(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Thank you for joining us for The Politics of Change with Pramila Jayapal, moderated by Crystal Paul.

Before we begin, we would like to thank our session sponsor, Bedrooms and More.

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- Hi, and welcome to Crosscut Festival.

I am Crystal Paul from the Seattle Times, and I'm here today with Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal.

Representative Jayapal represents Washington's seventh congressional district, and she began her career in activism right here in Washington when she led the charge to make Washington state a hate-free zone after a rise in racist hate crimes that followed 9/11.

That effort later became One America, a Washington-based organization that advocates for immigrant and refugee rights.

Our topic today is the politics of change.

And with her background in activism and as a political leader today, representative Jayapal is a great person for this conversation.

Congresswoman, thank you for being here.

- Thank you, Crystal.

Happy to be with you.

- Yeah, it's great to see you again.

So the last time we spoke was in January and a lot has happened since then.

So I just wanted to check in and see how you're doing.

Start us off.

- Thank you.

I am doing okay.

It feels like it's been a year already and we're only four months into it but there's a lot of good that is happening.

And so I'm trying to focus on all those wonderful things.

- That's great.

That's great.

So we're here today to talk about the politics of change and your journey into politics, starting with activism.

So I was hoping that we could start off by just talking a little bit about your decision to move from activism into politics.

- Yeah, I never thought I would be a politician.

I never wanted to run for office to be totally frank.

People know me in Washington state from having started One America, now called One America then called Hate-Free Zone.

And that started in the wake of 9/11, in the wake of all these hate crimes against Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, South Asian Americans, sick Americans.

And it ended up being the largest immigrant advocacy organization in the state.

And I was so proud to lead it through all of that for 12 years.

In pushing for change and the kind of change that is so important to immigrant communities, to communities of color, but more broadly to working families, pushing for a $15 minimum wage, pushing for marriage equality and so many other issues, I realized that we just didn't have enough people of color, enough women in places of policymaking.

And so we weren't at the decision-making table and it caused me to re-examine my whole theory of change that only the outside can make a difference.

And I realized that my new theory of change was that I wanted to test out, was what if we were to use elected office as an organizing platform.

And for an organizer like myself, that was a very appealing way to look at politics.

That we needed to have more people that were representative of our communities, that could bring those issues to the tables where decisions are made and could organize on the inside as well as the outside.

And so I ran for office first in the state Senate, where I became the only woman of color at the time in the state Senate.

It's hard to imagine that.

But that was the case.

And then later two years later, ran for Congress and became the first person of color that Democrats in Washington state have ever said to Congress and the first South Asian-American woman to serve in the United States house of representatives.

And I will just tell you, Crystal, I am convinced that we need organizers everywhere.

We need them on the outside.

We need them on the inside and we need to be really coordinating.

And so that's what I've been focused on here in Congress .

- Of course, now I have 1,000 followup questions, but the first one I'll say is, you know, that's a lot of firsts.

And I think we have a lot of students and young professionals in the audience who are considering a career in activism or politics in some way involved in creating change.

How would you advise them to make the choice on where to do their organizing?

- Well, I think that in terms of where, in terms of issues, I think our young people today are so much better than generations past in terms of intersectional thinking, right?

So there is such an intersectional lens to the work around gender class and racial justice.

And so I think that in some ways it makes it harder sometimes for somebody to pick where do I go to start the work?

But the good news is there's a lot more of that intersectional work happening no matter where you go.

So when you're thinking about change, I tell people to write down a little notebook.

When do you feel your heart jump?

Because you're working on something that really matters.

And that really has you excited.

And if you write down those times, you will start to see not only the issues that you're most interested in, but also what kind of thing is it?

There are people who love to do behind the scenes organizing.

That's a particular kind of person.

There are people who wanna be out front and leading on something.

That's a particular kind of person.

There are people who wanna do research.

That's a particular kind of person.

All of these things are part of creating change.

So the more you can get in touch with what you want, what you feel your skills are, and also where you find joy, the more you will be able to identify what's the right place for you to get plugged in.

And if none of that works, then I say, go try five things.

