impact social media can have on a campaign? Do you have any examples of how social media has increased awareness of Senator Warren’s presence, policies, and presidential campaign in Brooklyn?

It helps us organize events and get people involved and active. Warren herself tweeted out about our presence in Prospect Park with Cardboard Liz a couple of months ago. It definitely helped raise attention to what we’re doing here in Brooklyn. I have great conversations via DM (direct message) on a daily basis with people wanting to not only get more involved but also want to learn about her plans. Some of these people reach out because they feel more comfortable with one-on-one conversations. Also, people have been offering to send handmade Warren merchandise including buttons, stickers, and bath towels as a token of appreciation for our work.

How is Senator Warren going to help rebuild state and local infrastructure? Are there any plans to rebuild infrastructure in NYC?

Senator Warren has not released an infrastructure-specific plan, but a number of her plans address infrastructure in various ways. For instance, her plan for rural America invests $85 billion to create a public option for Broadband Internet access. Her green manufacturing plan invests $2 trillion over the next ten years into green energy research, green energy manufacturing, and exporting that technology around the world. Much of this, necessarily, would be devoted to infrastructure in various ways. Her plan for economic patriotism would create millions of good-paying domestic jobs.

There are massive shortages of affordable housing across the country. NYC’s affordability crisis affects New Yorkers of nearly every income group in every community across the five boroughs. Does Senator Warren have a plan to combat high rent and lack of affordable housing in NYC?

Her plan is a national one, not specific to NYC, but it would certainly help the severe lack of affordable housing we face here. The plan would make a historic investment in affordable housing that would bring rent down by 10% across America. It also creates 1.5 million new jobs through construction and rehabilitation of affordable housing and addresses the historic impact of the racist and discriminatory policy of redlining, where the government subsidizes mortgages for white families, but not black and brown families. Warren will subsidize down payments for first-time homebuyers in historically redlined communities, which will help close the wealth gap between black and white families. It is fully paid for by imposing an estate tax on inheritances over $7m.

Warren’s own story is not unlike the stories of many working-class Americans and single-parent families who struggle economically. How does she appeal to voters differently than her opponents?

Warren’s approach and tactics become a part of every conversation. She is able to communicate through ideas, not guise or rhetoric. Current and previous Presidents have based their politics on slogans like “hope” and “great.” Warren’s politics are based on ideas and plans, not slogans. She’s really in charge of the conversations, and if you have something that is consistent and tangibly sound, then you can speak to all voters.

©Brooklyn For Warren

There are a number of Democratic presidential candidates who effectively speak to core American values and present a strong vision for the future of our country’s economy. What makes Senator Warren especially unique to the other presidential candidates?

The thing about Senator Warren is that, although it looks like she has all these plans to solve all these different problems, at their core, every single one of her plans is addressed at fixing one core problem–the vast inequality in American society. It’s the problem that she has spent her entire career studying and trying to remedy. What makes her array of plans different than in any other campaign we’ve seen is that they resonate with people–they’re not just a disparate array of white papers–they show that she has a deep understanding of all the different ways people are hurt by inequality, whether it is the racist history of redlining, the huge power imbalance between the 1% and everyone else, the ways corporations have changed the rules of the game to their advantage, the ways working mothers are held back by the lack of child care and so many more.  And they present an optimistic vision of how our society can be equal. While her plans are bold and visionary, they are also very practical. They are fully paid for, and she has talked about the need to eliminate the filibuster so that they can actually become law.

I believe down to my toes (to borrow Warren’s phrase) that once people get to know Senator Warren, those who are open to having their minds changed will become convinced that she is an exceptional candidate who really stands out from the rest. There was some interesting polling earlier this summer that measured how closely people were paying attention to the primary–among those paying the closest attention, Warren was in the lead. To me, that says that once people have the opportunity to learn about her, many of them will end up supporting her because of the strength of her ideas and conviction, her toughness, her record of getting things done, and her innate goodness that just shines through.

How can our readers contribute to your cause?

We welcome anyone of any ability. Everyone has something to give for the fight– we see it daily in our group. From broke students to those who are able to do more than their $2,800 campaign limit. We welcome those in Park Slope and elsewhere who want to use their energy to support the strongest economic and social justice candidate to represent ALL of Brooklyn. Our success is based on community building around Elizabeth Warren, and our team members are all a reflection of her. It’s a further testimonial to her inspirational personality and candidacy, and to the people who have come together to build something. It’s a positive reinforcement daily.

For more information on Brooklyn for Warren, including upcoming events and ways to contribute, please visit: brooklynforwarren.org

The Reader Q & A: Presidential Election

By Filed Under: The Reader Q & A Tagged With: , ,

Photography by Maria J. Hackett

We are now about a year out from the next Presidential election. There is already a large and ever growing field of possible Democratic candidates seeking to unseat Individual #1. We went around Park Slope to ask various residents who they think will win the Presidential election in 2020 and why. Here is what some had to say.

Raymond Tsway I would say Andrew Yang, in support of him. Also, it would be very new and different to have a Chinese President. I have some friends who out their own money there and to have some friends who are in the same position like me where they don’t have much money to put $2,500 down for a candidate you know speaks a lot. I think that, especially like now, we’re also proven that with Barack Obama, you know, minorities can actually win. You know, even though Trump was kind of like, “Oh, we had Barack now we had to go go to the other side, ” like hey, I think we can get a Chinese president. Andrew Gang.

Adam Simms I think the Smart money is on Bernie Sanders. All the Bernie supporters butt-heads decided to vote for Trump because he wasn’t water. I think I want Andrew to win, just because he’s new blood. But I also want Elizabeth Warren. Uh, so whose gonna win… Again, I feel like the smart money is on Bernie, even though he is another white guy, I feel he may be the best to get shi*t done. I’d really like Andrew to kind of get in there through and become more of something.

Najma Daylb Essentially, overall, Americans are very short term. So, like, it depends on the state of the economy and 2020. In my personal opinion, because if the economy is really like crappy, then people will go towards a different presidential candidate. The American people also don’t show up to vote often. The odds of Trump being reelected in 2020 is really high if the economy isn’t crappy, in 2020. Otherwise, I would say Elizabeth Warren is my first option because she’s pretty great.

