Mediaboss Marketing

Fight disinformation. Get a daily recap of the facts that matter. Sign up for the free Mother Jones newsletter.

Two days before a nearly all-white jury bought Kyle Rittenhouses claim he was acting in self-defense when he shot three men, killing two, at a Black Lives Matter protest, Maddesyn George, a 27-year-old Native mother, was sitting in a courtroom in Eastern Washington, waiting to learn how many years she would have to spend in federal prison for a shooting a white man she said had raped her.

George, a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes, admits she killed Kristopher Graber in July 2020. The two had been friends; in a police interview, she said was at Grabers house doing scratch-off tickets when he got on top of her and raped her with a vibrator. When she protested, he pulled out a gun, George told the tribal detective. Graber eventually fell asleep, and George took the gun from him, along with cash and drugs, according to prosecutors. Then she left. The next day, Graber went out looking for her, found her sitting in a locked car, and confronted her. In the altercation, she shot him once through the window, killing him.

I was like panicking cause I was like, Oh, fuck, the windows open this much, likehes going to fucking, he is going to get me, George told the tribal detective shortly after the shooting. So then I got the gun off the floor.

Yet unlike Rittenhouse, George never got a chance to argue that the shooting was done in self-defense. Last summer, federal prosecutors filed a motion trying to block her from making that argument at trial, arguing that she was the initial aggressor in the shooting, and arguing the purported assault wouldnt be enough to justify a self-defense claim.

A couple weeks later, staring down the possibility of a 35-year sentence, George decided to take a plea deal for voluntary manslaughter and drug possession, according to Steve Graham, her lawyer. On Wednesday, US District Judge Rosanna Malouf Peterson sentenced George to six and a half years in federal prison, lower than the expected range, and far less than the 17 years prosecutors had asked for. Everybody outside the courthouse was just delighted, Graham says. Because the sentence was a third of what the prosecutors asked for, and then also because the judge said she believed Maddesyn. And she articulated that she fully understood.

Yet Georges sentence is a stark contrast to Rittenhouses not guilty verdict, delivered by a jury on Friday. Here we have Rittenhouse gas up his car, cross state lines, claiming to defend himself, when Maddesyn George was in her own reservation, hiding out from this white man who crossed reservation lines to try to come after her, Graham says. The two cases played out in separate jurisdictions, with very different sets of facts. But their outcomesRittenhouse goes free, while George is going to prisonillustrate larger disparities in whose claim to self-defense is seen as legitimate, according to Caroline Light, director of undergraduate studies in the Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University. An Urban Institute study, for instance, found that homicides with a white perpetrator and a Black victim are 281 percent more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a white perpetrator and white victim. Meanwhile, according to a survey of 608 women imprisoned for murder or manslaughter convictions, 30 percent said they were convicted after trying to protect themselves or loved ones from physical or sexual violence.

After the Rittenhouse verdict came down, I called up Light, the author of Stand Your Ground: A History of Americas Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense, to talk about the connections between his case and Georges, and these larger trends.

We just got news that Kyle Rittenhouses self-defense claim was successful, and the jury acquitted him of all charges. What do you make of the verdict?

Its devastating. What happens in these courtrooms affects our lives and our culture and our behaviors. It sends a message to certain people that if they want to take a deadly weapon into spaces where it could get volatile, and then claimafter they kill peopleto have been in fear for their life, a court is likely to exonerate them. When we see demonstrations against anti-Black violence, against hate crimes, against police violence, does this decision then license people who feel like those demonstrations themselves are an act of aggression, to go in with their firearms and start shooting? That, to me, is the torturous logic at the heart of this decision.

In a way, this expands the idea of self-defense, right? If Kyle Rittenhouse put himself in this situation, and yet he could successfully claim self-defense, thats sort of expanding the notion of what qualifies. Might that be good for other people whose self-defense claims typically arent believedlike women who kill abusive partners in self-defense?

It might affect, say, a white woman who wants to take a firearm into a Black Lives Matter protests and threaten demonstrators. But it will not expand the terrain of self-defensive capacity for a woman who uses a firearm to defend herself from an angry or violent boyfriend.

Why not?