Just go out there and randomly pick five things that seem kind of interesting to you and see if they work because at the end of the day, you know, none of these decisions are permanent.

You can always move on.

You can always change your mind, but get educated about what the options are.

- So I've been reading your book and in it you talk a little bit about the difficulties you had running up against your parents and their expectations for you as a first-generation immigrant and your decision to choose activism.

As people are considering which paths to take, what advice do you have for young people trying to convince their parents to get on board?

(laughs) - Yeah.

I really detailed that in my book because I came to the United States when I was 16 years old by myself.

My parents took every last penny that they had, 5,000 bucks and they used it to send me here by myself, which is the ultimate sacrifice.

And so there's a lot of expectations that many of us have from our parents or from the outside world or from ourselves and whatever has been acculturated into us.

And for my dad, it was that I was supposed to be a doctor, a lawyer or a business person.

Somebody that was gonna earn a lot of money and was gonna be able to take care of myself in a way that he was not able to.

He was able to take care of himself, but he wanted me to have more.

And so it was very difficult for him when I told him my second year of college, that I was going to be an English literature major instead of an economics major.

And I used my one phone call home that I had every year to tell him that.

And I had to hold the phone away from my ear as he yelled at me and said, "I didn't send you to the United States to learn how to speak English.

You already know how to speak English."

So I'm sure that there are a lot of young people who deal with that in some form.

And what I would just say is start to have faith in yourself.

Start to have faith in yourself.

Make the smart argument to your parents.

I made it to my dad that I would get the same job with an English degree that I would have gotten with an economics degree.

Which is what led me to investment banking for a couple of years and made me realize so completely that I did not want to do that.

And so that was all part of my transition.

And I think that sometimes our parents expect of us and we expect of ourselves that we're gonna have a linear progression.

You know, that from the time we're born essentially to the time that we become successful in whatever realm we're supposed to be successful in, that it's all gonna progress in a linear way.

And I am living proof of the idea that life is not linear, and you can learn something from every opportunity you have, even the ones you don't like.

You learn just as much from the things you don't like as from the things you like.

And if we take each of those learnings and kind of think about it as the next step, we can make that argument to our parents, to ourselves, to anybody else that has expectations of us.

That really the biggest skill is to trust ourselves and to continue on a path that we feel driven towards.

- Well, speaking of things we don't like, I can't imagine that it is easy to be the only, or the first and you've just rattled off a bunch of firsts that you've been in in your career.

You said that you made that choice consciously, that you decided that there needed to be more people of color in these roles.

How does one make that choice to be the only, to be the first?

And what sort of challenges did you face being in a minority, in a lot of the rooms that you were doing work in?

- I don't think I ever made a conscious choice to be the first, but I think I made a conscious choice that there needed to be more of me.

And it just so happened... You know, more people like me.

And it just so happened that in many cases, that was because there hadn't been any before me.

One of the things I'm proudest of though is that I know that after I ran a whole host of South Asian American women ran in our state and a whole bunch of people of color and immigrants ran in our state.

And so our state legislature now and the state Senate, there are many women of color there now, not enough still.

And in the state legislature, there are many.

And I will tell you, I think that's a big part of the reason why the state legislature just wrapped up one of its most productive and progressive sessions because people of color were at the table advocating for equity.

So I think when you're deciding what you wanna do, the trick is to think clearly about why you want to do what you wanna do.

For me, it's not about having a title.

I mean, I'm thrilled that I have the title of Congresswoman, but it's only important to me if it gives me a platform and an opportunity to advance the things I care deeply about.

And the minute it stops being that is the moment that I will stop being a member of Congress , because I don't wanna do it.

There's a lot involved in this job and it's only good if I'm moving that moral arc of the universe more quickly towards justice.

So think about what it is you wanna do and why.

And it's not about who you wanna be in terms of a title.

It's about what you wanna do.

The second thing is if you are then running for something or trying to get a position where you are the first, or maybe not the first, but one of very few, I think again, I feel like I'm repeating myself because so many of the answers to your questions have been trust yourself.

You are going to go into an environment where people will try to diminish you.

People will try to speak over you, or you just will be ignored in different ways.