Bernie Sanders, I don’t think so and Joe Biden, I think his time has passed. I think she’s [Elizabeth Warren] is more likely to win, because I feel like although in some places Bernie Sanders, or Joe Biden might win in the primaries. When it comes down to it, people are going to pick someone that isn’t too far off what they believe, and I feel like she’s not completely eradicate, like to completely make colleges free. She’s like not very radical about a lot of things where puts her int he middle for everyone of differing backgrounds to work with.

Melody To be honest, I don’t know. I mean, there’s how many now democratic people versus however many people are Republican. I’m really hoping everyone can get everything together to kind of just choose one candidate that’ll work. I’m really hoping that I mean, I loved Bernie before and definitely voted for Hillary when it was not an option. I don’t believe Biden is an option that we shall all take. I don’t know if, Elizabeth Warren, everyone will take. But I’m hoping with someone who’s a bit more, progressive a bit more in the essence of Barack Obama, where at least he got everyone together and was able to like get it. And be like “Okay, cool. We’re all in this together.” And we all really, really rally together. I’m really, really, hoping it’s not Trump. But I don’t think I have a set like solid in my gut of, yes, this is what’s gonna happen.

The True Progressive

By Filed Under: Community Spirit Tagged With: , , ,

On September 12, New York City’s incumbent Mayor, Bill de Blasio, sailed through the mayoral primary with 74.6% of the vote. The next day, Park Slope resident Libby Edois-Alb, one of the mayor’s longtime advisers and friend of the family, announced she was running a write-in campaign against him as the “true” progressive candidate. I sat down with her ahead of the November 7 general election to discuss what made her decide to run, whether the decision has created a rift between her and the mayor, and what she means when she says “true” progressive.

 

Roberto Paul: So you recently announced that you’re running for mayor on a “true” progressive platform. Can you tell us more about what you mean by this distinction?

Libby Edois-Alb: Sure. So many times we see candidates campaigning as progressives and then once they are elected they abandon nearly everything progressive they promised. My good friend Mayor de Blasio is a prime example of this. He campaigned on police reform, affordable housing, green energy, etc., and then once elected he started taking millions of dollars from real estate, doubled down on Broken Windows arrests targeting the very people he promised to defend on the campaign trail, softened his stance on police, and refused to address the cloud of smog hanging over the New York City metro region every day.

And why do you think he did this?

Well, I think once candidates get elected they realize that if they want to get re-elected there are powerful lobbies and interest groups with the money and political influence they need to raise money. They end up selling out their values in order to build a war chest big enough to scare off any potential challengers in the current money-takes-all system.

Those are strong words, and I know the mayor is a longtime friend of yours. Do you worry that by speaking so candidly you might jeopardize your relationship with him?

Honestly it’s too late for all that. Leading up to the 2013 campaign he spent hours upon hours consulting me. Night and day he labored over each and every point of his platform. I spent years helping him hone a progressive message that was moral, just, incorruptible, one that erred on the side of defending society’s vulnerable. All the ideals he personified during his first campaign, the real talk with police, spending a night in public housing, the tale of two cities – all of that came directly from his consultations with me, while he lay awake at night, tossing and turning in his bed, and then to seem him win, move into Gracie Mansion, and so abruptly abandon everything we planned hurt me very deeply.

So you would say that you were his conscience, his voice of reason, if you will?

Yes, definitely, his progressive mother protector alter ego.

And so now that you are running against him how will your campaign be different?

It’s quite simple, really. I’m going to run on the progressive platform that we perfected together over the years, the one he abandoned. I’m going to commit to raising no money, ever. Not from individuals, not from corporations, not from anyone.

Well, I mean the obvious rebuttal to that is that you won’t be competitive. Without money you won’t get on the ballot, qualify for televised debates, receive matching public funds, the list goes on and on. How will you get your message out to voters?

I think that the majority of the public is as fed up with money in politics as I am, and they will hopefully understand and appreciate why a candidate would commit to such a drastic course of action. We’ve got to start relying on voters, particularly those who claim they are part of the “resistance,” to go the extra mile and help us get our message out without money. I’d also like to take this opportunity to publicly challenge Bill to do the same, to commit to raising and spending no money, ever, but sadly I know that he won’t do it.

And what is the message you hope that voters will get out there for you, since you won’t be able to pay for any advertising or campaign materials on your own?

Because I accept no money, I’ll be able to spend all of my time working on my five-point platform for all New Yorkers, rather than scurrying from fundraiser to fundraiser like my opponent. One: No money, ever. That one’s simple. Two: Make New York a real sanctuary city. Three: Police reform. Four: Affordable housing. Five: Make NYC green.

Do you care to elaborate on these further?

Yes, of course. Point One I explained. Point Two: I will make New York a real sanctuary city. Federal agents were recently caught lurking around a Brooklyn courthouse, arresting people with no prior criminal records. On day one I am going to issue a blanket trespass warning to all ICE agents on city property. If you don’t have a warrant signed by a judge in your possession, you are trespassing. And if you don’t stay away from the city’s courthouses, schools, MTA stations, etc., the NYPD is going to escort you off the premises and arrest you if you fail to comply.

That sounds like a provocative, but relatively easy legal measure to implement. Why do you think the mayor hasn’t done this yet?

As I said, I think it’s about being progressive in name only. Of resisting with words, and symbolic gestures, rather than implementing real policies with legally enforceable teeth.

Okay, and the rest of your platform?

When Bill ran he talked constantly about police reform. Then he got elected and realized how powerful and politically connected the police unions were and backed off. On my first day as mayor, I plan to end Broken Windows policing and other low-level arrest dragnets and devote all of the police resources this frees up to solving hate crimes and infiltrating and arresting members of known white supremacist terrorist hate groups.

