During election season, I always cringe when I see can didates eating fried chicken next to a bottle of hot sauce in Harlem or taking stag ed photos with black leaders. These shallow symbolic gestures are not a substitute for meaningful engagement with black voters. And candidates should know that we see right through them.

Candidates and their campaigns are comfortable talking at black people, but few want to talk to us. This limits our ability to influence their decisions and policies. And it’s a bad strategy at a time when black people, black women in particular, form the base of the Democratic Party, are its most loyal voters and mobilize other people to go to the polls.

That’s why, in 2018, I started the Black Census Project, the results of which we are releasing on Tuesday . More than 31,000 bl ack people from all 50 states participated in what we believe is the largest independent survey o f black people ever conducted in the United States.