And your job is to remember that when people do that, it's largely because of their problem.

They're intimidated by you.

They have their own issues that they're gonna have to deal with.

But none of those you need to accept.

You don't need to accept any of those.

You can still be who you are and you can advocate for the things that you care about.

And the reality is because we're often the first or one of few, we are far more prepared than anybody else.

We do way more work to get ourselves prepared, because we're never gonna be in that situation where somebody says you got that wrong or you didn't do that right or whatever.

It's a lot of pressure I'll admit that we put on ourselves, but that's part of what happens.

- Yeah, we definitely have the dictum in my community of, you know, work twice as hard, right?

- That's right.

That's right - So I see that the time is already running out.

We still got about 15 minutes.

So I wanna pinpoint something that you just said about moving the arc more quickly towards justice.

There seems to be a bit of the sense of opposition between activists and politicians.

And the language of activism tends to be something about urgency and demand versus politics tends to be about compromise.

How are you bridging those two sides and how do you communicate across those two different languages?

- Yeah.

The more of us we have on the inside, the smaller that gap gets, but it is always gonna be there to some extent because what we really need is to constantly be pushing the limits of what's seen as possible.

I mean, I consider being an activist on the inside.

I'm still an activist.

I'm just on the inside with Congress .

And so for us, as progressives, as people that are pushing for bold change, if politics is the art of the possible, which is sort of what you're getting at with the issue of compromise, then our job as activists, wherever we sit, is to push the boundaries of what is seen as possible.

Possibility is only limited by what you see or believe.

It's not limited by actual factors on the ground necessarily.

And so I think that a lot of what we do is we're pushing, pushing, pushing on the outside and the inside.

If you get to a place where you have to "compromise," to me compromise is not about some people are here, you know, extreme Republicans believe in white supremacy and here we don't believe in white supremacy.

And therefore you cut the difference.

And we're only gonna believe in white supremacy for 50% of the people.

No, that's not compromise, right?

It's not just dividing the difference in half.

It's about principled compromise.

So where is the principle?

It's the same thing on caging kids.

Some Republicans are saying, "Well, we need to cage 100,000 kids," and some are saying don't cage any.

We don't settle and say 50,000 kids caged is okay.

So I think really thinking about what are the principles, and if we are moving fo... You push for the most you can get.

If we are moving forward and we're not moving another group backwards, that is part of what a principled compromise might entail.

But we are always limited in politics by what we can get done.

And so it is a challenge, that gap will always be there.

I'm not sure it's a bad thing because when I was pushing for a $15 minimum wage, along with the fast food workers, almost a decade ago, people told me I was crazy.

Well, now we're gonna pass a $15.

We've already passed it in the house and we're working to get it through in the Senate.

You can kind of go through issue after issue.

Community college.

I introduced free community college in the Washington state Senate in 2016.

Now I'm introducing a bill for free education overall, two and four-year colleges.

We move on progressives of the first to the best and most just idea and then everyone else has to try and keep up with us.

- It sounds like you're speaking sort of specifically about a evolution, even slow evolution of change.

And you know, this talk is about the politics of change, but I also wanna talk a little bit about staying in power.

So, you know, we are just coming from four years of a Republican president and a Republican majority.

And now we have a democratic president and a democratic majority.

And, you know, the last president undid a of things that the president before him did and the Congress before them did and the same thing is happening now.

So when you are creating, when you're trying to create change through policy, is there any hope that those changes will last, when they can be so easily undone?

And how do you cope with that as an activist, as a politician?

How do you push back against things kind of being undone regularly?

- Well, legislative changes are quite hard to undo, particularly legislation that gives things to people that they desperately need.

So you think about Medicare or social security, two of the most enduring programs, two of the most popular programs, because they provide real benefit to people.

I think that legislative changes that are bad are also very difficult to undo.

And so I think about welfare reform under president Bill Clinton.

I thought that was a terrible policy.

And I think it's been very hard to undo pieces of that, including the framework of work requirements or criminalization of immigrants or a number of things that were part of that welfare reform bill.

And so it's only with the executive orders that things get undone quickly because then any president can undo it.

Which is why legislation is so important for the right things.