I also plan to appoint an independent panel of officers who objected to the illegal conduct of their superior officers during Stop and Frisk, like Edwin Raymond, Adhyl Polanco, and others like them, and I’m going to task them with conducting an exhaustive internal review of all NYPD (and NYC Corrections) personnel files. Any cases where probable cause exists that a crime was committed by a city employee will result in the filing of the appropriate criminal charges forthwith. Further, officer(s) with three or more misconduct judgments will be deemed unfit for service and terminated without pay, pension, or benefits. From the moment I’m elected and as long as I’m mayor, the taxpayers of New York will pay one misconduct judgment per officer. Accidents happen. For any and all subsequent judgments officers will be held personally liable. We’ll see how long police and COs continue to rack up civil rights judgments while paying them out of pocket;

Don’t you think that this will cause the police and corrections lobbies to turn their backs on you, and refuse to work, like they did to Mayor de Blasio?

No doubt, and the union bosses will crimson and spittle and call me a bunch of names, too, but this was why I spent years with Bill trying to steel his moral resolve. It’s why we discussed how this is in reality a pro-police stance (because by committing misconduct and getting away with it, the police have eroded the public trust that undergirds a working criminal justice apparatus). By holding them accountable, I’m restoring faith in them and the important work that they do. The police take an oath to uphold and defend the law. I am simply asking them to keep their word, and, if they can’t, to find a new line of work.

What will you do with the money the city saves on misconduct, and on benefits and pensions for terminated officers, which in recent years has risen into the hundreds of millions, and even billions?

Yes, exactly. Experts in corrections and public safety have known for 30 or 40 years how to effectively prevent recidivism and reduce crime. Yet despite a host of proven programs and rock-solid data showing us how to keep New York City safe without aggressive and alienating law enforcement tactics, we keep adding more officers, more money, and more military-grade war gear to an already bloated $4.8 billion police budget, while spending a paltry fraction of that amount on programs that the data shows are far more effective.

There has been a lot of talk during the campaign about affordable housing. You said you plan to address this issue as part of your platform. How?

Yes, I do, I plan to address it specifically as it relates to displacement by gentrification. During the primary people kept highlighting how Bill froze rent increases and created more affordable housing than any mayor in city history. This was a great sound bite, but quite literally everyone I know in New York saw their rent increase during the last four years. Very few could’ve passed the intensive credit check and salary vetting to qualify for one of the supposedly “affordable” housing lottery units even if they’d beaten the one in a million odds of getting selected to apply for one (though nobody I know did, you?).

These are obviously cosmetic gestures and woefully insufficient to meet the amount of need for affordable housing that exists throughout the five boroughs. Starting on day one, I plan to turn all parcels of city-owned land over to community-run public land trusts that will determine how to best convert the properties into affordable housing.

Any real estate developer that wants a permit for a private project will need to commit to hiring 75% of workers from the area surrounding the site. They’ll be required to deed 10% of new units to recently displaced residents of the area, and devote an additional 40% of units to affordable rental housing as measured by an amount equal to or lesser than the lowest median income of the proposed site’s zip code for a period covering 20 prior years, with first rental lottery preference given to residents with longest residence.

I also plan to give tax breaks and multiple operating incentives to businesses that hire and train young people previously involved in the criminal justice system, and specifically those that live in neighborhoods directly in the crosshairs of blistering gentrification. Gentrification lives in this gap, where incoming businesses refrain from hiring long-time residents, and especially those who have previously been involved in the criminal justice system – or if they do hire them, it’s for menial labor that doesn’t pay a living wage – and I will implement a schedule of incentives and penalties designed to close this gap ASAP.

Are there any other issues you plan to address?

Another issue that needs to be urgently addressed is traffic congestion and pollution around the city. I was in Sunset Park the other morning and the massive cloud of smog leering at the city was horrific. How this has not been addressed in any meaningful way by a progressive mayor with four years under his belt is preposterous. Accordingly, I plan to phase fossil-fuel powered vehicles out of New York City by the end of my first term.

Year one, if you drive a fossil-fuel powered vehicle during rush hour you’ll pay $10 on your way in and $10 on your way out. If you use a commute-sharing app, which allows commuters from nearby areas to find one another and carpool, the toll will be $7.00 per trip with two people checked in, $3.00 with three, and $0 with four. Year two the top charge for solo drivers will increase from $10 to $20, year three from $20 to $40, and so on. The charge for a four-person check-in will increase from $0 to $2, $2 to $4, etc.

Electric and solar-powered vehicles will pay no toll, and the city will create tax and parking incentives that will promote the increased purchase and use of environmentally friendly vehicles. I plan to introduce similar penalties for buildings and businesses, with similarly generous incentives for those that choose to go green. The substantial revenue generated by the penalties for delaying or refusing to go green will go towards revamping and improving the city’s crumbling and embarrassing public transportation infrastructure, which the governor and state officials have proven they cannot be trusted to manage.

The bottom line is that so-called progressives can no longer allow a brown cloud of exhaust to hang over the city every morning during rush hour while just about every car sitting in traffic is occupied by a single person – I mean literally nothing could be stupider for a city surrounded by water on all sides than to continue allowing this.

So, let’s do a quick recap: No money in politics; taxpayers no longer pay for repeat official misconduct; create enough affordable housing to meet need; reduce pollution; improve public transit infrastructure.

Yes, that’s right.

You know, if you threw in universal health care and a freeze on military spending, you might have a platform that could be used as a litmus test for all progressive candidates.

Yeah, maybe, like an ALEC for progressives, or something.

How about PALEC?

Haha, I like that.

Which leads me to ask: if New York is widely regarded as one of the most progressive cities in America, how is it that you find yourself in this position?

Which position? Waging a longshot write-in campaign a month before Election Day?

Precisely. In this day and age of supposed “resistance,” the positions you have outlined, or some modified iteration of them, should be automatic it seems, part of every platform. How isn’t there a single candidate in the mayoral race that already supports them?

It’s a good question. These are all pretty basic reforms that would most likely have been implemented a long time ago if money and powerful interests hadn’t commandeered our local, state, and federal election processes. But commandeer them they have, and they show no signs of returning them to us voluntarily. Which means we’ll have to hope and pray that Bill comes to his senses in his second term, realizes that his mother protector, his progressive conscience – that is, me – is not a real person, and that I can’t run for political office. We’ll have to hope he remembers where he left me four years ago, in his attic on 11th Street when he moved into Gracie Mansion, and that one day he’ll find the time to stop in and visit me on his way home from his workout at the Park Slope.

