---

Warren for President
For Immediate Release: Friday, July 5th, 2019

Warren Announces Set of Executive Actions She Will Take to Value the Work of Women of Color

Charlestown, MA -  Prior to her appearance at Essence Festival, Elizabeth Warren announced a set of executive actions she will take on day one of her presidency to boost wages for women of color and open up new pathways to the leadership positions they deserve. Elizabeth wrote about her plan in an exclusive Essence op-ed this morning. Read it here. 

Read Elizabeth’s Medium post here and below:

Our society and our economy demand so much of women — but they place a particular burden on Black, Latina, Native American, Asian, and other women of color. More than 70% of Black mothers and more than 40% of Latina mothers are their families’ sole breadwinners — compared to less than a quarter of white mothers. Black women participate in the labor force at higher rates than white women, and Latinas’ share of the labor force has nearly doubled over the past 20 years. And at the same time, Black and Brown women have more caregiving responsibilities, with Black and Latinx caregivers spending 50% more hours a week on caregiving than white caregivers.

While millions of families count on Latinas and Black women to deliver financially, they face a steeper climb to provide that financial security. In 2017, Black women were paid 61 cents for every dollar white men made. Native women made 58 cents to a white man’s dollar  — and Latinas earned just 53 cents to a white man’s dollar*. And it’s getting worse: the gap in weekly earnings between white and Black women is higher today than it was forty years ago.

Employers tilt the playing field against women of color at every stage of employment. During the hiring process, employers use salary history to make new offers  — creating a cycle where women of color are locked into lower wages. Once in the workplace, Black and Brown women are disproportionately mistreated. In a recent survey, nearly two-thirds of Black and Latina women reported experiencing racial discrimination at work.

The path to higher-level management jobs is also rockier for women of color — a reflection in part of having fewer networking and mentorship opportunities with members of their same race and gender. Even though Black women and Latinas are often the leaders and decision-makers in their own homes and communities, they hold only one spot on the Fortune 500 CEO list and less than 5% of Fortune 500 Board positions.

The experiences of women of color are not one-dimensional: sexual orientation, gender identity, and ability all shape how a person’s work is valued in the workplace. But our economy should be working just as hard for women of color as women of color work for our economy and their families. For decades, the government has helped perpetuate the systemic discrimination that has denied women of color equal opportunities. It’s time for the government to try to right those wrongs — and boost our economy in the process.

That’s why I have a new plan: a set of executive actions I will take on day one of the Warren Administration to boost wages for women of color and open up new pathways to the leadership positions they deserve. I will:

Promote equity in the private sector through historic new requirements on federal contractors. Companies with federal contracts employ roughly a quarter of the U.S. workforce. By imposing new rules on companies that hope to receive federal contracts, we can take a big step towards creating equal opportunities for Black, Latina, Native American, Asian and other women of color. I will issue an Executive Order that will:

• Deny contracting opportunities to companies with poor track records on diversity and equal pay. I will build on existing disclosure requirements by requiring every contractor to disclose data on employees’ pay and role, broken out by race, gender, and age. And I will direct agencies not to enter into contracts with companies with poor track records on diversity in management and equal pay for equal work.
   
• Ban companies that want federal contracts from using forced arbitration and non-compete clauses that restrict workers’ rights. Forced arbitration and collective action waivers make it harder for employees to fight wage theft, discrimination, and harassment — harms that fall disproportionately on women of color. And abusive non-compete clauses for low- and middle-wage workers needlessly hold them back from pursuing other job opportunities. Companies that impose these restrictions on their workers will be ineligible to receive federal contracts.
   
• Ban contractors from asking applicants for past salary information and criminal histories. Companies will be barred from winning federal contracts if they request previous salary information or violate the EEOC’s criminal records guidance, which prevents discrimination against formerly arrested or incarcerated people.
   
• Ensure fair pay and benefits for all workers. Federal contractors must extend a $15 minimum wage and benefits (including paid family leave, fair scheduling, and collective bargaining rights) to all employees. This will have an outsized effect on Black and Brown women, who perform a disproportionate share of lower-wage work.

