Democracy Dreamin' | 1

Los Angeles is a city usually known for Hollywood, sunshine, and its freeways, but LA also offers up something else: an opportunity to build a truly multiracial democracy.

Angela Glover Blackwell thinks LA is ahead of the curve when it comes to democracy. Los Angeles is a city usually known for Hollywood, sunshine, and its freeways, but LA also offers up something else: an opportunity to build a multiracial democracy, which makes it well positioned to make good on democracy’s promise: by the people, of the people, and for the people.

Listen in as Chinaka Hodge, Mayor Karen Bass, Manuel Pastor, Alberta Retana, Tiffany Benitez, Denise Fairchild join Angela in Democracy Dreamin'.

Title: Democracy Dreamin’
Featured Guests: Mayor Karen Bass, Economist Manuel Pastor, Nonprofit Leader Alberto Retana, Community Organizer Tiffany Benitez, Environmental Leader Denise Fairchild
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ACT I
I’m Angela Glover Blackwell and I’ve been advocating for racial justice and equity all my adult life. But for most of those years, I never really spent much time thinking about the fragility of our democracy. I took democracy as a given in the U.S. It was a bedrock of the nation.

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Of course, I understood that our democracy was deeply flawed and that equal rights and opportunities were a myth, a tantalizing set of promises that has never been fulfilled. That’s why I’ve spent more than a half-century doing the work that I do.

I grew up in a segregated St. Louis in the 1950s and ‘60s and attended all-Black schools with highly educated teachers who, because of racism, were essentially barred from other professional work. I remember one evening, my parents and their friends took us kids to the city’s famous outdoor municipal opera. The adults clustered the children in the inside seats while arranging themselves along the perimeter. At the time I thought it was to watch us for misbehavior. Later, I realized they were actually protecting us from the ugly, hostile looks and racial slurs that Black people usually encountered when we ventured out of Black spaces.

So yes, I knew from an early age that ours is a flawed democracy, with a brutal history of Native American genocide, stolen land and enslavement, racial violence, and discrimination. But I — and, I believe, most Americans, indeed most of the world — assumed that it was a strong democracy, with a moral arc that could be bent toward justice.

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Now we know just how vulnerable our democracy is.

Archival: On January 6, 2021, thousands of rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol…
Archival: Florida becomes the latest state to ban schools from teaching about systemic racism.
Archival: ‘23 Saw the highest number of bills introduced in state legislatures attacking LGBTQ Rights.
Archival: Legal challenges regarding voting rights in multiple states from Georgia to Arkansas could alter the nation’s political landscape ahead of the 2024 Elections.

But I’m not here to talk about the threats to democracy. You can get plenty of that on cable news. I want to explore how to realize the potential of our democracy to achieve a good life for all. A potential that I believe was articulated at the very start of this nation.
But before we dive in, I want to make it clear that democracy isn’t just about voting. Although, I implore everyone to vote. Please vote. Democracy is actually an ongoing process, a way to get to where we want to go – a good life for everyone.
I also want to make it very clear that multiracial democracy means everybody. It doesn’t leave out white people. It doesn’t push out anybody. It calls everybody in.

This sentiment is expressed by the supremely gifted writer and poet, Chinaka Hodge in her poem “All Power To The People.”

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Chinaka Hodge (All Power To The People):
The truth of the matter is white folks’ freedom depends on ours and the rest of us are brown.
And we've outgrown a binary that excludes all other comrades.
I'm talking about all of the people.
All of the people, all of the people.
All of the power, all of the people.
All of the power, all of the people.
All of the power, all of the people.
All power to the people.

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Welcome to Reimagining Democracy For a Good Life. On this podcast, we’ll explore a place that gives me hope. A city where I see the emergence of the essential elements for a radically inclusive, thriving multiracial democracy, even as it struggles with the same problems facing the rest of the country. That city is Los Angeles.

This is Chapter 1: Democracy Dreamin’.

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ACT II

I understand that LA might not be the first place that comes to mind when you think of a multiracial democracy. It wasn't for me. But what first attracted me to LA as a place where we might learn something, was the election of Karen Bass as mayor in 2022.

Archival: The city of Los Angeles finally has a new mayor. And whether or not you voted for her, this was a historic win.
Archival: Becoming the first female and second Black Los Angeles mayor.
Archival: Not only is she the first woman elected as mayor of Los Angeles, Bass drew more votes than any mayoral candidate in LA history.