 

 

DISPATCHES FROM ALBANY: THE READER INTERVIEW

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The Reader Interview with Assemblymember Robert Carroll

Spring of 2017 has been a tumultuous time for the New York State Legislature. Having missed the deadline to pass a new budget, the Assembly and the Senate voted for an emergency extender budget. This placeholder, in effect until May 31, prevented a shutdown of the state government but left many questions unanswered.

In the midst of this uncertainty, and between votes on the Assembly floor and meetings with colleagues, Assemblymember Robert Carroll was kind enough to speak to me in early April. Assemblymember Carroll, elected in 2016, may be new to the Assembly but not to politics. He has been involved with the Park Slope Civic Council, Community Board 7, and was the youngest President of Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats. He now represents Assembly District 44.

Our conversation touched on the concerns of his District, the Young Voter Act—a bill Carroll crafted in collaboration with three Bard High School students and that would, if passed, lower the New York State voting age to 17—and Raise the Age. Raise the Age is an unnecessarily controversial effort to ensure that individuals under the age of 18 will not be prosecuted as adults for non-violent offenses. As of this writing, the Assembly has voted to raise the age, but the Senate has not.

Assemblymember Carroll’s take on how young voters, and young people, should be treated reveals his faith in the ability of the community to determine what’s best for the whole. As the story of Kalief Browder—a young man whose life and death speaks to the necessity of Raise the Age—becomes more widely known, one can hope that the resolution of this issue will no longer be considered a roadblock to the passage of a budget, but, as Carroll calls it, “a necessary good.” Albany could certainly use a bit more of Carroll’s optimistic practicality.

 

Robert Carroll speaking on the assembly floor.

 

What do you hope to accomplish for your district in your first term?

Originally I was hoping that we were going to be able to pass a progressive and transparent budget, one that prioritizes New York City public schools, our infrastructure, and also making sure that necessary services to our senior centers were fully funded, as well as bigger picture items, like raising the age of criminal culpability to 18 from 16, making sure we bring electoral reforms to the state of New York, and that we open up our election process.

[pullquote]Time will tell which bills will pass, and which ones won’t, in the New York State Legislature this year, but one can only hope that future legislation will build “towards a more just and fair society.[/pullquote]Obviously we’re still having these big picture conversations; raising the age is still a necessary good, and hopefully we will get it by the time this is published. It’s a reform that will make our society more just. It’s something that is right, makes sense, and is practical. It has hit a lot of roadblocks, and that’s one of the reasons why we don’t have a state budget. Whenever you’re trying to reform a system, or whenever you’re trying to change something, there are always people who are inherently afraid of that change and will not want to go and do it.

I am looking forward to still working on those issues, and making sure we find ways to bring about real electoral reforms. That’s something I’ve done as an attorney and worked for as an activist and I think is necessary.

 

New York state is one of two states where a person 16 years of age or older can be automatically prosecuted as an adult. At the same time that Raise the Age is front and center in Albany, you’ve introduced the Young Voter Act to lower the state’s voting age from 18 to 17. Does our state need to change the way it looks at young people in general?

Yes. On the one hand, our outlook is paternalistic towards young people. On the other, when people make mistakes early on, we can brand them for life, putting them in a system that will basically make it impossible to right their life. This impacts communities in a whole host of ways, for generations. The Assembly bill for Raise the Age is not saying that there aren’t repercussions for violent, heinous crimes; it’s not stopping somebody who has killed or raped someone from facing real serious repercussions. The Assembly bill addresses cases where, for example, a young person commits a burglary that is non-violent, but because that crime is categorized with other violent crimes, they’re treated like an adult and could possibly do years and years in prison and have a felony record to their name. No one is condoning that action, but if we put a 16 or 17 year old in prison for years, it only hurts the rest of us.

It’s going to be harder for that person to reintegrate into society as a functioning individual, and become employed. That creates other burdens for society. That person could commit other crimes, could go on some form of public assistance, they could lose their relationships with family and friends and become disconnected. It reverberates throughout and hurts communities. That’s why Raise the Age is so important.

 

Speaking to PTA leaders.

 

And it couples directly with lowering the voting age. Some people think, ‘shouldn’t they be the same? If someone is not mature enough be tried as an adult, then surely they’re not mature enough to vote.’ That’s a false choice there, because Government tries to reinforce good habits all the time.

By lowering the voting age to 17, all students can at least vote once before they go to college, or go out in the world to work. So we foster that habit. Then it’s on them, to continue to participate. But we jumpstart that person’s engagement in civic and political life. There’s a lot of good research out there that if you start voting before you’re 25, you’re very likely to become a lifetime voter. If you start voting after you’re 25, you’re not likely to. That was in The Economist back in February. In 1972, over 50% of people 18 to 25 voted in that year’s presidential election. In 2012, it was around 38%. We’re seeing this steady decline in youth participation in elections, but we want to reverse that and help people become regular voters.

And you’re not a regular voter if you only vote every 4 years for president, and if you’re not voting in local elections: midterms, State Assembly, State Senate, City Council, and mayoral and gubernatorial elections, and also primaries in New York. Most elections in New York City and in the suburbs are decided in the primaries. Most years in New York you can vote almost every year, once in September, and once in November. We’re going to have a big election in New York City in September for all those citywide offices, and a general one in November. We’ll also be voting on a constitutional convention.

We need people to participate in all of these elections. I’m a big believer that the whole collective, the group, is rather smart, and in tune with what’s going on. I’m not cynical. There are some people who believe that voters aren’t intelligent, that they’re easily manipulated by power brokers, or will only vote in accordance with certain aspects of their identity. If they’re young, then they’re easily swayed by their parents. I don’t believe any of this. Voters do tend to go towards issues that are better suited for the whole. All elected officials should be trying to get as many people out there to vote as humanly possible. It’s simple – we’ll get better outcomes when more people vote.