Make the senior ranks of the federal government look like America. The federal government does a dismal job on diversity and inclusion. The share of Latinas in the federal workforce is about half that of the entire workforce. And even though Black women are disproportionately represented in the federal workforce, they are nearly absent from its leadership ranks. White workers make up nearly 80% of the senior civil service despite making up only 63% of the overall federal workforce. If we’re going to demand more of the private sector, we should demand more of the federal government too. My Equal Opportunity Executive Order will recruit and develop leadership paths for underrepresented workers by:

• Diversifying recruitment: Direct real resources towards attracting entry-level applicants from HBCUs, Tribal Colleges and Universities, and other minority-serving institutions, and reforming our higher-level recruiting process to attract diverse experienced hires into senior management positions.
   
• Supporting development: Create new paid fellowship programs for federal jobs for minority and low-income applicants, including formerly incarcerated individuals, focusing especially on agencies where Black and Brown women are most underrepresented.
   
• Opening up promotion pathways: Require every federal agency to incorporate diversity as part of their core strategic plan and create support networks through a government-wide mentorship program that centers Black and Brown employees.

Strengthen and target enforcement against systemic discrimination. Sectors that disproportionately employ Black and Brown women — such as the low-wage service industry — have higher rates of discriminatory practices. But women in these sectors are much less likely to report violations. My EEOC will more closely monitor these fields and bring in top talent to enforce claims in those areas. It will also issue first-of-its-kind guidance on enforcing claims involving the intersectional discrimination that women of color face from the interlocking biases of racism and sexism.

These executive actions are just a first step. We need to do much more to make sure that women of color have a fair shot at opportunity and financial security. That means everything from enacting my affordable housing, universal child care, and student debt cancellation plans to passing legislation to expand protections for domestic workers to creating stronger enforcement mechanisms that protect the right of all workers — especially the most vulnerable — to call out discrimination when they see it.

It’s time to build an America that recognizes the role that women of color play in their families and in the economy, that fairly values their work, and that delivers equal opportunity for everyone.

* Much of the data doesn’t let us fully describe the experiences of people with different and overlapping identities in the workforce. The data here assumes a gender binary — but we know that peoples’ experiences aren’t. There is much more work to be done to understand the barriers people with different identities face in the workplace.

###

---

Beto for America
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Saturday, July 6, 2019

ICYMI: At ESSENCE Fest, Beto Recognizes African American Women as “The Heart and Soul of the Democratic Party”

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA－Today, Beto O'Rourke delivered keynote remarks and answered questions on the Power Stage at the 25th Anniversary ESSENCE Festival in New Orleans. Addressing the largest annual gathering of black women in the country, Beto shared his plan to support black women-owned businesses, expand access to healthcare, and address environmental justice issues disproportionately affecting black communities.

“We have a maternal mortality crisis in this country that is three times as deadly for women of color,” said Beto. “We must achieve universal health care, fully invest in family planning clinics, and follow the lead of women who are confronting this crisis daily.”

Prior to the festival, Beto visited Thrive New Orleans to discuss environmental justice with local residents and advocates in the Ninth Ward, an area that experienced catastrophic flooding during Hurricane Katrina. Thrive New Orleans is a key partner in the local environmental movement.

Listening to stories from around the table, Beto noted that we can’t fight climate change without also fighting for climate justice. Beto closed the conversation by reinforcing that every community must be part of the solutions to the challenges our country faces: “As your nominee, as your president, or just as your fellow American, I'm going to do everything I can to work with you to make sure we meet this－the greatest of all challenges－and that we do it together.”

---

Kamala Harris for the People
July 6, 2019

---

Bennet for America
DATE: Saturday, July 6, 2019
CONTACT: Shannon Beckham

Michael Bennet at Essence Festival: “Education System Reinforcing Inequality, Instead of Liberating People From It”

NEW ORLEANS — Michael Bennet spoke today at the 25th Essence Festival, where he drew on his experience as the former superintendent of the Denver Public Schools and discussed how our education system is reinforcing economic inequality, instead of liberating people from it.
 
He spent the last week in the Mississippi Delta, visiting with parents, teachers, and students facing some of the worst educational and economic inequality in the country.
 
“We need preschool for every kid in America who needs it — and that's every kid in America,” said Bennet. “We need K-12 schools all across this country that any Senator would send their kid to. We need people to be able to go to college without bankrupting their families. And for the 70% of kids that don't go to college, we need them to get the training and skills so they can earn a living wage, not just a minimum wage. … We need to start paying our teachers like the professionals that they are. This may all seem obvious to everybody here, but we're doing almost none of it. … We must beat Donald Trump, begin to govern this country again, and create an education system that works for everybody in America, not just the wealthy few. That's why I'm running for President.” 

