Shift Happens | 5

 As community organizers and activists move from the grassroots to positions of power in city and state politics, how do they use their backgrounds to make democracy a tool for the people? Chapter 5 includes conversations with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, President and CEO John Kim of Catalyst California, California State Senator Maria Elena Durazo, and President-CEO Alberto Retana of Community Coalition.

Episode 5
Topic: Governance
Title: Shift Happens
Description (Draft): As community organizers and activists move from the grassroots to positions of power in Los Angeles, how do they use their roots as a guide to govern? Chapter 5 includes conversations with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, President and CEO John Kim of Catalyst California and President-CEO Alberto Retana of Community Coalition.

AUDIO
I grew up during the civil rights movement. But by the time I finished college, I was beginning to conclude that this country needed more radical transformation than that the movement demanded.
While I admired the bravery and moral fortitude of the people fighting for civil rights, I felt that for Black people to thrive, we needed more than access to systems and institutions that were designed to exclude and oppress us.
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That’s why, in the late 60s, I was drawn to the Black power movement, led by a new generation of young people who prioritized the beauty and humanity of Black people. They were organizers, activists, intellectuals, and artists who recognized we needed power – economic power –and the power to control our own destinies. And the last place we would look for that power was the government.
We saw government as the problem: a system designed by wealthy white men to preserve their own affluence and power. There was a suspicion among Black power activists that gaining a seat at that table was to sell out. At best, it meant settling for making reformist tweaks around the edges of racist systems.
Our vision was revolution.
We wanted to tear those systems down.
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But the anti-Vietnam War efforts siphoned energy away from racial justice movements.
And our efforts were further undermined by the U.S. government’s ongoing and illegal surveillance operations that discredited and criminalized political groups, especially Black liberation groups.
So the revolution evolved.
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The spirit of the movement transformed, and I along with it. Many activists changed and refined their strategies. Creating opportunities to expand our work into rooms that we had been kept out of, or that we had intentionally kept away from. There was a pathway now from the good organizing happening within our communities to channels of power.
We saw the potential to create systems change.
I became a lawyer, a community builder, and a policy advocate. I also found myself negotiating with government at the local, state and federal levels to advance equity.
I began to see what many young people today – people who are already living in our multiracial future – have figured out.
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That being radical and doing something revolutionary doesn't mean we have to reject democratic systems.
Quite the opposite.
We can claim these systems as our own and use the ideals and power of those systems to create governance for human flourishing. Because the cold fact is: if we don’t do just that, people determined to erase more than half a century of progress on equity, civil rights, human rights and justice will succeed.
THEME SONG
I’m Angela Glover Blackwell. This is Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life, Chapter 5: Shift Happens.
In this chapter, we look at a new generation of elected leaders of color who came from grassroots organizing. We’ll explore how the power of government can be used to help all Angelenos flourish, and what can happen when it is misused.
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Angela Glover Blackwell: What's the relationship, as you see it, between power and thriving multiracial democracy?
John Kim: When it comes to thinking about power, you know I think there are three critical components:
John Kim, who we met in chapter four, is President and CEO of Catalyst California.
John Kim: Who is setting the conversation, right? Who is setting the bounds of the debate that we're having politically? That's number one. Number two, do you have the ability in that conversation to prioritize your interests? And then number three, do you have the hard-nosed capabilities to make it happen? You need all three of those things in order for you to say that you actually have governing power. And in a lot of ways, I feel like our movement has done an extraordinary job with the first two.
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John’s work includes the establishment of an annual report called RACE COUNTS, which collects data all across California tracking racial disparities in economic opportunity, housing, education, and crime and justice. His work puts him in touch with traditional channels of power, like city and state government. And equity advocates in LA have been busy on all these fronts.
John Kim: We’re able to set a different conversation about education in schools, a different conversation about the homeless and the criminalization of the homeless. Not just us, but the entire movement has now been able to effectively set the conversation. We've also been able to prioritize our interests. The interests, as you say, of a much broader swath of people in Los Angeles. Those that have always been ignored, shunted to the side. Their interests are now more and more coming to the forefront. I would say what we're still struggling with, the things that we still really need to focus on moving forward is that third component, the hard-nosed capabilities to actually get it done. To not only set the conversation to lift up our interest, but to actually change systems to implement what we want.