 

What has most surprised you about being in the Assembly so far?

There are days when you feel progress is being made, and that you’re moving forward. And then there are days when you feel there are entrenched forces all around and nothing will change. That kind of dichotomy, where it can switch on and off, can be frustrating. You can feel very heartened one day, and completely frustrated the next day. The other surprising thing—which is somewhat amorphous and hard to pin down—from day to day those things can be almost the same. You can have a person surprise you from one day to the next. You might say to yourself, ‘I never thought this person or this organization would champion this issue,’ and then you think, ‘Why is that person now doing this?’ You forget it’s three-dimensional, with different parts moving.

There are some really good things that the New York State Assembly and the Legislature has done lately, from minimum wage, to stopping hydrofracking. But with something like Raise the Age, you wonder, ‘why can’t we figure this out?’ The Assembly is very good on it, but the Senate is being pretty difficult on it right now. Why can’t we come up with something that’s reasonable? It’s not an unreasonable point to make, or issue to bring to the forefront.

So overall, it’s not as great as it is on its best day, nor is it as bad as it is on its worst day.

 

The 44th District is pretty diverse. How do you balance your different constituents’ needs?

My district is wonderful. We’ve got Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Kensington, Victorian Flatbush, Ditmas Park, parts of Borough Park, and a little bit of Midwood. There are people who are very new to Brooklyn, who have just moved into all parts of my district from far and wide. There are some people moving to Park Slope, Victorian Flatbush, and Windsor Terrace who are maybe professionals with means and money. Some people are moving to Kensington and Coney Island Avenue from Pakistan and Bangladesh. There’s a large Orthodox Jewish population in Borough Park, and in the district there are also people of Irish, Italian, and Puerto Rican descent who have have been here for years and years. I grew up in the district, in Windsor Terrace and Kensington. Brooklyn is the only home I’ve ever known.

There are multigenerational homeowners here, and immigrants, and people who are brandnew who might be called gentrifiers. That’s the way neighborhoods are created in New York. If you’re a New Yorker, you understand the city is always in flux. And when you get down to the core issues, people are worried about the local subway station, the local public schools, making sure the neighborhood is safe and affordable and that city services are working.

A great thing about this district is that a lot of people are concerned about building towards a more just and fair society. It’s not just purely a matter of, ‘what the government is doing for me.’ They understand that we’re all in this together and that we need to bring everyone along with us.

 

Reading to children at Windsor Terrace library.

 

The previous Reader Interview: http://www.psreader.com/issue/issue-59/the-reader-interview/enriched-landscapes-the-reader-interview-with-susannah-c-drake-on-cleaning-up-the-gowanus-canal/

LIFE AS YOGA: Yoga and Responding to the New Reality

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Grief, Division, and the Necessity of Waking Up

In the aftermath of what for many of us has been a devastating month after the Presidential election, it’s hard to know where to begin. As I connect with my peers and my community, one thing is clear: everyone is in a different place in their process of coming to terms with the election results. Some people are in a space of subdued resignation;, others rage with fierceness, and still others are overwhelmed by anxiety. When I look around, I recognize much of what I see as grief: the shock, the bargaining, the depression, the anger and blaming, and ultimately, the acceptance.

Grief and its process are real. The shock, disembodiment, and isolation that many people are experiencing are also very real—and they come from the place where, according to the ancient wisdom, all suffering stems from: ignorance and misperception. In this particular case, those of us who are now grieving (myself included) were ignorant to the degree of division, fear, and discrimination that is still rampant in the consciousness of the country, communities, and even the families we love. We are shocked because we were just hit with a heavy realization: things aren’t as we thought they were. And then we woke up.

[pullquote]Full disclosure: as an immigrant woman of color; I have been deeply invested in, affected by, and shaken by the results of the election. I too have found myself in deep emotion, struggling to keep my composure; I have felt utterly lost, and have run the gamut from fury to sadness and back, without knowing how to respond. I have feared for my family and the future of my child. This election was personal for me, as it was for many of us.[/pullquote]It’s especially when our personal fears are triggered and we find ourselves in the throes of lost-ness that our practice can be a source of guidance, like breadcrumbs left on the trail to lead us home. This is the heart of our practice, and this is when yoga is most essential: when it becomes fully embodied—when it teaches us how to respond in times of deep wounding.

In order to return home, we need to take stock of where we are now. The heated election results (as well as the campaign leading up to it) prompted a sort of national reactivity. The divisive rhetoric that started well before the election results came in has succeeded in awakening within us, collectively, a very mythological, caricature-like “us” vs. “them” mentality; and hence, we find ourselves in that exact reality. Through the process of othering (which both parties took part in), we have brought to the forefront one of our most damaging human tendencies and easiest default modes. By creating such stark oppositions—not just about our political attitudes and philosophies on financial policy or immigration, but about who we are as human beings—we have drawn a thick line in the sand and have chosen to embody the epitome of duality. The problem is that while this situation is real, and its consequences are certainly very palpable, it isn’t actually true. The divisions are based primarily on falsehoods and misperceptions.

Xenophobia, for example, is rooted on the false premise that a person originating from outside of one’s own country is by default a threat. On the other side of the coin, the assumption that a person with xenophobic attitudes is a wholeheartedly rotten human being, is also dangerous. For stark, extreme divisions like this to take hold (as they have) requires that we throw the baby out with the bathwater (as we have); it requires that we willingly blind ourselves to the nuances of situations that always, necessarily, demonstrate the paradoxical aspects of any argument, no matter how corrupt. In other words, even in the most “evil” of places, there is good—you just have to know where to look; you just have to ask the right questions.

The result of adhering to a false division is that when we live in a state of opposition to the truth, we suffer. The current state of division has our (collective and individual) nervous system in an absolute fritz, firing like a pinball machine. When the nervous system is on alarm, we can’t act; we can only react, and reactions tend to snowball and deplete us. In talking to people, one phrase I hear often is, “I’m so tired.” Yes—we are depleted. In such a state of over-activation, we are unable to drop into the place within ourselves that can actually access truth, the place of inner knowledge known in our tradition as Vijnamaya kosha, or our wisdom body. This is the element within us that aids in our process of discernment. In order to access the Vijnamaya kosha, in order to tap into the inherent wisdom that allows us to respond with grace rather than reactivity, we must work through the sheaths of the body, and if the body is playing the fear game, the door to wisdom just won’t open; we get stuck in the cycle of duality—the dangerous game of fear mongering.