Mayor Bass is a Black woman and a progressive coalition builder.

Mayor Karen Bass: What has motivated me in life, in terms of pursuing leadership roles, is the need. I've never been just aspirational. I've not even looked at my life as a career. I've looked at my life as a mission.

She inspires me because she came out of a kind of organizing that believes in the authenticity and the wisdom of community – and she has never lost her roots. That’s rare in politics. She uses her abilities to solve problems. That’s what I do too. And while the elected office route isn’t for me, I see the power and necessity of having people like Mayor Bass in government to make the changes we need for human flourishing. And by human flourishing, I mean all of those things that allow all people to thrive: good education, safe housing, good health, well-being, and economic opportunities.

I wanted to know what's been happening in LA to catapult someone like Karen Bass to the mayor's office. And I don’t mean just during her campaign. I mean the work that has been happening for decades to forge multiracial consciousness, organize across diverse communities, and build coalitions that elect grassroots leaders. As I looked closer, I found this work is based on thinking differently about some common ideas, like leadership, power, and governing. The more I explored LA, the more I felt like I was uncovering what it takes to build a truly inclusive multiracial democracy. It's so much more than the election of one person. And that's what we'll be exploring over the next five episodes.

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I’m fascinated by the origins of LA’s rich diversity. The LA of today is the ancestral home of the Ventureño Chumash, Fernandeño Tataviam, and Gabrieleño-Tongva peoples. And LA is home to the largest number of Indigenous people of any city in the U.S.

Americans of Mexican ancestry helped found LA. And today, Latìne folks make up the largest racial group in the city: 48 percent of the population. The vast majority are of Mexican descent, but there are Angelenos with roots from all over Latin America.

LA is home to 5 historic Asian Pacific Islander neighborhoods. Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Historic Filipinotown, Koreatown, and Thai Town. And all the way back to the 1700s, when the Spanish government was sending people to establish what we now know as the city of Los Angeles, that group included a Filipino family. Today, LA has the largest population of people with Asian ancestry of any county in the United States.

White people began to arrive in LA in large numbers with the start of the gold rush. Black people began migrating from the South after the Civil War, with numbers really swelling during the Great Migration.

LA’s abundant diversity includes immigrants from all over the world and migrants from other parts of the nation. Whatever their ancestry, these groups were held together by shared aspirations of economic opportunity and the prospect of a good life.

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This is not to minimize the barriers and brutality that people of color endured as the city grew. Native Americans were the first targets, as their land was stolen and their people were slaughtered. Legal discrimination, segregation, and racial violence were facts of life in LA for centuries, impacting where and how people could live. It wasn’t until the signing of the civil rights and immigration acts in the mid-1960s that LA’s diverse population finally began to get a foothold into the middle class.

Over the years, LA has faced many challenges and has forged a deep history of protest and organizing for racial justice. There was the infamous Watts uprising in August of 1965 in response to the police beating a 21-year-old African American, Marquette Frye, for allegedly resisting arrest. And in 1968, there was a huge student walkout in the predominantly Chicano neighborhood of East LA, over unfair treatment in the schools. And, in 1992, there was the uprising after the acquittal of four LAPD officers caught on video beating African American motorist Rodney King. This last event sparked a massive eruption in the city.

Manuel Pastor: I actually think one of the most formative moments, and I think this is something that will be really crucial for listeners in the rest of the United States, was the 1992 civil unrest, and perhaps not for reasons most people think.