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It’s clear that we can create beautiful, inspiring, even radical programs and institutions outside of government. But to make the big political, economic and cultural changes our multiracial democracy needs, we must harness the power and use the mechanisms of government too.
But, as John Kim makes clear, participating in democracy is about much more than voting. It’s about redefining governance to include all of us.
It means expanding participation into the overarching vision of governance; how the day-to-day work of running a city – or a state or a country – should happen. And how activists and grassroots leaders need to remain engaged in the process even after our candidates win… or lose.
John Kim: I feel like we have to get comfortable struggling with some hard contradictions that are required to actually make stuff happen. There are times when we can fight a campaign with a level of ideological purity that I think is motivating for ourselves and for our compatriots and those that we're organizing with. But right when you get into governing, we have to struggle with them. And we have to not be willing to just walk away once it doesn't go our way. Like we have to be willing to play the long game.
And I get it. Governance can sound like a slog. But it matters who governs, and how.
Nothing has a greater impact on the quality of our lives and our collective future.
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ACT I
How do activists, and organizers – people closest to the sweet spots and pain points in their communities – bring their grassroots values with them when they make it into political seats? In LA, we can look directly at the mayor.
Archival: It is my jubilant honor to welcome the next mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass
[crowd cheers]
Karen Bass (archival): Good morning everyone. What a morning it is!...
Mayor Karen Bass is the first woman and second Black person to hold the position of mayor of Los Angeles.
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Before taking office in 2022, she was a long-time builder of multiracial coalitions as an organizer in South LA. She also held seats in state, and federal office – most recently serving in the U.S. House of Representatives for 12 years.
Karen Bass (archival): When I think of unaffordability, the difficulty, the struggle that working people face today in Los Angeles, I reflect on the challenges Angelenos have faced across our history. I reflect on the fact that no matter what, we never give up. We have never given up. And that's our LA magic. LA magic is still here.
Angela Glover Blackwell: I want to start by trying to get a sense of you and Los Angeles. Talk about growing up in LA and the neighborhood that you were in and what it felt like to grow up in your neighborhood.
Karen Bass: I am an Angeleno through and through. I was born here. My mother was born here. She was born in 1916. And my father came as part of the Great Migration. I began the first part of my life in the heart of South Central, right off of Central Avenue and 49th Street. And as I was growing up, my parents wanted to move to another side of town, which at the time we moved, which was in the early sixties, it was an all-white neighborhood. But I will tell you that the white folks moved so fast, I never met any of them. There was one white family that stayed, and then there was a Japanese family that was next door to us and they stayed. Everybody else moved so fast that it became a Black neighborhood, but it's important to say it was so quick.
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It was the 1960s. That time period shaped Mayor Bass’s sense of who she was and of what was possible.
Karen Bass: But I grew up in a wonderful, wonderful time of tremendous change, and that is who I am today and why I made such a commitment as to how I wanted to live my life as a child. I mean, I grew up watching the civil rights movement on TV and my father explaining to me what was going on as a person from the South. So I grew up very anxious, wanting to grow up quickly so that I could get on the picket line and participate in change because I was sure that my generation was going to change the world. Struggles were happening all over the world in Asia and Africa and Latin America. And so I always grew up with an international perspective.
Angela Glover Blackwell: It's interesting hearing about your father helping you to understand the struggle writ large and your understanding of the international dimensions. What was going on in Los Angeles that you were seeing close in in your neighborhood or the broader LA community that made you feel that you needed to be involved in struggle?
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Karen Bass: Well, really it started when I was in middle school because the first campaign I got involved in was actually Bobby Kennedy's campaign. And I signed my mother up to be a precinct captain. She never knew that. But I was the precinct captain and I think I was 13 or 14…
The year was 1968 Robert F. Kennedy was running for President and Martin Luther King Jr. was leading the civil rights movement.
But that April, King was assassinated. Two months later, Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, right after winning the California primary.
Karen Bass: You know, the assassination of of King and, and RFK, fundamentally changed my perspective on the world because then it made me cynical about, you know, traditional politics. And that's when I became more interested in more radical politics…
Political turmoil had reached a new pitch. The 1960s and 70s were roiling; people were full of a newfound awareness and determination. But the strife also provided an opportunity for much needed change.
Karen Bass: As a matter of fact, my first week of high school, I entered high school with the LAPD riot squad because these students were protesting the war in Vietnam. And then our teachers went on strike. And that led to the United Teachers of Los Angeles – they unionized then. And we were all supporting the strike. The students organized. We organized to get our school president. And then when the principal fired the president, we got the principal fired by organizing and pushing him out.