Watch Michael’s remarks here.


Thank you Reverend. Thank you for having me this morning. 

My name is Michael Bennet. As the Reverend said, I'm not a politician. I was the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools before I was in the Senate.

I didn't fly to New Orleans. My family and I drove here. Over four days, we took the back roads from Memphis. Our first stop was Marianna, Arkansas, my wife's hometown. The distance from Washington, DC to Marianna is 1,000 miles. But it might as well be a million, because the people living there are invisible to the broken politics in Washington, DC. And that's true of all the places we visited up and down the Mississippi Delta.

We visited communities trying to rebuild their economy from ashes. Heard doctors worried that their rural clinic was going to close, even though they're in some of the unhealthiest counties in America. Drove by shuttered schools and one thriving private prison after the next. The Delta needs us to use this campaign to put these issues front and center. And today, I want to focus us on another critical issue that hasn't come up in any of the debates. And that is the issue of education. 

There was a time in America when public education was the wind at our back and transforming our economy. But today, taken as a whole, our education system is reinforcing the income inequality that we have, not liberating people from it. 

The best predictor of the quality of the education you're going to have is the zip code you are born into. And as a school superintendent, I met kids who woke up at 5:30 in the morning to take three buses across town to a better school. Who came to class exhausted because they worked the night shift. I know parents who speak with tears in their eyes about the gap between their child's potential and what they're able to learn in school. One parent in the Delta told me, we just want our kids to be able to keep up with the times. Today we are falling short of even that basic expectation. 

I know you know this. But when one group of children has access to preschool, and the other, through no fault of their own, does not... when one group has access to a million dollar house, and therefore quality K-12 education, and the other does not… when one group has access to tutors and counselors and parents who went to college themselves, and the other does not, then even equal is not equal. And we need to make a change. 

We need preschool for every kid in America who needs it — and that's every kid in America. We need K-12 schools all across this country that any Senator would send their kid to. We need people to be able to go to college without bankrupting their families. And for the 70% of kids that don't go to college, we need them to get the training and skills so they can earn a living wage, not just a minimum wage. 

And one more thing: we need to start paying our teachers like the professionals that they are. This may all seem obvious to everybody here, but we're doing almost none of it. 

Three days ago, I was in Sunflower, Mississippi. 74% of the community is black. Average incomes are half of what they are in the country, the poverty rate is three times higher. But every day for the last five weeks, the Sunflower kids have walked through the doors of the summer school, fulfilling their responsibility to our democracy 

Every day, they pass a mural on the wall that says “education is the seed of freedom.” Like millions of kids across the country, their hands are full. They need to learn English, they need to learn math, they need to learn science. They have no time to figure out how to pay teachers what they deserve, how to fix the education system to benefit them, how to end our system of mass incarceration, address the climate crisis before we incinerate this planet, end gun violence, and restore America's role in the world. They already have a job to do. And they have a reasonable expectation that we're going to do our job to make sure we're not the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, to the people coming after us. That is what we must do in this election. We must beat Donald Trump, begin to govern this country again, and create an education system that works for everybody in America, not just the wealthy few. That's why I'm running for President. Thank you for having me here today. It is a great honor to be here with all of you.

---

Pete for America







July 7, 2019

VIDEO: Mayor Pete Speaks at ESSENCE Festival Followed By On-Stage Interview

Key excerpts from ESSENCE speech:

ON RACISM

We have seen the consequences of systemic racism that must be defeated in my lifetime in order for America to succeed. [...]

And on all of these issues, Black women have been at the tip of the spear, experiencing the consequences to our nation’s shortcomings but also putting forward solutions to deal with them. [...]

I’m running for president as a young American mayor in part because I believe the toughest issues we face locally are also the toughest issues we face nationally -- segregated neighborhoods, unequal schools, mass incarceration, economic exclusion. And we need national leadership that cares about cities and understands what we face. [...]

There's been too much talk about Black problems in this country and not nearly enough about Black solutions—of which women are at the forefront. It’s why as president I will not only be addressing and listening to Black women, but appointing them as we have done in South Bend. And we see the consequences of that, positive ones.


Key excerpts from ESSENCE interview:

ON ACCOUNTABILITY

So, step one is transparency, I believe, because what we know about things like women and black women, in particular, being underpaid is there is a lot of accountability when that comes to the light. So I am proposing that employers be required to publish gender pay gaps that are going on in their organizations, and I think that will provide a powerful motivator for people to do that job right.

