On the latest episode of “Building Power,” host Zakiya Sankara-Jabar features a panel of guests to discusst how voting impacts the Black community.
Torraine Walker of Context Media Group, Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign co-chair Nina Turner, and Morgan State University professor Jared A. Ball join Sankara-Jabar in what Citizen Ed reader @RenyTey said shows “how Black folk can disagree with love & still be locked at the circumstance.”
There’s a lot to discuss, and yes, disagree on. The panel goes over things like building Black capital, wealth redistribution, political power, and more.
So, How Do We Build Power?
As Walker points out, the issues facing Black families these days are multi-faceted, from a global pandemic that disproportionately affects Black people to schools that had not received proper resources for years before “social distancing” entered our vocabulary.
“Let’s be honest,” Walker says. “We had eight years of optimism” for Black voters under President Barack Obama, but “what Black people are dealing with is not new” in the current environment.
“If voting doesn’t achieve power, then we have to do something very differently,” says Ball.
What Ball means by that is “a wildly different engagement with electoral politics.”
What does that look like? New organizations, running for office, and organizing communities to engage with the people who have the most say over how their communities are run.
Turner noted Our Black Party, among other Black-led political parties, is one such way to get communities together to advocate for their neighborhoods’ most pressing needs.
Turner’s colleague on the Sanders 2020 campaign, Briahna Joy Gray, summed up the stakes of this well: “It’s unconscionable that these voices and these subjects don’t get more of a hearing in the public sphere.”
So get your voice out there.