Meanwhile, Mayor’s Bass’s political education was supported outside of school.
Karen Bass: I mean we had study groups. I attended study groups every Sunday when I was in the 10th grade, reading political theory and philosophy. We always studied.
Like Mayor Bass, and so many others at the time, I too engaged in organized study groups. The fact was, none of us were getting taught about racial and economic justice in school. Anything we learned about struggle, we either learned at the kitchen table or we taught ourselves with our peers.
Karen Bass: So I graduated high school on a Thursday. I left the country on a Monday or Tuesday, and I'd never been on an airplane before, never traveled anywhere. We never had a vacation when I was growing up. And I, you know, went over to Europe. And I woke up the next day and said, “What did I just do?”
Angela Glover Blackwell: [Laughs]
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Mayor Bass was looking to refine and expand her understanding of the global struggle for collective improvement. But while in London, the political issues back home found her.
Karen Bass: I was over in Europe traveling around and there were protests that were happening in London to free Angela Davis. And I personally felt very bad because Angela was from LA, she was from UCLA. And I used to sit in her philosophy classes. And so here I am, halfway around the world and they're trying to free somebody that I actually met, and I actually talked to. And so that made me feel like, “What are you doing?”
Angela Davis is a political activist, scholar, author, and Black feminist philosopher who was charged with three felonies after murders took place with weapons that allegedly had some connection to her. She was incarcerated for 16 months, while people around the globe protested to free her. In 1972, she was acquitted on all charges.
Karen Bass: When I came back to LA, I knew I wanted to be an activist. But when we were growing up that wasn’t a job. I mean it is a job now, but that wasn’t a job when we were growing up.
Mayor Bass continued her activist work but, like she said, it wasn’t a job. So she went to nursing school, and became an ER nurse.
During the 1980s, she became a physician’s assistant and saw how the growing crack cocaine epidemic was tearing through communities of color, and especially the Black community. That crisis is what brought Mayor Bass’s activism and healthcare work together.
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Karen Bass: I was a P.A. and I was actually on the faculty at USC Medical School by the time crack hit. And I became obsessed because I thought crack was going to be like smallpox blankets for Native Americans. I mean, you remember, there was such a sense of profound despair in the Black population that we were just being decimated over crack.
She understood that the social unraveling feeding the crack epidemic was connected to economic devastation. That devastation was brought on by globalization and the loss of jobs. Much like the opioid epidemic of today, the crack epidemic was fueled by despair.
Karen Bass: And then the violence at the same time, because it was the structural change of us moving from an industrial base to an information-based economy. The big plants were shutting down that we just got into. And there was tremendous displacement that was taking place. And so knowing that the economic structure was changing and crack had, you know, been infused in the inner city, I panicked and I was very demoralized and upset.
So, with a coalition of Black and Brown community residents and activists, she formed an organization called Community Coalition, located in South Central LA. The aim was to train community members to become organizers in order to build power and advocate on behalf of their neighbors. But her approach wasn’t immediately embraced by all.
Karen Bass: The nuance when it came to Community Coalition and the issue around drugs was the left didn't want to touch it and basically said, “Until we address the economic structure of capitalism, we can't do anything about it.” And I'm like, “Well, then you've just basically said people can continue dying.” And that was unacceptable to me. And I was criticized as having sold out because I was taking government money, but I said “Well, you do you and I’ll do me.”
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Mayor Bass saw an opportunity to use public funds to be able to pay workers at Community Coalition fair wages with health insurance. In other words, she made being an activist a job. At the time, other community organizations didn’t have the money to do that. In many cases they didn’t even want that money if it was coming from the government.
Karen Bass: That was taboo. And to me it was about people living and dying and I didn't care. And so, and the money that we accepted was Bush money. It was Bush ‘41. It was his war on drugs, but it was money that was in the public health department and it was a community anti-drug coalition. And we were able to create the organization that we wanted.
After more than a decade co-leading the organization, Karen Bass was ready to translate the achievements of Community Coalition into a drive to win a seat in government. In 2004, she was elected to the State Assembly, later becoming the first African American woman to serve as Speaker. Then she was elected to the US House of Representatives in 2010 and held that seat in Congress until 2022, when she ran for mayor of Los Angeles.