I expect to be held accountable for whether my administration models the diversity that all of the candidates are talking about right now. We're seeking to do it in our campaign—we're very proud of the campaign team we're building—in the city administration that we build, even facing the fact that in areas like law enforcement recruiting, we've still got a ways to go. And I expect to be held accountable for how diverse our administration's top appointments are because personnel is policy, and things change very quickly when you have different kinds of people in charge.


ON ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY

Well, one of the biggest things we know is an issue is access to capital. And we have got to reform a credit system that restricts access to capital for so many would-be entrepreneurs without actually doing a good job of assessing how credit worthy they are.

So we know that scoring needs to change, we know the administration of these algorithms needs to change—and by the way, one of the big issues we've got to face as technology grows in our lives is to make sure technology doesn't wind up automating the biases that have already been in people's minds, because an equation can discriminate just as much as a loan officer can, and we have got to write the right equations. [...]

A big piece of it is making sure people have the freedom to take a risk...This is why healthcare is so important. If you are afraid to start a small business because you can't leave your old job, even though it doesn't pay enough, because you are clinging to those health benefits, then that diminishes your opportunity to go create opportunities for yourself and others.



Full transcript of speech below:

Thank you and good morning. Good morning. There we go, good morning ESSENCE Fest. It is so good to be with you.

As a mayor, I am particularly pleased that we are gathering at a center named after a trailblazing mayor, Ernest Morial, the father of another great mayor, Marc Morial, in a city that also brought us Mayor Landrieu who was the ringleader of the U.S. mayors for a time, and is now led by the very first Black woman mayor of New Orleans, LaToya Cantrell. It is the season for mayors, and you have produced some amazing ones.

I want to thank Reverend Sharpton for your kind introduction, for your leadership and for your insights whenever I reach out.

And I want to thank and express my admiration for Michelle Ebanks, Richelieu Dennis, and the entire ESSENCE team. Acquiring ESSENCE, restoring its black ownership has been a tremendous contribution and we all admire you a great deal.

My name is Pete Buttigieg, people back home have trouble saying my last name too so they just call me Mayor Pete. You can call me whatever you like. I want to take a few minutes to introduce myself, tell you what I believe, and why I'm running for president.

I also want to let you that I stand here aware that Black women are not just the backbone of the Democratic Party, but the bone and sinew that is making our democracy whole. We have seen time and time again, especially in the last couple elections, that when Black women mobilize, outcomes change. And we need some new outcomes at a time like this.

Now, we need Black women to rise up more than ever because we are living, I am convinced, in a moment that will decide not only what the next three or fours years are like in American life, but the next thirty or forty. And a great deal is going to depend on whether we can tackle racial inequality in my lifetime.

I say this as a mayor from a diverse city in the industrial Midwest. And I can tell you one story about how our city came back from the brink, not because I went around saying we were going to “Make South Bend Great Again,” not by trying to turn the clock back to a past that was never that great anyway for a lot of us, but by focusing on the future.

But I can also tell you about a story in which Black residents of our own hometown have been excluded from the recovery of our city and of our country by the consequences of systemic racism.

I’m running for president as a young American mayor in part because I believe the toughest issues we face locally are also the toughest issues we face nationally -- segregated neighborhoods, unequal schools, mass incarceration, economic exclusion. And we need national leadership that cares about cities and understands what we face.

We have seen the consequences of systemic racism that must be defeated in my lifetime in order for America to succeed.

We know what we’re up against in the criminal justice system, in concerns brought home to my community three weeks ago when we experienced the police shooting of a Black man, Eric Logan. And I have challenged our own police department to recognize all of the ways the uniform has been burdened by racism. But it goes beyond that.

Our entire healthcare system is burdened by racism, when Black women are dying from maternal complications at three times the rate of white women. Your race should have absolutely no bearing on your life expectancy in this country.

Our housing is burdened by racism, with neighborhoods segregated not by accident, but by federal policies enacted within living memory. Race should never, ever, be an obstacle to living in any neighborhood that you choose.

Our education system is burdened by racism. Not just a distant history leading up to Brown v. Board but a reality that even today — so many years after Ruby Bridges bravely walked through jeering crowds a few miles from here — even now, we face tremendous segregation and outcomes divided by race.