For women, for sexual minorities, gender minorities, and people of color, and low income people and people with drug addiction, and houseless peoplethe various, layered social vulnerabilities that put people in a position where they may need to use lethal self defensethose are the very people who are not going to be able to claim the same kinds of immunities as someone like Kyle Rittenhouse or George Zimmerman.

The law is written to appear neutral. It doesnt have any reference to different races, or different genders, or class, or anything like that. But the way it plays out in the courtroom is always already stacked against people who are occupying different social vulnerabilities, especially multiple social vulnerabilities. So someone like Maddesyn George is not going to benefit from the self-defense expansion that we will see in the wake of Kyle Rittenhouses trial.

Because shes not a white man.

Its about both actors. Part of what happens in the courtroom, with a Kyle Rittenhouse or George Zimmerman, is that they succeed in magically reversing the roles of victim and perpetrator. [Rittenhouses] defense was successfully able to position him as a victim of violence rather than a perpetrator of violence. Framing it as, he had no choice, and had to defend himselfa rational response to a reasonable threat.

During slavery, and at the very beginning of the settler colonial state, there were people who justified colonial violence based on a need to protect themselves from dangerous savages or other offensive terminologies for Indigenous people. And so armed white masculine violence could easily be justified as protective and as virtuous violence rather than aggressive and hostile.

If we look at someone like Kyle Rittenhouse, he looks very much like the average mass shooter. What we had were people trying to disarm a potential threat. It turned out, he was indeed a real threat. And yet, the court exonerates himand treats the people who tried to disarm him as the perpetrators. That, to me, is devastating.

Youve spoken before about how important it is which events get included of the chronology of a self-defense casewhich events the jury looks at when theyre deciding whether its provocation, self-defense, or something else. Because Maddesyn George took a plea deal, her attorney Steve Graham never got a chance to make this argument at trial, but I asked him where he would start the clock if he were presenting this case to a jury. Id love to read you his response. He said:

During colonialism. Thats when we would talk about the clock starting. And the fact that she was on her lands. That she was here first, her ancestors were here first. She hid out there. We would start with the fact that she was sexually harassed by a white copand we documented that, and the judge believed her about that. It would start with the fact that not much was really done when she was a victim of prior crimes. It would start with Mr. Graber, essentially being allowed to run amok up there, and sell drugs, and hurt women with impunity. And then it would kind of come around to the culmination of the real unspeakable indignity that she suffered at his hands.

Thats fantastic. However, the prevailing legal system doesnt do it that way. We tend to interpret especially female perpetrators of violence through a very particularly curated chronological lens. Are you familiar with the case of Brittany Smith? This was a woman who killed the perpetrator in her own home, and she was defending her brother. In the trial, they were throwing out the evidencehorrible evidence of physical violence, all kinds of evidence that this man had brutalized herand they spliced it out. It was like they did this curation of chronology that completely excluded all the evidence of sexual violence and harm that had preceded the deadly encounter.

Is that because she didnt shoot him right in the middle of him raping her? Like, what does it take?

Thats the issue.

What happens in the trials around women who use self-defense against partners or acquaintances is what we believe about gender and race and class and drug addiction, these things are stacked against them when they try to claim the status of victim. The law is always skeptical of any womans claim that she was sexually assaulted. And the law, and our dominant culture, is always skeptical of a person of color who takes the life of a white person. Theres just so many preconceptions and biases baked into our culture that were stacked against Ms. George from the get-go.

There really are very few cases you can point to where a woman who kills or maims the man who sexually assaults her, is exonerated. Shes probably going to go to prison. And if she doesnt go to prison, shes going to plea to something so that she can avoid prison time. But she will be criminalized for taking that life.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

This article has been updated and corrected. A previous version of this article misstated how people are taught to respond to active shooter situations. In fact, the FBI instructs people to first run from an attacker, to hide if fleeing is impossible, and to fight back as a last resort.

Read more:
Two Days Before Rittenhouse Verdict, a Native Woman Was Imprisoned for Killing Her Alleged Rapist Mother Jones - Mother Jones

Award-winning actor Rob Reiner has always been known for his political activism so much so that he was even parodied in an episode of South Park titled Butt Out.

Reiners waded into those waters again, taking to Twitter to weigh in with provocative statements over Kyle Rittenhouses visit to Mar-a-Lago to visit former President Donald Trump.