Karen Bass (archival): Today, our neighborhoods are facing a public health, safety, and humanitarian crisis. Homelessness. At least 41,000 people sleep on the streets of L.A. every night. Throughout my career, I've stepped forward…
It was an intense race against a billionaire real estate magnate – a formidable member of LA’s business class– who reportedly spent around $104 million on his campaign while Mayor Bass spent just over $9 million.
Karen Bass: It was the grassroots piece and the neighborhood organizing – the people that I had worked with for many years that came to the table and said, “Let's do this.”
And on her inauguration day, true to her roots, Mayor Bass made it clear she was there to work with and for everyone in LA.
Karen Bass (archival): Now, no matter who you voted for, no matter who you are or where you live, I will be a mayor for you. And that’s the only way forward. I have spent my whole life as a coalition builder. Being a coalition builder is not coming together to sing kumbaya. Being a coalition builder – being a coalition builder [cheering] – being a coalition builder is about marshaling all of the resources, all of the skills, the knowledge, the talent of this city.
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On her first day in office, Mayor Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness in Los Angeles. Shortly after, she implemented reforms to fasttrack affordable housing development. And, her 2023-24 budget included an unprecedented $1.3 billion to address housing and homelessness in LA. This is the kind of policy priority that comes when a leader from the grassroots, like Mayor Bass, actually wins a seat in the halls of power.
Karen Bass: We've reached a level in our struggle that we can run and win. We run for president and run for governor, but we never even fathomed the idea of winning. It was just to make a point. But we've reached a new stage in our evolution, which is why now I'm so committed to the generation that's in office now. I don't want them to waste the opportunity. And I don't want them to focus only on themselves.
Angela Glover Blackwell: I wondered if you could just say what you hope will be the long term benefit of your leadership. What do you hope it's going to lead to?
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Karen Bass: I hope it leads to a number of people who follow, who run for office but who run for office in the right way and that they push and build democracy to its fullest. Not just let me see if I can win, but how do I bring everybody along with me while I'm running, while I'm winning, while I'm governing? Part of your job as an elected official is to teach. You got to bring people along so that they understand how the democracy works. People get angry at elected officials because they think they have all these powers they don't have. Well, it's my job to teach people these are the powers I have, these are the powers I don't have. Democracy doesn't work if you don't participate. And the onus is on me to do everything I can while I have the privilege of being in this position to expand democracy, to encourage participation, to educate Angelenos.
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Mayor Bass is committed to governance that understands our collective well-being is determined by the strength of the floor as well as the height of the ceiling.
ACT II
Senator Durazo: You’re talking about one of my best friends, sisters in the movement. She and I don't have to use words when we see each other. It's just the face, it's just the eyes, it's the hug. I love her so much. I’m so proud of her.
California State Senator Maria Elena Durazo is a kindred spirit to Mayor Bass. As we discussed in chapter four, before running for office, Senator Durazo was an influential labor organizer and leader in LA. She served as the first woman Secretary-Treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor – the second largest labor council in the country.
Senator Durazo: When I think of Karen, I think of all the women, particularly women of color, who struggle so hard and before us. My mother, my sisters and most of my campaigns in my life have been centered around women and women of color. That's what gives me hope.
Talking with Maria Elena, you can feel her commitment to the work. She’s among the new cohort of women of color in California who are championing forward-thinking campaigns that involve issues such as prison reform and reparations. Here she is in 2023 swearing in State Senator Caroline Menjivar, a Marine Corps veteran and daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, and an LGBTQ advocate.
Senator Durazo (archival): And that I will well and faithfully.
Senator Menjivar (archival): That I will well and faithfully.
Senator Durazo (archival): Discharge the duties.
Senator Menjivar (archival): Discharge the duties.
Senator Durazo (archival): Of this office.
Senator Menjivar (archival): Of this office.
Senator Durazo (archival): Of which I am about to enter.
Senator Menjivar (archival): Of which I'm about to enter.
Senator Durazo (archival): So help me God.
Senator Menjivar (archival): So help me God. Si se puede!
Senator Durazo: To this day, I would say the generation that's following us - Senator Menjivar, Senator Smallwood-Cuevas.
Senator Smallwood-Cuevas (archival): Good afternoon. Delegates of the California Democratic Party. I am so honored to be here with you to address this issue today. It's an issue that weighs heavily on my heart, the need for reparations, and how California will lead the way to finally heal the soul of this nation.