So what now? According to the Yogic Sutras, before anything at all, we need to learn to check ourselves: in what ways are we contributing to division? Instead of spending our energy proliferating divisive rhetoric and attitudes (a task much easier said than done), the sage advice is to rise above it. Does this mean that we ignore injustice and hide in a cave? No. Does it mean that we discard our responsibility to speak truth to power? Absolutely not. It means that we learn to do the work that’s necessary to come to understand others’ intentions, even if we disagree wholeheartedly with their conclusions. When we can understand the root of another’s experience, we gain insight into their paradigm and worldview. From here, it usually becomes clear what instincts drive their decisions (self-preservation, perhaps—it’s a powerful one). Then, we can pinpoint the root of emotions (like misplaced fear), and work to ameliorate these fears with reason (i.e. data), kindness, and education—tools much more powerful than a match of heated vitriol, which simply acts like kerosene on fire and keeps the wounds alive. In the process, we work our muscles of compassion.

Yet, the work is also within ourselves: we must check in with our own assumptions and fears. We must work to educate ourselves and others to enlighten, and to align with truth. This is perhaps what K. Pattabhi Jois meant when he said, “Practice, practice, practice” because it will take plenty of practice to accomplish such a task—to find the truth within ourselves, the rootedness into our wisdom, the compassion that allows us to recognize misconception, and the strength to enlighten it with the glow of fiercest gentleness we can muster.

The silver lining is that we now know what lies ahead. Prior to the election, we were asleep. No wound can heal if we don’t know it exists. Today, the wound and the work ahead, while deep and formidable, are clear. Now we have no excuse—we have woken up, and it’s time to practice.

The Reader Interview with Sally Kohn on Election 2016 and Beyond

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“Equality is Not a Zero-Sum Game”

On a muggy day in in late Summer, I sat down with Sally Kohn, columnist and CNN commentator. I picked her brain about the presidential election, Dog Whistle politics—rhetoric that uses coded language to convey a message to specific segments of the population—and Kohn’s idea of emotional correctness, as presented in her 2013 Ted Talk. For Kohn, emotional correctness refers to “a daily spiritual practice” that consists of trying “to find compassion for the people I not only disagree with, but who are fundamentally lacking in compassion for me and my side.”  By Mirielle Clifford

Kohn is currently working on a book that’s informed by that notion of emotional correctness. Throughout our conversation, Kohn showed how the choice to examine the systems at play, instead of simply blaming individuals for actions we may not agree with, can lead to a much more productive understanding of our current political landscape.

How do you think this election will be remembered? 

Either as the beginning of the end, or the beginning of the beginning. It’s very hard to say, in this universe of political thinkers and talkers. Everybody always says, ‘this is the most important election of our lifetimes.’ We’ve all heard this before. This actually does feel like an important one, in an existential way, in terms of the future of both parties’ ideologies which are being wrangled with in really interesting ways, and in terms of the future of American values and identity. Belonging and inclusion or exclusion are being wrestled with in fundamental ways. Fundamental precepts of democracy, voice, respect, and civility are facing unprecedented turmoil in this election.

Which way does it go from here? I think it’ll keep getting worse in some of these regards, but it could be the moment where, historically we’ll look back and say, this is when it started to turn. The profound ugliness, elitism, and exclusion of the racial bias-fueling politics of the right for the last forty years probably won’t end after November. But this could be the moment we look back and say the wool was pulled off the disguised wolf and America saw it for what it was. I hope that’s the case, but I’m not sure.

You wrote for CNN that “so many Americans see the advancements of others as a strike against themselves.” Why do you think that is?

How much time do we have? This could be the entirety of the interview, trying to understand this. I’m careful not to say that people who support Donald Trump, or who are against affirmative action, or who think we need a wall between the United States and Mexico are racist. First, I think “racist” is a loaded word that shuts down the conversation. Second, it locates the whole conversation in the personal, while what we’re going through as a country is bigger than that.

This is about forty plus years of politics—largely fed by the right, but not exclusively—responding to the progressive successes of the New Deal in helping to build the white middle class. These politicians thought, ‘we can’t attack those policies on their face because they’re so effective, but we don’t like them. What are we going to do?’ When the Civil Rights movement came along, and Lyndon B. Johnson tried to expand these New Deal policies, which specifically excluded African Americans, the Right saw an opportunity to exploit and fan white racial resentment, to turn it against public policy the Right didn’t like.

So you had Nixon, Reagan, and this practice called the “Southern strategy,” but which was really a national strategy, of Dog Whistle racial politics. ‘We’re not going to say Black people are inferior, or endorse segregation; we’re going to move away from that. But we’ll talk about law and order, welfare cheats, and cadillac-driving Welfare Queens.’ If you’re Bill Clinton, you’ll talk about Super Predators.  They tried to feed into the notion, or create the notion, that by making our country more equal, by creating opportunity for people of color and Black people in particular, that you’re taking something away from white people. Your schools will get bad, your neighborhood will get dangerous, your property values will decrease, you won’t be able to get that job.

It fascinates me when I hear white liberals say off-handedly when they don’t get a job—‘Oh, they probably gave it to a person of color.’ No, they probably gave it to a white person. We know the statistics. If there are five job openings, and one goes to a person of color, the inclination as a white person is to say, ‘Oh, the person of color took my job,’ as opposed to the four other white people. The assumption is that you, as a white person, and the other white people, were entitled to the job, but the person of color only got the job because of affirmative action. White people reading this, even the good Clinton-supporting or Sanders-supporting liberals, can hear a kernel of truth—they’ve thought these things, too. Certainly it’s something to be held accountable for as an individual, but it’s not just about individual bias. It’s also about these social, political, and economic systems that have encouraged white people to think of equality as a zero-sum game.