His name began to trend on Twitter on Wednesday, alongside the Meathead nickname from his character in All in the Family the classic 70s TV sitcom where he first made his name before evolving into a well-known director.

An underaged kid illegally takes an assault rifle across state lines, kills two people, injures another, then is welcomed with open arms at Mar-a-Lago by the leader of the Republican Party, a mentally ill Racist, Reiner opined in a tweet.

This is where we are, finishing with a declarative, God help US.

Rittenhouse, of course, is the teen protagonist of a recent high-profile court case, in which he was acquitted of charges stemming from an August 2020 shooting at a protest event in Kenosha, Wis.

Reiner isnt the first celebrity to tackle the topic of Rittenhouse on Twitter, of course. Author Stephen King notable compared Rittenhouse to a shooter from the Columbine High School massacre the morning he was acquitted.

But Reiners tweet brought in dialogue from those who disagreed with his position, including former Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman actor Dean Cain, who asked Reiner to at least be factual with your tweets.

Immigration lawyer Matthew Kolken went as far as to note, Imputing a person committed a crime is defamation per se, cheekily adding, You should probably consult a lawyer, Rob.

However, many flocked to Twitter to agree with Reiner as well. The Tweet, which garnered nearly 12,000 retweets and over 52,000 likes in its first 14 hours on the platform, sparked discussion.

One user suggested googling Zimmerman now referring to George Zimmerman, the subject of the 2012 trial for the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida to see what life would look like for Rittenhouse in the future.

Another user compared the meeting to the cult-classic Dumb & Dumber comedy films.

Another user shared an incisive quote from Trevor Noah about the case.

What do you think about Rob Reiners statements on the matter? Sound off in the comments.

Read the rest here:
Rob Reiner Stirs Online Controversy With Take on Kyle Rittenhouse - We Got This Covered

Millions of citizens long ago concluded that professional sports, academia, and entertainment were no longer disinterested institutions, but far Left and deliberately hostile to Middle America.

Yet American conservatives still adamantly supported the nation's traditional investigatory, intelligence, and military agencies - especially when they came under budgetary or cultural attacks.

Not so much anymore.

For the first time in memory, conservatives now connect the FBI hierarchy with bureaucratic bloat, political bias, and even illegality.

In the last five years, the FBI was mostly in the news for the checkered careers of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Robert Mueller, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok. Add in the criminality of convicted FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.

The colossal FBI-driven "Russian collusion" hoax was marked by the leaking of confidential FBI memos, forged documents, improper surveillance, and serial disinformation.

Prior heads of the CIA and FBI, as well as the director of national intelligence, have at times either not told the truth under oath or claimed amnesia, without legal repercussions.

Mention the military to conservative Americans these days, and they unfortunately associate its leadership with the disastrous flight from Afghanistan. Few, if any, high-ranking officers have yet taken responsibility - much less resigned - for the worst military fiasco of the last half-century.

Instead, President Joe Biden and the top generals traded charges that the other was responsible for the calamity. Or both insisted the abject flight was a logistical masterpiece.

Never in U.S. history have so many retired four-star admirals and generals disparaged their president with charges of being either a traitor, a liar, a fascist, or a virtual Nazi, as occurred during the last administration.

Never has the proper advisory role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff been so brazenly usurped and contorted.

Never has the secretary of defense promised he would ferret out alleged "white supremacists," without providing any evidence whatsoever of their supposedly ubiquitous presence and dangerous conspiracies.

Conservatives have always been amused by the liberal biases of the old network news and big-city print media. But they grudgingly admitted that many liberal journalists of the last century were mostly professionals. News divisions mostly reported the news rather than simply made it up.

Not so now with Big Tech and 21stt-century "woke" journalism. Few reporters have yet offered apologies for helping hatch and spread the Russian collusion hoax that paralyzed the country for three years.

Few have admitted culpability for reporting as fact the various fantasies surrounding the Duke Lacrosse team's prosecution or the Covington Catholic kids deception.

Many in the media ran uncritically with the Jussie Smollett concoction and the "hands-up-don't shoot" Ferguson distortions. Journalists promulgated misinformation about the "white Hispanic" George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin encounter, and doctored photos and edited tapes.

They invented the myth of the supposedly brilliant - but now utterly disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo - as well as the "Russian disinformation" yarn that allegedly accounted for the missing Hunter Biden laptop.