Senator Durazo: We have some extraordinary women in Sacramento that are just pushing even harder.
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Senator Durazo: I currently have a title of being California State Senator representing district 26 in Los Angeles – Central Los Angeles, all the way to unincorporated East LA. It's an extraordinary community because it is so diverse in many ways. Economically, we have higher income, and then we have the poorest of the poor.
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We have the five Asian Pacific Islander neighborhoods are in this district. We have some African American, we have Latinos, of course, white residents. So it is a very diverse community. It's a very, very active community.
Durazo was elected to office in 2018. She’d been compelled to run for the state senate in part because of the threats that she saw to democracy in the country and also because she wanted to bring what she’d helped build in LA to the state level.
Senator Durazo: Well, we had all worked so hard to transform Los Angeles, to really have a working class perspective, a perspective of hope, a perspective that when you organize, you make change. Los Angeles represents such a huge part of the state that we knew by changing Los Angeles we could have an impact on the state.
Now she’s in a position to make policies and to be the voice for so many who don’t get to elected office.
Angela Glover Blackwell: What did it feel like when you stepped into the halls of power in Sacramento? How did that feel, personally?
Senator Durazo: Well, it was an enormous sense of pride because my family was there and it was whoa, you walk into the Capitol and you're in the dome and you're in the Senate chambers and, you know, taking this oath and it was, it was intimidating, too, at the same time. But more it was a sense of pride and thinking, this is the place where I'm going to have the opportunity to represent the voices of a million people in my district.
Like Mayor Bass, Senator Durazo is the kind of leader we need to help build a multiracial democracy that takes everyone into account. She has introduced bills that protect workers during natural disasters, equity around climate action, and increased rights and protections for immigrants. Government leaders like her affirm my belief that a thriving multiracial democracy has a fighting chance.
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ACT III
When I think about governance, I think beyond the seats of political power to the role that the rest of us play – those working at the grassroots level, in community organizing, and in labor movements. So, having people like Durazo – who have had a foot in both spaces – is key to bringing those worlds together.
Kent Wong: I do think there has been a dramatic shift in politics in the state of California, largely due to a new alliance between the emerging labor movement and communities of color.
Kent Wong is the Project Director of Labor and Community Partnerships at UCLA where he teaches courses in labor studies and Asian American studies. He’s also on the Board of LAANE which was started by Senator Durazo and her late husband, LA labor leader Miguel Contreras.
Kent Wong: And in 1995, Miguel Contreras became the first person of color to lead the 800,000 members of the Los Angeles labor movement. This was a big sea change. We had never had a nonwhite male run the LA labor movement before. So here Miguel Contreras, who got his training with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, in the United Farm Workers – he was a leader in the hotel workers organizing Latino immigrant workers – he now becomes the first person of color to lead the LA labor movement.
He put in place a dynamic coalition that aligned the interests of the labor movement and communities of color around a common agenda.
Miguel Contreras actually recruited Karen Bass to run for the California State Assembly, and he put together a grassroots political mobilization program that turned out communities of color to vote like never before.
The story of Miguel Contreras, and his support for Mayor Bass early in her political career, is a perfect example of what I mean when I talk about redefining what governance looks like. When those of us on the ground work across difference on our shared interests, change can happen. Just look at what the Mayor has made her top priorities.
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Kent Wong: You know, Karen Bass for the first time in history has thrown down to make homelessness the number one priority and to center racial and economic justice as part of her administration. For the first time in history, the city of Los Angeles and the County Board of Supervisors, led by five women, are working together to address the issue of homelessness. You would think something as basic as this where shouldn't the city and county work together to address homelessness? Well, believe it or not, it's never happened before. And so both the city of LA, the county of LA, have declared a state of emergency.
The mayor’s collaboration with the LA County Board of Supervisors, a five-person governing body which is composed of all women for the first time, is another example of a new approach to governance. Historically, the county and the city have been at odds over the issue of homelessness. This partnership reflects a spirit of collaboration.
Robin Kelley: And that's the kind of leaders that we need, people who are deeply connected to these grassroots movements.
Robin Kelley teaches history at UCLA and has written extensively about African American history and social movements.
Robin Kelley: And I want to underscore Kent's point, that we're talking about elected officials coming out of the labor movement because we have a long list of Black and brown elected officials who have not been very friendly to the needs of people.