There’s a great, unattributed quote: ‘When you’ve only ever known privilege, equality feels like oppression.’ That’s true.

This is also how you end up with an economic system where working class and middle class white folks vote for elite economics, which is mind-boggling unless you understand this notion of racial hierarchy and racial supremacy, which is very much in place today.

Can’t actually figure out what to do about it. If you point it out, half the country will say, ‘Sally, you’re the racist for bringing it up.’ It’s like blaming the person who pulls the fire alarm for starting the fire. But you can’t solve a problem if you don’t talk about it.

In your Ted Talk, you talk about emotional correctness. I think we could all use more of that every day, but do you have advice for someone who may have a hard time cultivating that emotional correctness because there’s so much at stake? I’m imagining a member of the Black Lives Matter movement who feels that ending police brutality is a matter of life or death for them, and then you have people vilifying them for questioning the police’s tactics.

I’m working on a book that’s informed by the idea of emotional correctness, the Ted Talk, and how we can be less uncivil and mean to each other in small ways and in massive ways, in terms of actual hate and violence. Part of my work with the book is me interrogating these questions, like, how much of this is naivete? There are times when incivility could be seen as being in furtherance of justice, but I maintain that there aren’t. That’s where I am the moment, and have been for a while.

If we look at the history of social justice movements, long before Black Lives Matter, there have been these tensions, the tensions between Martin Luther King’s idea that ‘Hate cannot solve hate; only love can do that,’ and Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and a very understandable desire to fight fire with fire, literally and metaphorically.

I personally, spiritually, and ethically fall on the side of peace, love, kindness, and civility as the antidote to hate, violence, and cruelty.

For me, the answer is try to lead by example with my own life and share those ideas, but that’s a far cry from proscribing that everyone should act that way in every single situation. It’s a personal choice. Now, there are some interesting and real tensions in social justice movements that I support, like Black Lives Matter or immigrant rights. There are dimensions of these movements that are more on one end of that spectrum than the other. That’s both an individual decision to make and a movement-wide struggle which is sort of healthy. For me, I try to find compassion for the people I not only disagree with, but who are fundamentally lacking in compassion for me and my side. So far I’ve found that effective.

I’ve been talking to people who have left movements of hate, like former white supremacists. One common thread in their transition out is that someone they would never have expected it from showed them compassion, like an African-American woman showing compassion to a white supremacist. I take that as a good sign.

Emotional correctness is a daily challenge. To me, it’s a daily spiritual practice. I could pick up my Twitter feed and find fifteen tweets that it would be so fun and gratifying to tweet rude, nasty responses to. It would probably feel great—I don’t know, I haven’t done it—but only for a few minutes.

I have a seven-year-old, and one thing you try to teach your kids is not just delayed gratification, but that you can make choices that aren’t just satisfying in the short-term but that are good for you, your family, and everyone around you in the long-term. I feel that way not just about social media but about being a public voice in general. Yes, you can say the thing that would be gratifying and cathartic in the short-term, that would get you the most clicks and the most airtime, but are you actually doing good for society and your own soul in the long-term? I don’t think so.

How do you explain thorny or even painful political topics to your daughter?

She’s only seven. By the time this comes out she’ll be eight. She’s very excited. She’ll also have pierced ears, so look out, Park Slope, when you see that bling walking down the street.

I realized this the other day when I did a CNN interview on Skype in my in-law’s basement, which one can do. Everybody wanted to watch it, because my in-laws wanted to see their basement on TV. We all watched it, including my daughter and her little aunt and uncle who are around her age. We were talking about some god awful thing Trump had said. I felt ashamed watching it, though not for anything I’d said. I pride myself on helping my child to be informed, engaged with the world, and thoughtful, in age-appropriate ways. This was one of the moments where I thought, I’m not sure if I want her to know this, that people are saying these things, and someone running for President is saying these things.

It’s a hard time to talk to kids about politics. The same thing goes with what’s happening around race and racial bias in this country. People, including well-meaning liberals, think the way to talk to their kids about race is to teach them to be color-blind. That’s not practical, first of all; it’s not the world we live in. Secondly, the elevation of color-blindness as a solution to racial injustice in this country is a right-wing adaptation intended to serve their agenda. As in, race can’t be a factor in affirmative action or public policy.

The same way we talk to our daughter about gender is the same way we talk about race. She picks up gender cues all the time—pink is for girls, blue is for boys; boys are good at this, girls are good at that. When we see these things in movies or in books, we say, ‘you know, the thing I don’t like about this is…’ and we help her deconstruct her environment, and think thoughtfully about the world as it is and the world as it should be, as opposed to letting her live within her metaphorically and literally lily-white bubble.

There’s an interesting conversation around police. As a white parent with a white kid in a somewhat diverse but still fairly privileged community, especially for New York City, my instinct is to teach my kid, if you’re ever in trouble, you can go to the police. But I don’t want to instill the notion in my child that ‘the police are always a good thing, so if someone is critiquing the police, then they’re necessarily wrong.’

We have to help our children understand from the very beginning that their perspective isn’t the only one in the world, which is incidentally really hard to do with little narcissists, which all seven-year-olds are. Like all of us, when I was a kid and didn’t finish the food on my plate, I was told, ‘there are starving kids in Ethiopia.’ It was very distant, but there are starving kids in New York, too, and we try to help her see that. There are things we’re fortunate to be able to expose her to, through travel, through having a diverse group of friends, through going to a racially and economically diverse school, but also in the way we talk to her, to help help her situate herself and deconstruct the world around her. That’s what makes a good citizen.

But she’s only seven. How do you explain Donald Trump to a seven-year-old?  How do you tell her, ‘you can’t talk this way. Even though Donald Trump said it, you can’t say it.’ My kid thinks that being President must be the greatest thing in the world, and you would have to be a pretty special person—a great role model—to run for President. The Right has made the same critique about rappers. Fine, some valid points, but what about your presidential candidate?

Some people say that you shouldn’t vote for ‘the lesser of two evils,’ but should vote your conscience, even if that means abstaining. What would you say about that in this election?