And on all of these issues, Black women have been at the tip of the spear, experiencing the consequences to our nation’s shortcomings but also putting forward solutions to deal with them.

There's been too much talk about Black problems in this country and not nearly enough about Black solutions -- of which women are at the forefront. It’s why as president I will not only be addressing and listening to Black women, but appointing them as we have done in South Bend. And we see the consequences of that, positive ones.

When we brought in the first African American female corporation counsel to run our Department of Law, she went to become our county's first African American female magistrate judge. And, she built a diverse law department that made it easy to find a successor, also black, who is now going on to be our county, in Indiana, our county's first head of the Bar Association who is a black woman. Empowerment leads to greater empowerment.

So the policies that got us here were intentional, and so we are going to have to be intentional in reversing them. It's why I believe we need to invest in the future of Black America with a Douglass Plan that is as ambitious as the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II. If America could invest in other countries, we are going to have to invest in our own, in our time, and it starts now.

Now I want to talk very briefly about the values that animate our campaign and that must be experienced for all of us, because I am tired of values like freedom being talked about like they are the property of the Republican Party.

Republicans talk a lot about freedom. But I believe you are not free if you do not have access to healthcare -- healthcare is freedom too. And by the way, you are not free if your reproductive healthcare decisions are being dictated by male politicians. And it is twice as important for men to be speaking up about that.

You’re not free if you’re trapped in a broken justice system. Which is why I insist that we can and must achieve a 50 percent reduction in incarceration, without an increase in crime our time. And knowing that Black women are too often left to hold their families together and facing incarceration on the rise for them — we know that this is a matter not only of racial justice but of gender justice as well.

We also know that Freedom comes by way of access to education, which is why one of the first things I am going to do is appoint a Secretary of Education who actually believes in public education in this country.

We've got so much work to do expanding educational opportunity. It’s why we're going to make public college tuition-free for low-income students. It's why we're going to increase investments in HBCUs, so that we can support the next Katherine Johnson in STEM and other fields.

While we’re on the subject of education, let’s acknowledge some good news that just came about thanks to the activism of people like Adjoa B. Asamoah  and Senator Holly Mitchell, who led efforts to pass the CROWN Act in California that says you can't be discriminated against because of your hairstyle. This is about freedom too. You’re not free if you can be kicked out of school or lose your job cause somebody says your hair is a “distraction.” Hair discrimination is racial discrimination, and we ought to recognize that at the national level too.

And let's talk about economic empowerment. You know, women of color account for nearly half of all women-owned businesses—$386 billion of annual revenue—which means that we should continue lifting up women of color and black owned enterprises not just with our words, but with our dollars.

It's why I believe we should put forward an initiative named after Madam CJ Walker and Reginald Lewis, a Walker-Lewis Initiative that would triple the number of entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds within 10 years. We can do that, and we should.

We'll have a Debt-for-Jobs Plan, so that every debt Pell-eligible student will have their college loans forgiven if they employ at least three people within five years of leaving school. And we will have an entrepreneurship fund to co-invest $10 billion in underrepresented entrepreneurs, creating opportunity for more Americans.

This is what freedom looks like in the 21st Century. We're not going to leave it to one party to talk about it anymore than we're going to leave national security to one party to talk about. Because when I got off that plane that C-17 in Afghanistan, while this President was working on season 7 of Celebrity Apprentice, I'm pretty sure the flag on my shoulder was not a Republican flag, it was an American flag. So we're not going to give up on national security as an issue, especially knowing that in our time national security isn't the sort of thing you can deal with by putting up a wall. We are not safe until we have confronted and ended the threat of violent white nationalism in our time. Nor are we safe, New Orleans, if we have failed to recognize that climate disruption is a national security issue.

So we're going to recognize that freedom doesn't belong to one political party, security doesn't belong to one political party, and one more thing, God doesn't belong to a political party--least of all one that sows division in our land and pits people against one another and holds those most in need down. That is not in keeping with any faith tradition, certainly not the one I belong to.

Now lastly, and I want to be brief here, but it’s so important, we talk about democracy, because we are not a democracy so long as racial and partisan gerrymandering allow politicians to pick their voters rather than the other way around. We've got to change that. We've got to change disenfranchisement. And in the world's greatest democracy, I propose that we begin choosing our president by just counting up everybody's vote--and I mean everybody's vote--and giving it to the person who got the most.