Most recently, reporters spread serial untruths surrounding the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.

For much of 2020 to even suggest that the Wuhan Institute of Virology may have played a role in the birth and spread of the COVID-19 earned media derision.

Few reporters suggested that federal health agencies such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases might be disseminating contradictory or even inaccurate information about the pandemic. To believe this was happening instead earned condemnation in the media as if one were some conspiracy theorist or nut.

Rarely have communication industries - veritable utilities in the public domain - so asymmetrically censored speech and applied such one-sided standards of suppressing free expression.

Conservatives used to oppose regulating larger corporations. Now, ironically, most are calling for regulating and breaking up multibillion-dollar social media monopolies and conglomerates that suppress as much as transmit private communications.

The American criminal justice system also used to earn the respect of conservatives. Prosecuting attorneys, police chiefs, and big-city mayors were seen as custodians of the public order. They were entrusted to keep the peace, to prevent and investigate crime, and to arrest and prosecute criminals.

Again, not so much now.

After 120 days of mostly unchecked riot, arson, looting, and violent protests during the summer of 2020, the public lost confidence in their public safety agencies.

District attorneys in several major cities - Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and St. Louis - have often predicated prosecuting crimes on the basis of ideology, race, and careerism.

In the current crime wave, brazen lawbreakers enjoy de facto immunity. Mass looting goes unpunished. Indictments are often aimed as much against those who defend themselves as against criminals who attack the innocent.

Conservatives now have lost their former traditional confidence in the administration of justice, in the intelligence and investigatory agencies, in the nation's military leadership, in the media, and the criminal justice system.

No one yet knows what the effect will be of half the country losing faith in the very pillars of American civilization.

(C)2021 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

Excerpt from:
Losing Confidence in the Pillars of Our Civilization - RealClearPolitics

Although I participated in the countercultural "revolutions," antiwar protestsand racial conflicts of the 1960s, it wasn't until August2016 that Ihad my first truly unnerving intimations of a full-blown American civil war: Then-presidential candidate Donald Trumptold a rallythat if Hillary Clinton "gets to pick her judges, judicial appointments, nothing you can do, folks. Although, the Second Amendment people maybe there is. I don't know."

By June 1, 2020, Trump's seeming afterthought about "Second Amendment people"hadmetastasizedinto something truly scary. He and combat-fatigues-clad Gen.Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,along with Attorney General William Barr, strode from the White House to Lafayette Park, where a peaceful demonstration had been dispersed brutally by National Guard troops.

Trump's insistenceonlydays earlier that the U.S. Army itselfshouldbe sent against the protesters a demandechoed by Arkansas Sen.Tom Cottonin a now-infamous New York Times op-ed reminded me of Julius Caesarleading Roman legions illegally across the river Rubicon from Gaul into Italy in 49 B.C. to subdue Rome's own citizens and, with them, their republic.

Kenosha, Wisconsin's closest approximation to the Rubicon is the tiny Pike River, which flows from Petrifying Springs into Lake Michigan. Its closest approximation to a military crackdown was the police mobilization againstviolent protests aftera police officer shotand paralyzedan unarmed young Black man in August of last year. Those police failed to challenge Kyle Rittenhouse, the illegally armed, 17-year-old "Second Amendmentperson" who shot three men, killing two of them.

And when a Kenosha County jury failed to convict Rittenhouse on even a misdemeanor, sendingwhat the parents of Anthony Huber one of the men Rittenhousekilled characterized as"the unacceptable messagethat armed civilians can show up in any town, incite violence, and then use the danger they have created to justify shooting people in the street," I couldn't help but wonder what, if anything, will stop armed "Second Amendment people" from showing up near polling places a year from now, as a Republican National Ballot Security Task Force" has done intermittently since 1981, although without brandishing guns.

More unnervingly and urgently, I wonder why a jury of ordinary citizens, along withthousands of others who approved and even celebrated the Rittenhouse verdict are walking themselves across a Rubicon to deliver the message I've just cited, even though they haven't been "demagogued" into doing it by a Caesar or driven to do it by a military force.

