Buckle Your Seat Belts!
Thank you so much for subscribing to my new project. For the past three years, I have contributed my treasure, time and talents to the world of independent progressive media and political commentary. I have also hustled alongside some of the dopest grassroots organizers from the hood to the holler.
I had been toying around the with the idea to launch a newsletter or blog that would highlight grassroots voices and share tips, strategic suggestions, and alternatives to the status quo. In 2016, we watched conventional wisdom and “facts” fall apart in real time. Amid the chaos and confusion in the post-2016 world, came an opportunity for new ideas to break through and a new wave of candidates, organizers, and strategists broke onto the national stage.
Inspired by the transformational events of the 2018 cycle, I co-led a panel entitled “Redefining the Win,” helping us shift the narrative of loss to motivational stories of advancement. In January I quietly started consulting doing some work under the name Building Beyond Collective. I hope that we can work to build beyond and push past the limitations that exist in contemporary political and social spaces. For too long respectability and civility have dictated the rules of engagement.
Criticism and critique are not fatal. Helping to frame our work and spaces and charting a collective path forward ensures we are not in the same (or worse) place than we were before. With the 2020 presidential cycle in full swing, and 2019 state and local elections happening across the country, I wanted to provide my voice to the mix. Too many pundits, pollsters, and politicos are invested in pushing mainstream narratives that restrict the possibility of progressive advancement.
Pushing the left of center imagination and understating of what’s possible in the electoral realm, is an ongoing labor of love. If you’re like me, you probably already have poll fatigue. Whether it is reporting on polls that haven’t been publicly released yet, or polls that are publicly available but have skewed and misleading reporting, the social construction of political truth is geared toward maintaining the status quo.
In 2018, we saw countless efforts to take on entrenched power by building coalitions grounded in meaningful engagement across communities on the issues that matter to us all. As the pundits and pollsters cling to their failed models and predictions, we look toward seeing who will build the best coalition to turn out voters on the issues that matter.
Beyond the Status Quo is an in-depth look at the flawed analysis from pundits and politicos while bringing you an alternative lens through which to view the political conversations happening all around us.