I know this is a challenging and bleak moment, but running for office is an act of hope. Scripture tells us that `“faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”

We do not see justice and equality in our time. But we have assurance that we can bring it about—if we make common cause politically. If we change the channel from that horror show that’s going on in Washington. And, yes, if Black women are empowered to bring the essence of your experience to the highest levels of American politics.

That is how we bring about American greatness, true American greatness--found in the everyday. Not in a tank rolling down the streets of Washington to make the president feel like a bigger man. But the greatness that is in the soul of a women on the West Side of South Bend who oversees her neighborhoods in a way that every teenager and every mayor knows to respect. That's how we get American greatness. We build that up. We see greatness in the activists in our community who challenge their mayor—bluntly sometimes—to make sure that we live up to a knowledge that every facet of life in our city is different right now for different people, and commit to do something about it.

We have assurance about what we can not yet see—if we do the work. That's why I’m running. That's why I’m here. That's why I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Thank you for the opportunity to be with you today.


Full interview transcript below:


Reverend Al Sharpton: Mayor Pete Buttigieg, give him a hand! (applause) You gave us a little scripture there. You preached a little bit. Let me ask you a couple of questions before we go to our panel. There has been in the Democratic race for the last couple of weeks the controversy with Joe Biden, former vice president, about his statements about working with segregationist and racists, and many of us were offended by the language and the reference. And yesterday he apologized, something that many of us said in the beginning, we've all heard in our public life. How did you react and respond to his apology?

Pete Buttigieg: Well I think it was a step forward. You know, when you're responsible for something, you've got to own it. It's a quality that I think we should expect in our presidents. Obviously we don't have it in this president. But as we've faced our own challenges with racial equity in our city, a number of areas where I'm proud of what we've done, a number of areas where we have fallen short, you've got to own up to that. And it's important to accept responsibility for what needs to change. And I hope now the conversation can be a forward looking one about racial equity in our time, because every candidate—and frankly especially white candidates—need to find their voices on this issue.


Reverend Al Sharpton: Now you had said to me privately, when you called after the police killing of Mr. Logan, and you said publicly at the debate, that there were areas you fell short, that you didn't get things done with diversity in the police department in South Bend and things like the camera not being on, how that has to be dealt with more—the body camera, police. What have you learned in the process that as you have said, taken responsibility, now what? What is the next step to show that once you've come to terms with your responsibility, where we go forward?

Pete Buttigieg: So the biggest thing we're finding is how important it is to empower community members to have a voice in the way policing happens in our city. And I think that's going to be important for law enforcement to be able to do their job as well as for communities of color to feel safe and to feel that they are enjoying equal protection. So part of what we're doing is we're making sure that we have a full review of everything from use of force policies with a lot of transparency to the way these body cameras work and whether there might be a change in that. Things like recruiting—we have undertaken efforts year after year to recruit more diverse applicants to the department, but we don't have the results to show for it. We've got to own that. We've got to face it. It's not just a South Bend problem, but I'm responsible for South Bend getting it right. The other thing we've learned is that there is a nation full of people wrestling with these issues—cities, mayors, activists, leaders. And we are opening up our data, opening up our policies for national experts to weigh in and say, "you know, when I look, for example, at your use of force police some cities have the policy written differently and they have less police shootings." We've been working on this for years, but we've got to take it to a new level. And my hope is that, even if it's happening the hard way, that this will elevate the conversation about something that people in every part of the country are feeling, because that future that I'm trying to create—that year 2055 I like talking about when I get to the current age of the current president, we'll be looking back in these years asking what this generation did to fix things—I want by then for us to be able to say without hesitation that the experience of a black or a white driver, for example, when they encounter a police officer, is exactly the same. And that what they feel is not a sensation of fear, but one of safety. And we've got our work cut out for us to make that happen.


Reverend Al Sharpton: As we go to the panel, the last thing I want to bring up is that I took you to Sylvia's Soul Food Restaurant in Harlem. And one of the reasons I wanted to was to openly deal the fact that we have to deal with the remnants of homophobia still in our community, and in this nation. You have said from day one you're openly gay and married. And I've said whether people agree with your life or not, they have to judge you on the merits of your service, just like we want to be judged on the merits of ours. And as you are here at ESSENCE Festival, this festival has always been one to openly welcome all of our community, whether they are women, men, gay, LGBTQ, transgender, because there's all one family. And I thought it was very important that you be here so people would understand that those that are still homophobic in our community do not speak for the majority of our community, even the faith community. We can understand wherever we fight for civil rights for anybody, we fight for it for everybody.