New York Times columnistCharles Blow has notedthat Rittenhousewas the same age asTrayvon Martin, the unarmed Black youth shot dead in Florida by George Zimmerman, who consideredhimself a "protector" of his neighborhood and who was acquitted of murder. Blow notes that although Trayvon Martin "was thugified" by Zimmerman and the judicial process, Rittenhouse was "infantilized" by the defenseargument that a 17-year-old may be excused for misjudging dangers that hehimselfhas provokedillegally. It's hard to imagine a similar jury acceptingsimilarexcuses for a young Blackman with an assault rifle,even if he never fired it.

I've contendedfor yearsthatswift, dark undercurrents are degrading and stupefying Americans in waysthatmost of us trynot to acknowledge. Moreof usthan ever before arenormalizing ouradaptations todailyvariants of force and fraud in the commercial groping and goosing of our private lives and public spaces; in nihilisticentertainment that fetishizes violence without context and sex without attachment; in the "gladiatorialization: and corruptionofsports; in home-security precautions against the prospect of armed invasion; in casino-like financing of unproductive economic activities, such as the predatory lending that tricksmillions out of their homes; and in a huge, ever-expanding prison industry created to deter or punish the broken, violent victims of all these come-ons, even as schools in the"nicest,""safest," neighborhoods operate in fear of gunmenwho, from Columbine to Sandy Hook and beyond, havebeen students orresidents there themselves.

Stressed by this republican derangement, millions are spending billions on palliatives, medications, addictions and even surveillance designed to protect them from themselves. All those vials, syringes,home-security systems and shootings reflect the insinuation of what Edward Gibbon, the historian of ancient Rome, called "a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire" until Roman citizens "no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honour, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign, and trusted for their defence to a mercenary army."

Is it really so surprising that some of the stressed and dispossessed, too ill to bear their sicknesses or their cures, demand to be lied to instead, withsimple but compelling fantasies that direct them toward saviors and scapegoats into cries for strongmen to cross a Rubicon or two and for "Second Amendment people" to take our streets?

Originally posted here:
The Rittenhouse syndrome: Has America crossed the Rubicon? - Salon

Sometimes making change means playing the long game. And Jasmine Burney-Clark, founder of the Florida advocacy organization Equal Ground, knows this well.

As a young girl, Burney-Clark grew up in Orlando, in a congressional district so gerrymandered that it jigsawed unevenly across Central Florida and was represented by one of the few women of color in Congress. As a young leader, she founded Equal Ground in 2019 to ramp up the political voice of underrepresented communities of color.

Right now, even as the immediate battle for representation plays out with the states Republican-controlled Legislature convening to redraw the boundaries of legislative and congressional districts, she is keeping her focus on the future.

The result? A brand-new Redistricting Fellowship program that engages Black college students and young professionals about the crucial redistricting process that is taking place this year. Funded in part by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the program is giving a new generation the tools to monitor the redistricting process, and to fight back against a system that, if history is any guide, is skewed against communities of color.

As the founder of Equal Ground, this work is tied deeply and closely to how I was raised in a gerrymandered district the majority of my life, Burney-Clark said. That defined my political existence. I saw from a young age how it kept my community from having a proper voice. And I saw that affected everything. It meant a lack of opportunity for housing, for community development, for education. It meant more often than not that Black people were laborers in the places they occupied, rather than leaders. It meant that had to change.

To learn how to direct such opportunities to communities who need them, seven fellows from the northern, central and southern areas of Florida are meeting virtually now through November with advocacy leaders, legislators, local and state policymakers and others. They are undergraduate and graduate students from historically Black colleges and universities, and some are young professionals. They have each demonstrated leadership on various levels, and they come seeking equal representation with a level of energy that inspires.

One of the fellows is Jaliyah Cummings, 22, who learned early on how much your neighborhood can determine your future. The daughter of two police officers, she grew up in a middle-class suburb of Orlando, attending fine public schools that she said were well-resourced and gave her every opportunity to succeed.

But her cousins grew up in a more urban area not far away, and she watched with pain and dismay as their friends dropped out of poorly performing schools and ended up in prison. In 2013, when she was 14, she watched in disbelief as George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin.

As a younger child I can say that I was kind of sheltered, in a sense, but being able to be that age and watch that trial and to see the verdict, it was just so wrong, Cummings said. I realized I wanted to be an attorney. That is where I need to be. That is my purpose.