And what I would say now with this president, because of the moment that was created in part by the movement for black lives, by the movement for gun reform.

I mean, these are a lot of things that young people across this country were leading on.

Because of that combined with the tragedies and the horrors of COVID-19.

And then of course, with all of the elements that came to bear the murder of George Floyd, the unemployment, the health pandemic, 500,000 plus people dying in our country, food lines stretching around the corners.

All of that has contributed to this president being the boldest president we've ever seen, which many of us who didn't support this president in the democratic primary would not have expected, but we should take credit for that.

And we should hang onto it without foregoing the reality, the things still haven't changed for black people in America.

Things still haven't changed for poor people in America.

We have to do, we have to deliver now.

But even the frame that Joe Biden is putting forward is completely different than any other president before and it is the progressive movements frame for everything from tax reform to, you know, investing in cutting poverty, through long-term staying power things like a child tax credit or many of the other things that we're pushing.

- So many of the things that you just are tragic and your activism career also came out of tragedy.

I'm curious if over the past 20 years of your career, you've noticed a trend in that radical change follows great tragedy.

- Yes.

Unfortunately, it is a key part of organizing.

What organizing for change is about is you build a movement and you help create a tipping point.

But often that tipping point is a moment of tragedy and we are horrified by it as organizers and we take the opportunity that it requires of us, that it presents to us, but it requires of us to make a change in that moment.

And so the infrastructure was building with the Black Lives Matter movement over years.

The infrastructure for $15 minimum wage building over years.

Immigration reform, we still haven't reached that tipping point where we've gotten any kind of good reform through, but so much of how an organizer operates is to build, build, build and then look for the tipping point.

And usually it's a moment of tragedy.

I hate to say that, but I remember when we would have the most terrible things happen and people would come together in that moment with a real focus on what needed to be done and a renewed sense of urgency that allowed us to do it.

- So that brings me to something that I would like to talk about, but if you feel uncomfortable at any time, please feel free to stop.

We last spoke a day before the events of January 6th, the insurrection at the Capitol.

And I know that you were in the building at the time.

Have you felt that your work has changed?

How you understand voters, how you understand your colleagues across the aisle.

Do you feel that any of that has changed since that day?

- Yes, completely.

I was trapped in the gallery along with several of my colleagues.

Many of us that were people of color were watching as confederate flags were being raised.

Some of our white colleagues were being told to take off their member pins.

This is a member pin that identifies us as a member for Capitol police.

And they were taking off their pins so that the rioters, the insurrectionists wouldn't see them as members and attack them.

For many of us folks of color, we kept our member pins on because it was the worst of two evils.

Do we get recognized by the insurrectionist who attack us or do we not get recognized because where people of color by Capitol police who are trying to identify members to protect.

And so there was so much that was happening in that moment where I literally thought I could die.

And there was so much happening, not just on a personal level, but on a political level with the big lie that is continuing to be perpetrated by many of our colleagues and the former president.

And it's been very difficult to emerge from all of those places because we haven't had any accountability yet.

You know, we had the impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

That impeachment trial got more bi-partisan votes for impeachment than any impeachment trial in the history of our country, but it wasn't quite enough to actually impeach the president to, excuse me, to convict the president.

And that was a real problem because he's continued to do the same thing that he's been doing.

With our colleagues it's been a real problem because so many of them in fealty to the former president are refusing to even admit that there was an insurrection, that the president was responsible for it, or that it hurt our democracy.

That this was actually a fair and free election.

Some of them question whether Joe Biden is the legitimate president.

So it makes it extremely difficult for us to work in a bi-partisan way with our colleagues who aren't even recognizing that democracy and the election was fair.

So it has been very difficult on a personal level, just the trauma of the day for many of us and on a kind of broader national level, because democracy is really at stake and anybody who watched what happened on January 6, so how darn close we were to losing our democracy.

- Well, we have about five minutes left and I certainly don't wanna end on that.

So I wanna throw in here one of our audience questions.

So someone asked, what are some examples of ineffective strategies or tactics to avoid so I don't waste my time?

And I think they're referring as activists.

- Yeah.