Pete Buttigieg: Thank you.


Reverend Al Sharpton: Have you had to deal with any homophobia during your campaign?

Pete Buttigieg: Yes, of course. There's some ugliness out there. But the most important thing for me is to make sure that, because I know something about one kind of exclusion, it's not the same—I don't know anything about what it's like personally to be a trans woman of color, for example, or what it is to be a woman in the workplace or what it is to drive while black. That's not my experience. But because I know a little bit about exclusion, I also have, I think, something I can tap into to motivate me to look after others. My marriage exists— The most important thing in my life, my marriage, something that has moved me closer to god, exists by the grace of a single vote on the US Supreme Court. And I know that that is there because people fought for me. It's one of the things that motivates me to fight twice as hard for women's reproductive rights knowing that I am not a woman, that motivates me to find a voice to have the conversations that white America needs to have with itself on the issue of race because I am not a person of color, because I know so many people were there for me before I was even born and all through my life.

[...]


Michelle Ebanks: How will you be held accountable to black women with your agenda?

Pete Buttigieg: So, step one is transparency, I believe, because what we know about things like women and black women, in particular, being underpaid is there is a lot of accountability when that comes to the light. So I am proposing that employers be required to publish gender pay gaps that are going on in their organizations, and I think that will provide a powerful motivator for people to do that job right. I expect to be held accountable for whether my administration models the diversity that all of the candidates are talking about right now. We're seeking to do it in our campaign—we're very proud of the campaign team we're building—in the city administration that we build, even facing the fact that in areas like law enforcement recruiting, we've still got a ways to go. And I expect to be held accountable for how diverse our administration's top appointments are because personnel is policy, and things change very quickly when you have different kinds of people in charge. But also, this is, I think we need to make sure the conversation doesn't go down the false road of making it sound like this is about doing people a favor. This is number one, about equality, and number two, this pays back to the entire country. The wealth that is being created, for example, through the leadership of women entrepreneurs, the wealth that is being brought to New Orleans right now by what you are doing, is an example of how that empowerment makes everybody better off. And we have got to recognize that and invest in that. See, it turned out it was not true that a rising tide lifts all boats. We've been told that, and the experience across my entire lifetime is it doesn't work that way. Because we've seen the rising tide rise, and we've seen, in so many of the outcomes that you mentioned, from racial disparities in health outcomes to life expectancy, to income, to the wealth gap that we are wrestling with, that it is not true. And in particular, women have been excluded, Black Americans have been excluded, and of course Black women have carried that burden doubly. So it is not true that the rising tide lifts all boats, but what is true is that when you untie some of those boats that have been roped down to the ocean floor, everybody is better off—even those who are not part of that pattern of exclusion. And so I think it's imperative for our country to advance that we actually make good on this, and I invite people to look in more detail than we can probably do today at the elements of our Douglass Plan, which covers not just criminal justice reform—which is so important—but homeownership, health, education, and entrepreneurship. Because we cannot talk as if the Black experience can be reduced to criminal justice when there are so many other things that are happening that are so important too. And all of it rests on the foundation of an expanded access to democracy—making sure that everybody can actually vote and that those votes are counted. And that's why we are leading with that issue.

Michelle Ebanks: Thank you mayor.

[...]
 

Richelieu Dennis: Good morning mayor. You know, economics is the single most transformative idea that we can bring to our community, because with that idea we can bring the freedom to do the things that we deserve to be able to do. Homeownership, automobile ownership, education, vacations, coming to festivals, doing all the things that enrich our lives, but also the basics that take care of our children and our families. How do you start to lay the foundations through your policies and through your actions that encourage entrepreneurship beyond the rhetoric? Because we hear it a lot, right? And there's these plans, we're going to invest this, we're going to do that, we're going to do that. But what are going to be the things that you are going to do that are going to systemically remove those barriers that inhibit entrepreneurship in our communities?