Now a senior at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Tallahassee, Cummings is completing her coursework for a degree in criminal justice and plans to attend law school next fall. She said the fellowship with Equal Ground has given her the tools to understand just how critical securing real representation is for minority communities.

We are not angry, we are exhausted, Cummings said. There is so much that hinders people from reaching their full potential. And what we are learning is that so much of it starts with who is out there representing us.

Dierre Johnson, 22, another Equal Ground fellow, is a recent graduate in human resources studies at the University of West Florida. Now pursuing a Master of Business Administration degree, she has learned through the fellowship that redistricting is basically foundational.

My parents always told me not to be a spectator but to be a participator, Johnson said. How can your vote be your voice, how can you be a true participant when its muzzled or diluted from the effects of gerrymandering? That is what flipped the switch for me, when I actually learned what redistricting is and how it has been used to silence Black communities.

All members of Congress and state legislators are elected from political divisions called districts. Redistrictingis the process of enacting newcongressionalandstate legislativedistrict boundaries. The states redraw these district lines every 10 years following completion of the U.S. Census, which tracks population shifts. The federal government requires these districts to have nearly equal populations and not to discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity.

However, some politicians have used gerrymandering the process of drawing district lines to favor one political party, individual, constituency or race over another in order to advance their political objectives.

Redistricting is just one of the issues Equal Ground has taken on. Along with other, more established organizations throughout the state, it works to protect voting rights across the board. It also educates voters, particularly in the Central Florida communities where the organization got its start, on registering to vote, casting ballots and getting involved in their communities at all levels.

Equal Ground represents what a new social justice movement needs to look like to really effect change, said Nancy Abudu, interim strategic litigation director for the SPLC. Yes, there are bigger, more established groups like the League of Women Voters and Common Cause, but its often the smaller grassroots organizations that are nimble enough to reach voters in an even more impactful way. And in the case of Equal Ground, you have a Black-led organization making sure that Black people are politically engaged to change the system.

For its grassroots work to empower voters, Equal Ground received a grant of $200,000 from the Vote Your Voice campaign earlier this year. The campaign is investing up to $30 million from the SPLCs endowment to engage voters and increase voter registration, education and participation.

The SPLCs Voting Rights Practice Group has made redistricting a priority.

The process will determine the allocation of political power and representation at every level of government across the country for the next 10 years. Equal Ground and other organizations like it want to ensure that redistricting is not used to exclude communities of color from attaining political power.

The stakes are high. State legislatures have an obligation to ensure fair and equal representation for all people, upholding the 14th Amendments guarantee of equal protection under the law and complying with the requirements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But historically they have often done the opposite.

The last time Floridas Republicans were tasked with redrawing the states political districts, in 2012, a judge concluded they turned it into a mockery by secretly and illegally working to enhance their command of the state. After years of litigation, the Florida Supreme Court threw out the Legislatures map and set the states current congressional boundaries.

This year, an even more powerful GOP-led Legislature is again preparing to begin the recasting of state House, Senate and congressional district lines. That means it can dictate not only who runs for public office and who is elected, but also how financial resources are allocated for schools, hospitals, roads and more.

And the representatives who are elected have the power to make decisions that greatly impact the communities they represent, from ensuring safe schools to adopting inclusive immigration policies. The people who live in a district can then influence whether elected officials feel obligated to respond to a particular communitys needs.

To make matters still more fraught, Floridas population has grown, so the state will be allocated one more seat in Congress. Whether that seat will be held by a Republican or a Democrat and whether the district will fairly represent the people who live in it depends largely on how the Legislature draws district boundaries.

Against that backdrop, Equal Ground is working with other organizations around the state to train Black and Brown communities on how to reach their elected officials, how to vote for officials who will better represent them, and how to hold legislators responsible for conducting a fair redistricting process.

The more were able to educate folks, the more powerful they become, said Jamara Wilson, redistricting program manager for Equal Ground. We understand that this process right now is in the hands of the Legislature, but they need to understand that they are being watched carefully.

Read more stories from theBattle for Representation: The Ongoing Struggle for Voting Rightsserieshere.

Photo at top, from left to right: Kristin Fulwylie,Jasmine Burney-Clark andJamara Wilson.

Read the original here:
Redrawing the Map: Grassroots organization trains Black college students and young professionals on the importance of redistricting - Southern Poverty...