Manuel Pastor is an influential economist, who uses his expertise to educate and advocate for justice.
Manuel Pastor: After the ‘92 civil unrest, organizers looked around and realized that if you have a city that is pissed off enough to burn itself to the ground and you have not been able to channel that into something more productive, there's not just something wrong with the system, there’s something wrong with you as an organizer in terms of your ability to capture people's imagination. And I think the lessons from that was we needed to go multiracial. We needed to go in terms of an alliance generally with working people and with labor. And we needed to go big at a scale that would capture power at the city level and at the county level.
It’s at this point that the modern LA emerged. Leaders on the ground began to develop a multiracial consciousness and translated that into ongoing organizing and coalition building. A shift that makes it a city worth investigating and learning from.
Alberto Retana: In order for there to be unity, division has to exist. Unity just doesn't happen because it's there. Unity implies difference.
Alberto Retana is the CEO of Community Coalition, an organization founded by Karen Bass before she got into politics.
Alberto Retana: Whether you're in one community, right, the Latino community or the Black community or across two different communities or across two different tribes or two different sectors, regardless of how you want to frame it, there's a difference. And our job is to unite people around a set of values and ideas and politics that folks are willing to grasp onto. And you can only do that through struggle. You cannot unite without a version of struggle. So you struggle with each other to build clarity on that unity, to understand that there are people being exploited and excluded against each other. Can we be united around that and understand who the common enemy is so that we can actually struggle against the real enemy, which is the 1%, the economic divisions, the exclusion. So unity, struggle, unity. Right. We struggle to unite so that we can struggle against the forces. That's the moment of opportunity that we have in Los Angeles.
Because ultimately, what makes LA unique isn’t simply racial and cultural diversity but the fact that throughout its growth there’s been extraordinary leadership working in partnership with communities and labor fighting relentlessly for change. Folks like Manuel Pastor, Alberto Retana, and LA Mayor Karen Bass
Mayor Karen Bass: We have to build 500,000 units of housing, Angela. How are we going to get that built without public participation and involvement? So I think there's very practical implications to solve problems, but it's also, we don't want people to be so cynical about government they don't want to participate. Because when you do that, then you surrender all your power, all your resources over to a select group of people, who more than likely do not have your interest at heart.
Fighting for change is hard. Los Angeles is not a democratic nirvana, by any stretch of the imagination. It has an abundance of all the problems facing other U.S. cities — poverty, homelessness, crime, underperforming schools, unaffordable housing, low wages – you name it. Whether we recognize it or not, we all experience the effects of democracy, including what happens when it fails us. The city is on a promising path. But it takes more than a single mayoral term, or a single administration, to transform systems and institutions that were not designed to serve human flourishing. It takes action. And, a lot of the time, it’s the people who bear the outsized burden of these problems and understand them best who are successfully putting forward solutions.
[Singers]: Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah
Early one Sunday morning in August of 2023, at a mass at Dolores Mission, a Catholic church in Boyle Heights, there was a gathering hosted by the non-profit organization LA Voice, for their Home Is Sacred event. It was attended by people campaigning for and affected by housing insecurity in Los Angeles.
Tiffany Benitez: Well, about four years ago, we were moved out of our home here in Boyle Heights.
In attendance was Tiffany Benitez, who was 17 years old at the time. She’s a young housing rights organizer. Her activism began after she and her family were pushed out of their home. They were told it was temporary, for renovations. But they never heard back from the landlord about when they could return. And after a while —
Tiffany Benitez: We found out that a new family was living there. And we found out that it was because they were paying a little bit more than what we were paying at the time.
It’s a tactic often used by unscrupulous landlords who want to replace their rent-controlled tenants with renters who will pay more. Tiffany and her family ended up having to find a new place to live.
Tiffany Benitez: We went from paying [speaking Spanish — Cuánto pagabamos aqui en la terrazza?
Unidentified Speaker: $850, $900 ]
Tiffany Benitez: Almost $900 - $1,000 to paying $2,500 in a matter of months.
Tiffany’s story is not uncommon. Boyle Heights, where Tiffany is from, is a predominantly Latíne neighborhood that has been plagued by gentrification and displacement. Across the city on any given night, over 75,000 people experience homelessness. The housing crisis is exacerbated by inadequate tenant protections and rapidly rising rents. Tiffany sees this insecurity among her friends, too.
Tiffany Benitez: Recently, my childhood best friend, her family is also getting evicted from their house. We're not sure why. We're just trying to help them find a home as of now. And I feel like that's when it started hitting me like, okay, this is a real problem.
As young as Tiffany is, she recognizes that the housing crisis needs to be tackled collectively and that’s exactly what she’s doing as an organizer.
Tiffany Benitez: Coming together as a community really helps people's voices get out there. It makes us stronger. It makes senators and all these people realize that we are strong and that we have goals. And this is why we're all uniting together to fight for something that seems just for any regular person, any ordinary person.
Tiffany inspires me. She has the wisdom I see in so many emerging leaders of color in LA and across the nation. When people like Tiffany, those for whom the current system isn’t working, organize for what they need, they are also working for what the nation needs to achieve human flourishing for its people. This gives me hope.