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ACT IV
Of course, electing people of color to political office, or any seat of influence, doesn’t guarantee generous leadership, integrity, good governance or the use of power to benefit all. One painful example is the scandal that rocked the LA City Council in 2022. The council president, two other council members, and a labor leader – all Latine – were caught on a leaked recording making racist comments about Black and Oaxacan communities. They also talked about redrawing council district boundaries to protect their own power and erode Black leadership.
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Newscaster 1: LA Mayor Eric Garcetti is the latest political power player to say three city council members should resign after their racially charged comments were recorded and leaked to the media.
Newscaster 2: Other council members, as well as both mayoral candidates Karen Bass and Rick Caruso, are also calling for the three to step aside. KTLA’s Jennifer McGraw live at City Hall with new details. Jen.
The racial hostility and abuse of power heard on the tape had many people questioning the prospects for LA’s multiracial democracy. It showed the anti-Blackness we’ve seen in communities of color before. The recording also revealed that in the eyes of a few officials, the route to one racial group’s political power is through the diminishment of another.
That calculation turns the growing diversity of the city’s population into a numbers game. A game that can splinter our collective power, instead of uniting communities to work for change. It’s an enduring racist strategy fed by a culture of deeply ingrained white supremacy, and by racially exclusionary systems that harm people across the board.
Alberto Retana: We're going through such a profound moment, I think, in so many different ways in Los Angeles.
Alberto Retana is President and CEO of Community Coalition – the organization co-founded by Karen Bass to bring Black and Latine people together to fight the crack epidemic in 1990. As someone who’s worked inside a multiracial organization for decades, he’s seen how the demographics of Los Angeles have shifted.
Alberto Retana: So now we have so many Latino leaders that are so infatuated with numbers that we don't even talk about the root causes anymore or the vision that we want. It makes me think deeply about the Black folks who came to Los Angeles who've never had numbers. It's never been a numbers game in terms of their ability to amass power. It's always required coalitions, always required a stronger moral fight that folks had to choose what side of the moral line you wanted to be on. And I, I'm really concerned about that. All of the conditions I think, in our society, in our economy, in the US, really breed division.
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In some ways, this story can be seen as political business as usual. Our current system creates this kind of us versus them attitude pitting racial groups against each other.
On this front, Alberto and the organizers at Community Coalition take a different approach.
Alberto Retana: How I approach this as an organizer is in acknowledgment of that. Not to be surprised by the division. The division is going to be there. So it's our job as organizers to unite folks.
In an attempt to find some kind of repair to what happened, Community Coalition opened its doors.
Alberto Retana: The week of the tapes, we held a community meeting in about, you know, it was so last minute, but about 120 residents came out, Black and brown folks and you had Latinos who were, out of, out of deep concern for their relationship to their Black brothers and sisters, apologizing.
The rupture not only showed how power can be splintered at the top, but also how it could – for a moment – splinter a community. That night, Alberto and his staff weren't sure how the conversation would go at first.
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Alberto Retana: There was a group of staff that had prepared for the meeting, and we had the chairs set up like a theater. And we were going to do a presentation around what had happened. Everyone was nervous because we didn't know where they was going to go. We didn't know if people were going to show up. And at some point, one of the members was like, “Why are we sitting like this? Who came up with this agenda? Who came up with this seating plan?” And of course, we're like, “This is your meeting, so let's switch it up.” So they made a circle.
I'll never forget a 6 or 7-year-old girl got up and gave a speech about what it means to feel excluded, what it means to be a Black girl in Los Angeles in this moment when she has Latino friends and they go to school together. And to hear this was the most troubling, painful thing for her to experience, but that we have to unite and fight together.
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I mean, that was the conversation that was taking place. The apologies that immigrant Latinas speaking in Spanish, getting up, saying, you know, “Lo siento. Soy no mi comunidad. This is not my people, not my community.” And then, you know, Black folks getting up and saying, you know, “We escaped the South to come to deal with this. You know, people expect us to be in coalition with with you. But this happens every day.” You know, like, it was incredibly intense, but it was incredibly beautiful. And we ended the night by going into the back of our lot, we all sort of walked out into the parking lot, and we had a Oaxacan band because Oaxacans were also talked about very negatively because they're Indigenous, they're darker, they speak a different language. And so they were also dehumanized in the conversation, like Black folks were dehumanized. And so we had a Oaxacan band play music and get on the trumpet…
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…and play this beautiful melody that just had everybody in silence, sort of quiet. And in community with each other. And just, and remembering that as ugly as it was that week, we do love each other, and we do care about each other. And we held hands and we closed the night committing to one another that at Community Coalition and at South LA, we weren't going to allow this kind of ugly, racist, white supremacy to divide us.