I’m going to say this as clearly and as non-judgmentally as I can—if you do not do everything you can to get Hillary Clinton elected this November, I think you have some soul-searching to do. This includes not just voting yourself, but spending your time, money, and talent to elect Clinton and defeat Donald Trump.

I’m a lifelong left-wing progressive. I agree our two-party system is broken, that the Democratic Party is too beholden to corporate interests, too hawkish, that a lot of these dynamics around Dog Whistle politics harken back to Bill Clinton. I’m not naive about the past and present structural issues in the Democratic Party, and the challenges and blindspots of Hillary Clinton in particular.

That said, elections are about choices. If we had a multi-party system, which I really wish we did, it would go a long way to address issues like the current hyper-partisanship. But when you have two parties, you have a choice. You pick one or pick the other. Any action you take is picking one or the other. I’ve admired Jill Stein for a long time. I find what she’s doing now unconscionable. Donald Trump isn’t Jeb Bush. If this was Jeb Bush, and we said, ‘Ok, it’s time to teach the Democratic Party a lesson. We’re going to use this as a teachable moment to transform the party for the future, and so it’ll stop taking these issues and these voters for granted.’ I’m down. But this isn’t that time.

And thinking like that assumes that the only way to have power or influence in this two-party system is by withholding votes. Look at the influence that Bernie Sanders had on the party platform; it’s the most progressive platform in history for either party. You can say, ‘look, you’ve  had influence by being at the table, and you can continue to do so.’ If Clinton wins, constituencies that weren’t involved in helping her get elected will have less input. When we talk about a broken political system, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about, ‘who helps?’ We’re never going to have as much influence as big money, but if you didn’t help, if you weren’t there, you have no influence. Clinton has already moved to the left in this election, but the larger point is, you can engage in that struggle, but you can’t win it. I’ve talked to people on the left who insist they’re not going to vote for Hillary. Some of those people have the luxury to do that because Trump’s policies won’t affect them. They’re not immigrants who will be deported or whose families will be broken up, they’re not Muslims who will be treated with suspicion and whose loved ones won’t be able to come into the country.

Also, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. You can support Hillary Clinton. I don’t think she’s the lesser of two evils. When you look at what she stands for and what Sanders and Jill Stein stand for, there’s 80% or 90% overlap. There are real, serious issues around which we should still be struggling, but to cast those disagreements as overly broad is disingenuous and in the case of this election, very dangerous.

I get emotional about it. I was a Hillary Clinton critic, I remain a critic, I was a Sanders supporter. But you don’t go and elect a protofascist hatemonger and call yourself a Leftie. Clinton wants to raise taxes on the rich; Trump wants to give away $7 billion in tax giveaways to millionaires and billionaires. Clinton believes in public education, while I think Donald Trump wants to get rid of the Department of Education. These are fundamental things. The edges of the conversation are essential, but I think the core of agreement between Sanders, Stein, and Clinton is profound, vast, and not to be overlooked.

What was it like to be at the Democratic National Convention?

It was very helpful, inspiring, and positive. I learned things about Hillary Clinton I didn’t know. Her record fighting school segregation early on, the work she’s done for foster kids in New York City, her deep commitment to children with disabilities, and to 9/11 victims’ families, survivors, and first-responders. I used to question whether Clinton was a progressive. The Convention challenged me, in that I don’t think she’s a progressive on certain issues, but on other issues, she is. It’s dangerous if we become too dogmatic. And she’s the first presidential candidate to talk about getting rid of the Hyde Amendment and expanding access to abortion. In my book, that’s progressive. So the Convention made my image of Hillary Clinton more complex.

It was also incredibly inspiring to me, in the juxtaposition with the Republican National Convention, which was not only frightening because of Trump’s rhetoric, but also decisively white. That reflects choices made by the Republican Party post-1964, to be the party of white people, and they’re succeeding. Going to the DNC helped me appreciate that the Democratic Party is a diverse, pluralistic party that’s largely led by women of color, in terms of the Convention and now the DNC itself with Donna Brazile. Appreciating the social and political significance of that made me proud to be a democrat.

Did the anti-Clinton mood wane?

Yes. People needed to get it out of their system. Bernie did a good job going group to group, talking to folks. A larger percentage of Sanders supporters now support Hillary than her supporters supported Obama in 2008. It continues to strike me that some of these Bernie-or-bust people were very pro-Obama, and Hillary is running to the left of Obama, or at least his governance for the last seven years.

Has your work as a community organizer influenced your current work in media?

Yes. Organizing is about communicating ideas to people, helping make ideas accessible and understood. That carries over.

What do you think is the most pressing issue for Park Slope residents to be involved in? 

There’s something about the complacency of liberalism, that everyone in Park Slope should be thinking about. There’s the notion that ‘we live in a progressive bubble, so we’re good.’ Demographically, it’s a diverse community, but there’s a fair amount of hierarchy and segregation in Park Slope. Are people thinking about the overwhelming whiteness of PS 321 and the implications of that? Are they thinking about their nannies and housekeepers, how much they’re being paid, and whether they’re getting paid sick days? As liberal Park Slope people, we say, ‘Of course we support raising wages and paid sick days,’ but are we doing that for the people who work for us who, in this neighborhood, are largely women of color? Systems of inequality and patterns of bias are about systems and structures, but they’re also about us. I’m not saying, put on a hair shirt. Don’t walk around feeling guilty and suffering. But everyone can ask what they can do in their own lives, not to mention their own companies and investments. We can ask ourselves, am I investing in companies with diverse leadership in terms of people of color and women? In every facet of our personal and professional life, can we all look at how we can do 20% better? What kind of difference would that make? Especially for people with privilege and power, which people in Park Slope tend to have.

What is your favorite part of living in Park Slope?

I love running into friends, knowing people on our block, having neighbors we hang out with. I do love off-leash hour. I wish it were an hour later on weekends. I love small businesses. I love the walkability. A lot of what I love is about city life in general, but there is a really lovely sense of community and belonging that’s delightful.

As the weather cools but the presidential election heats up this fall, we can hope that the values of community, belonging, inclusion, and civility are given their due.