Thread by @beyond_process

After designing, building & running the most successful petition program ever in MI, the majority white board of the antigerrymandering campaign layered me under a white strategist with ties to the state Dem Party for GOTV. After we handed in 440k signatures.

It kills me daily.

I still built the strategy they followed that allowed them to scale to the biggest campaign in 2018. Bigger than @GovWhitmer. I trained their volunteer leadership to run the programs I built. They could not fail. None of that mattered.

My good friend from college, who brought me to the campaign and was executive director, had no real experience going to bat for anyone, and certainly not for me adequately with the board. It literally did not matter what I accomplished for them.

Rewind the clock to when we started getting signatures on petitions. I had randomly bumped into the person who would end up taking my position. He assured me that we were going to need paid petition circulators later, and we never did. seattletimes.com/nation-world/n…

He was also certain that circulators would never knock doors, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy in field if ever I had heard one. He had a bad experience getting circulators knocking on the Recall Walker campaign.

Rewind the clock to me sitting in an office in Hannibal, MO with the guy I directly reported to on the @clairecmc campaign in 2012. Will had worked on the Recall Walker campaign. He said it was run like trash from the top down, more focused on videos than door knocks.

All I wanted to do politically, the only thing on my bucket list since 2016, was to clean up the mess left by the Michigan Democratic Party, and get the majority of people there who do lean left to knock on doors like their lives depended on it. I still believe it does.

My goal working on that campaign was to change the political landscape of the state of Michigan, and we absolutely did that. I was in no way sufficient for that, but I absolutely was necessary, and I was absolutely thrown in the dirt for it.

Would it be different if I was white?

I wish I knew. 😔

All I know is, the current leadership of that organization doesn't feel that civil rights is a topic related to democracy reform.

Jamie is the person I directly trained to run the petition program I built.

I used to consider her a friend.

I quit that campaign and moved to California. I found out later that on his first day, the person who replaced me walked up to the only Black person on staff and asked them if he knew where any cocaine could get purchased.🤦🏽‍♂️