Dear Friends,

I started Data for Black Lives a few months after the 2016 election. Before then, I worked at Color of Change, where I led voting rights efforts across several states, among other responsibilities. This work was arduous but educational. It gave me a bird’s-eye view of what was happening all over the country three years after Shelby County v. Holder. This U.S. Supreme Court ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by eliminating critical protections that barred states from enacting racist voting laws.

New restrictive policies seemed to pop up overnight, and these laws disproportionately targeted Black communities - from Florida, where we fought prison-based gerrymandering and new district maps that included prisons where our folks were incarcerated but could not vote, to Georgia where we first received reports of police being sent to the home of Black voters to contest their registration status, alleging ‘voter fraud’ a term that continues to be weaponized.

As we near election day, we must remember that our democracy was built on the dehumanization of Black people. The Electoral College, which will be used to decide the 47th President of the United States next week, is based on a formula that counts then enslaved people as 3/5ths of a person, a concession made to slave-owning states. Black people had representation but zero participation.

Today, the notion of “one person, one vote” continues to elude us as we fight disenfranchisement on all fronts, political and technological. The poll taxes and literacy tests of the past have become the weaponization of AI to deny eligible voters their rights. Unless we reverse engineer the algorithm of white supremacy that is inherent to our democracy - we continue to go two steps forward and one step back.

We reclaim data as protest, accountability, and collective action because we know that while next week, we will cast our ballots for the candidate most likely to listen to our demands, our political power must go beyond the project of American democracy. Our efforts to build political power for Black communities using data will only help shape and refine that project.

This begins next Tuesday, election day, and continues on November 18th when we come together as a community for D4BLIII. Check out past panels on voting rights and democracy below, as well as some important conference updates. I look forward to discussing in person next month how we can harness the power of AI to build the political power of Black people, from the protest to the polls.

Much love,

Yeshi

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