Pete Buttigieg: Well, one of the biggest things we know is an issue is access to capital. And we have got to reform a credit system that restricts access to capital for so many would-be entrepreneurs without actually doing a good job of assessing how credit worthy they are. So we know that scoring needs to change, we know the administration of these algorithms needs to change—and by the way, one of the big issues we've got to face as technology grows in our lives is to make sure technology doesn't wind up automating the biases that have already been in people's minds, because an equation can discriminate just as much as a loan officer can, and we have got to write the right equations. So that's a big piece of it. A big piece of it is making sure people have the freedom to take a risk. Part of the experience of being excluded is, you need a certain level of security to go off and start that small business. This is why healthcare is so important. If you are afraid to start a small business because you can't leave your old job, even though it doesn't pay enough, because you are clinging to those health benefits, then that diminishes your opportunity to go create opportunities for yourself and others. It's why we need universal healthcare in this country. And when it comes specifically to wealth building in the black community, it is why I also believe, just from the perspective of access to capital, that we do need to have this conversation about reparations. Even while not everybody understands where it's going to lead, we at least need to have HR40 set up that commission. And from an entrepreneurship perspective, the most important thing I think the debate misses is this: There's this talk, well we're talking about long ago, far off sins from a different generation, we should, you know, those are in the past. But if you think about, as anybody who has started a business, or anybody who has ever borrowed a dollar knows, you think about how interest and the value of money compounds, right? You have a dollar today, next year it's a dollar and 5 cents, pretty soon it's two dollars, after a hundred years it's a hundred dollars. Well that's true of a dollar invested, that's also true of a dollar stolen. Which means the fact that some of this generational theft of wealth happened a long time ago doesn't make it better, it makes it worse. And so I don't claim to have fully figured out how we redress that, but what I know is that this conversation needs to be brought forward, that HR40 should be passed and I will sign it, and that that has got to be part of the equation on how we build the wealth that makes it possible for entrepreneurs to step forward. And again, when they do, they create opportunities not just for those who are historically excluded, but for all of us and we are all better off.

 
Richelieu Dennis: And why is it, in your opinion, why do you think that we haven't had more movement on this issue? Why do you think that as a party, the Democratic party hasn't done more to lead this into fruition?

Pete Buttigieg: I think it is because we have been under the spell of the idea of color blindness, which may have felt very progressive relative to what came before, but I think we have been under the spell of this idea that if you have a racist policy and you get rid of it and replace it with a neutral policy, everything else will kind of take care of itself. And it doesn't work that way. That's what we've learned. We have learned that unless you act proactively, intentionally, to reverse harms that were also created intentionally, it's just not going to be enough because these harms compound themselves. And I think, but, the other thing that's happening that will help us shift is that we have now the most diverse generation in the history of our party, in the history of our country, and the next one is going to be even more diverse. So an answer that doesn't work is no longer going to be considered good enough. The other thing that I think has held us back is that even now, this is being talked about like a Black issue. And I think it was James Baldwin who said that until White America comes to terms with itself, there will never be resolution to the treatment of Black people in this country. So now is the time for us as a party to recognize that all of us are diminished, all of us are made worse off, so long as some of us are being systematically oppressed and excluded. And we shouldn't have any illusions about the fact that this is not only a legacy from 400 years ago, this is the consequence of things going on right now as we speak.

 
Richelieu Dennis: So as we all know, change doesn't happen in one place, by one person, by one party. We are going to ask that you, the other candidates, the Democratic party, starts to really focus in on these economic issues, because these economic issues will determine the fate of our community fifty years from now, a hundred years from now. But it is also not just us asking and demanding that you and your compatriots and the Democratic party do this, but also, what advice would you give us in the audience as to how we can participate and help to drive some of this?

Pete Buttigieg: Well, the biggest thing is to recognize, I hope you can tell by the parade of candidates seeking to get on your good side right now, the power that is represented in this room. So to put it really simply, it's, use your power. We have seen elections change, outcomes change, I would argue that what happened in the United States House of Representatives finally getting back into Democratic hands happened because of voters, activists, and in particular women of color, rising up. And so the power is already there. It has anybody who wishes to seek office wanting to engage. Now my hope is that you will have candidates who don't only want to win, but want to make sure we deserve to win. But that dialogue, that conversation, and above all that movement into the polls, is what is going to bring about change. And we'll know we are doing well when this is not a partisan issue. When you hear Republicans talking about this just as energetically as Democrats are. And if you want to see that happen, no better way to reunite them with their conscience than for there to be a severe consequence in November 2020 for them at every level for failing to address these issues.

 
Reverend Al Sharpton: Mayor Pete Buttigieg! Mayor Pete.

---