Denise Fairchild: How do we flourish? In my mind's eye, it's really about building community. How do we build community that is life-affirming, which is going to provide for our food and our housing and our clothing and our education?
That’s Denise Fairchild. She’s a long-term advocate who sees the link between our natural environment and our economy.
Denise Fairchild: I believe that the environmental justice, the climate justice, the economic justice, the social justice movements are foundational to the transformation that is required. Their political analysis is correct. And they're shining a light on the fallout from a system that does not allow everyone to flourish. These are movements that are really grounded in love and people's commitment and caring for the human condition as well as the condition of our economy and our environment. So it's rooted in a deep sense of care for the world in which we live.
Tiffany and Denise both manifest the power of understanding interconnectedness. The health of our democratic institutions is inseparable from the health of the people. And, the health of the people is inseparable from the health of the planet. The profound change needed for collective human flourishing requires leaders to act in this spirit of generosity and understand that our fates are intertwined.
Chinaka Hodge relays this idea beautifully.
Chinaka Hodge:
We are worth protecting.
We are worth engaging.
We are worth the struggle it will take to make us our newest and best selves.
Every hard conversation, every changed behavior, negotiation, protest, march, or affirmation.
We ain't chasing perfection.
Ain't looking for hope overnight.
What we want is equity.
A fair shake for everybody who looks like us and everybody that doesn't.
What we want is access.
We want amends.
We want livable wages.
We want tired, poor, huddled masses.
We want to give them safe space and sanctuary.
We want women to be safe.
We want children to be safe.
We want queerness to be exalted.
We want our ancestors to be acknowledged.
And we want our babies to be free.
Act III: CONCLUSION
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The framers of the Constitution were wealthy white men, many of them enslavers who limited the rights of citizenship to people like themselves and dehumanized others. And yet, they also articulated a revolutionary concept of government. Of a democracy “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
They created a model that could grow and stretch. It’s a democracy that becomes stronger as it becomes more inclusive. And today – in a United States so diverse that soon no single racial group will be in the majority – our democracy must be multiracial or it won’t exist.
I want to explore what a thriving multiracial democracy can look like, how it can serve human flourishing, and what it takes to get there. The truth is, no place in the world has ever had a truly thriving, inclusive democracy that serves all in a diverse population. Finally meeting that challenge of representation and service is vital.
Los Angeles looms large in the public imagination, for many reasons. Hollywood. The beach. Sunshine. Freeways. I want to show you a different side of LA. One that holds lessons for shaping the nation’s future.
Reimagining Democracy For a Good Life puts a magnifying glass on Los Angeles, but it’s really about something bigger. It’s a response to those who would rather destroy democracy than see it live up to its promise of justice and opportunity for all. And I think it offers a vision of hope and inclusion for those who feel anxious or dispirited in the current political climate. I’m not holding up Los Angeles as an ideal model of multiracial democracy, at least, not yet. But I’m excited to show you how people are coming together across racial lines to seize this moment and stretch democracy to serve all.
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In our next chapter, There’s No “I” in Leader, we’ll discuss how organizers on the ground turned the trauma of the 1992 uprising into a call to action.
Kent Wong: The role of the police was laid to bear that we are not here to protect you. If you folks want to kill each other, if you folks want to burn each other, that is fine with us. We are here to protect those with wealth and privilege in the city of Los Angeles.
Robin Kelley: The rebellion sparked something that we don't always talk about, an amazing cultural renaissance.
Until next time, I urge all of you to make sure you are registered and have a plan to vote.
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 more resources, visit PolicyLink.org
The team at PolicyLink is Perfecta Oxholm, Fran Smith, Glenda Johnson, Josh Kirchenbaum, Ferchil Ramos, Vanice Dunn, Montana Raine, and Loren Madden. Special thanks to PolicyLink CEO Michael McAfee.
This episode was produced by Yinka Rickford-Anguin, with support from Associate Producer Natalie Peart and Producer 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 Alvira.
Our Assistant Audio Engineers are Sharon Bardales and Jade Brooks, who also provided scoring assistance.
Theme song by Donwill.
And our music is from Epidemic Sound.
Special thanks to Leila Day, Grace Cohen-Chen, and Gabe Kawugule.
Excerpts of "The Promise of the Bay," courtesy of Chinaka Hodge and the San Francisco Foundation. Special thanks to the Othering and Belonging Institute for the use of “All Power to All People.”
Our Head of Sound & Engineering is Raj Makhija.
Je-Anne Berry is our Executive Producer.
I'm your host, Angela Glover Blackwell.
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