It's a great question but a hard question to answer because every effective strategy or ineffective strategy depends on the campaign, right?

So depending on what you're trying to get and who you're trying to target, that's how you should decide what your strategies are.

So ineffective strategies could be if you're only targeting people who are already on board.

That may be, you know, important in other contexts to build momentum, but if you're organizing a whole bunch of stuff and it's around somebody that's already on board because they happen to be closest to you, that may not be effective.

Now, there may be other reasons to do that, but I'm always telling people, you know, that come to see me, I'm with you, I'm already signed on, or it's my bill or I've, and I love hearing from people, but can you organize people in other states?

Do you have family members in other states that you might want to get them on board?

Because I think matching the strategy to the target to the result is the arc of a campaign for change.

So kind of a roundabout way to answer that but think about your goal.

Think about your target to reach that goal, and then think about your strategy.

Maybe I'll just add one more thing.

In my book, I detail something called a power map, which I think is a really important organizing tool and too many organizers don't know about it.

So I just wanna push it out there, which is when I got to the state Senate, I created a power map of all the state senators.

There were only 50, so it wasn't that hard.

And in that power map, it was essentially a profile of every senator, Republican and Democrat.

What they were moved by, what issues they focused on, what church or synagogue or mosque or whatever they went to, who they were influenced by, who their top donors were.

It was really sort of like, what are all the leverage points for this person?

Where did their kids go to school?

Was there a PTA association that their wife or husband were a part of?

And that really was a great way to identify what the points of leverage were with any particular senator that I wanted to work with.

So there are tools like that that are really great organizing tools.

And I go through some of them in my book, but organizing is a skill.

It isn't just an attention.

It is actually a skill and there is a lot to learn.

And so I hope that people who want to organize, run for office, any of those things, really get engaged in making something happen at the ground level first, even before you run for office because it will help you to understand what moves people and how do you create change whatever the venue is.

- So just under the wire here, what advice do you have for budding activists and politicians coming of age in this very divided political landscape?

- Believe in yourself.

You've heard that from me many times.

That is really important.

Get to know your opposition.

I go on Fox News quite a bit, or I used to, I haven't in a while, but you know, I think that was important to me.

Being able to make the arguments about what I was arguing for, to people who didn't agree with me.

And I think we surround ourselves too much with people who agree with us.

So get to know your opposition and then develop your skills.

I think those are kind of three good ones for everybody to go out there and be able to do something that really is meaningful for you and for the world.

And remember, it doesn't take more than a single person sometimes often to create the kind of change we wanna see.

So we all have the power, we just need to use the power we have, which of course is the title of my book.

But use the power we have.

- And title.

Well, thank you so much for being here.

This was a great conversation and I hope everyone out there in internet land got some good stuff out of it.

Thank you again, Congresswoman.

- Thank you, Crystal.

And thank you Crosscut.

- So before we go, Crosscut Festival wanted to invite Abel Pacheco from the United Way who is here to offer some ideas for how to get active and involved in our community.

Thank you all.

- Hi everyone.

Thank you for joining us this afternoon and really wanna send a note of thank you, special thank you to Congresswoman Jayapal as well.

So we've all had an opportunity just to learn today about how we can be part agents of change and at the same time being engaged in our communities.

And so there's a continued opportunity to learn more about the issue of homelessness.

Tomorrow May 4th, a conversation that will be led by a United Way King County, CEO, Gordon McHenry.

And so one of the ensure that we have the opportunity to continue the conversation there.

Secondly, you can get involved by giving as little as a dollar a day to your local United Way.

You have an opportunity locally within King County to join the United Way King County emerging leaders program for a little as low as donating a dollar a day.

Myself and other young professionals get involved, get engaged and it's a great, great, great opportunity for just the networking as well as to learn more and volunteer.

With regards to volunteering, so you have an opportunity that's coming up around the corner.

It's to phone bank, it's a phone banking project.

We're helping members to connect members of the community with available food resources.

And so these are just some small ways that you can be an agent of change locally.

And so I really wanna encourage you to do it and then encourage you to continue the conversation, continue to give and continue to stay engaged.

Thanks.

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