This has been 100 percent volunteer, people-driven. It’s people power and that’s what keeps me doing this every day. Because I’m still working full time—I still have multiple jobs. I still do pro bono legal work. And, to be honest, as a queer woman of color in Seattle, there are questions I get asked and critiques come at me, especially being young, that you would never heard towards a white male candidate.

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Have you you been disappointed by any of the narratives around your campaign?

We really had to push the media in Seattle to acknowledge that I even existed even though we were the campaign who, other than the incumbent, had raised the most amount of money. And not even just to get them to acknowledge I existed, but to even include my merit. There was a point in time where they referred to me as a Black Lives Matter leader and an activist. While I’ve certainly participated in the movement, as a black woman, they would not mention attorney, they would not mention educator, they would not mention organizer or the body of work that I have in Seattle. Not just around criminal legal reform, but also around education reform, community development, economic opportunity. I’m on the record at City Hall testifying a lot on a lot of issues.

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What I did find heartening about that though, as we called that out in numerous ways—we put a video up online, we would call reporters and say, look you referred to me like this, but here’s actually who I am. Over time we’ve actually seen journalists really start to shift. And not just shift how they report about me, but shift in how they report about all the candidates and try to be more holistic. And, again, that’s another win.

After the presidential election, we saw a lot of calls for women and people of color specifically, as well as people who wouldn’t ordinarily have considered it, to run for office. Do you see yourself as part of this larger reaction following the election? If Hillary Clinton had been elected, do you think you would be running for mayor right now?

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That’s a great question. I don’t know if I would be doing it right now, but would I be doing it eventually. Although, I will say, I’ve never had aspirations of being a career politician. My role has always been as organizer, and while I have quite a bit of substantive experience around policy development and doing work with political people, I’ve always more so viewed myself as a community advocate.

What I think became an incredible impetuous around the election was really starting to question why is it we do not view community advocates or organizers as having a political role and why is it that public service, when it comes to being elected to office, has been relegated to career political or those who have enough money and access to become politicians. I can say that watching this last election really revealed to me how important it is that we redistribute that knowledge.

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Some people may be concerned you’re too “radical” or that you’re not a politician. How you would respond to that sort of critique?

Angela Davis said, “Radical means to get the root.” I know when people call me radical they’re thinking of something in particular, but the way that I view that word is that it’s about getting to the root of the problem. Thinking about the context we live in now, Trump is certainly a problem, but Trump is not the problem. Trump is actually a symptom of something that has been living beneath the surface for a long time. Part of the problem is we have not gotten to the root of the historical and present day inequities in our system as they pertain to cash poor people and as they pertain to black and brown folk. As a result, there’s been a bubbling up. To see someone so openly talk in such a bigoted way take office is really a symptom of how we haven’t addressed the cultural things beneath the surface. In a country that really talks about itself as a land of opportunity and equality and justice, the reality is, where you see the law and justice are not the same thing because your value for justice and for whom, is really at a heart level.

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So, my response to that is, you may think I’m radical, but let’s look at the substantive positions that I’m taking around issues that are very much at a crisis point in Seattle. And if you agree with my substantive position, if we can agree there’s at least a root problem that has to be addressed and actually within our current context needs a bold addressing, then I’m perfectly fine being called radical. If we can at least agree to start taking some bold stances forward around what equity truly looks like in Seattle. I believe Seattle can be the progressive city we talk about it as. There is so much money and so much opportunity in this city and if it was shared a little more equitably, I cannot imagine the strides forward we could take. They’re so unimaginable they’re so exciting—they’re that great.