And that's what hopefully we continue to, to do every day in our work, to unite folks for the good life.
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That night at Community Coalition is an example of what can happen when we create processes for disagreement, work through discomfort, and emerge stronger on the other side. We need to be able to do this for a multiracial democracy to flourish. It allows us to hold each other accountable and keep going.
Alberto doesn’t think this would have been possible in LA before now.
Alberto Retana: That's the moment of opportunity that we have in Los Angeles. And because of the last 30 years of power building, of organizing, we're in such a unique place to really make a mark and not let those tapes be a defining moment for where we're headed, but to be a defining moment of where we're not going to go, where we're not going to go and what we’re not going to allow ourselves to be bought into.
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Governing in ways that provide for all – even those who have been excluded or historically marginalized – is particularly hard because there is no template. History is no guide. U.S. democracy was designed to be run by and serve white men and those closest to them. Although centuries of struggle and bloodshed have pushed our democracy to become more inclusive, we don’t have models of governance guided by the wisdom, voice, and experience of all communities.
But now, at last, we have stories of leaders like Mayor Karen Bass, and State Senator Maria Elena Durazo, who – unlike traditional elected officials – came to office after years of organizing and are actively collaborating with communities on the ground to get governance right. They’ve also cleared a path for a new generation of lawmakers – people of color, children of immigrants, working class people. As this cohort of elected officials grows, so does the power and possibility of a thriving multiracial democracy.
And we have stories like those from the community meeting that Alberto described, which show us that we can suffer through the struggle together without turning on each other.
The stakes are high. But the struggle is worth it.
And so is the work of holding our elected leaders accountable by participating: attending the hearings, writing the letters, making our collective voices heard, voting. And insisting on inclusive, generous, principled governance that serves all the people.
The reality is that nobody we elect will deliver everything we hoped for when we cheered them on and helped them win. And that can be frustrating, even infuriating. But we can’t tune out, turn away, sit out an election. Democracy is only as strong as our capacity to imagine a government of the people, by the people, and for the people — all the people.
THEME MUSIC IN
In our next and final episode for this season, Hope is a Discipline, we’ll talk about a vision for the future.
Ana Maria Alvarez: I was clear from the beginning, I was like this is a dance company that is about transforming the world as we know it. Our mission is actually like, how does dance shift the reality of our future, like, literally transform the world? That’s what we're up to.
Manuel Pastor: And I feel like what's gone on in Los Angeles is that we've tried to make a thing of beauty, a vibrant set of social movements and an idea, an attempt to take and wield governing power to make a thing of beauty, a world of beauty with our friends.
CREDITS
Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life is a podcast created by PolicyLink in partnership with Pineapple Street Studios.
We are grateful for the PolicyLink funders whose support allows us to produce this show.
For a transcript of the episodes and for more resources visit PolicyLink.org.
The team at Policy Link is Perfecta Oxholm, Fran Smith, Linda Johnson, Josh Kirschenbaum, Virgil Ramos, Venice Dunn, Montana Raine and Lauren Madden.
With additional support by Dr. David Kyuman Kim. Special thanks to PolicyLink CEO Michael McAfee.
This episode was produced by Natalie Peart with support from producers Yinka Rickford- Anguin and Alexis Moore.
Kamilah Kashanie is our managing producer.
Our editor is Darby Maloney. Fact checking by Will Tavlin
Our senior audio engineer and mixer is Pedro Elvira.
Our assistant audio engineers are Sharon Bardales and Jade Brooks, who also provided scoring assistance.
Theme song by Don Will. And our music is from Epidemic Sound.
Special thanks to Leila Day, Grace Cohen-Chen, Gabe Kawugule and Aggi Ashagre Palmer.
Our head of sound and engineering is Raj Makhija
Je-Anne Berry is our executive producer.
I'm your host, Angela Glover Blackwell.
Until next time, I urge everyone to make sure you’re registered and have a plan to vote. A thriving multiracial democracy depends on participation and voting is extremely important.