Ethan Epstein is associate editor of The Weekly Standard.

PHOENIX — “Democrats hope demographic changes will translate into a win in November,” wrote The Nation magazine a while back. “Arizona, the second fastest-growing state … brimming with Latinos and Independents [is] where the bloodiest fight is likely to take place,” correspondent Marc Cooper trumpeted. Liberal writers of all stripes have been bullish in recent years on the Democrats’ prospects in this southwestern state long associated with Barry Goldwater-style arch conservatism. “[C]onsider the influence of ongoing demographic changes in the state which have been steadily increasing the percentage of minority eligible voters, mostly Hispanics, and reducing the share of relatively conservative white working-class voters,” wrote Ruy Texeira in the New Republic, arguing that Arizona is a state that’s ready to “flip.” Democratic optimism in Arizona has even reached across the pond as well, with the U.K.‘s Guardian writing, “Across bone dry Arizona, voters and pollsters have begun to ask openly about a change that seemed nearly impossible not so long ago: Could Democrats take the American West?”

The answer, so far, has had been a resounding no. That Nation article was written in 2004—a year in which President George W. Bush carried Arizona easily, and Senator John McCain coasted to reelection with 76 percent of the vote. Texeira’s missive in the New Republic? That was from 2012; Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama by 9 points that year in Arizona, and Republican Jeff Flake won an open Senate by nearly a million votes. As for the Guardian—it was bolstering the Democrats’ chances in 2016. We all know how that ended.


But this year, those indefatigable Arizona Democrats are sanguine once again. For once, their optimism may be justified: President Donald Trump’s unpopularity, coupled with an electorate that has only grown more Latino since Cooper’s 2004 article, has put two crucial races in play. One is the governor’s contest, where incumbent Republican Doug Ducey faces a likely challenge from David Garcia, a Hispanic-American professor and education expert at Arizona State University. A number of House seats are up for grabs in the state. Then there’s the race to fill Flake’s seat that pits Democratic Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema against, depending on how the primary shakes out, establishment-backed Republican Congresswoman Martha McSally. The last time a Democrat won that seat was in 1982.



Top: The Villalobos family, three generations under one roof, say a prayer of thanks before their Fourth of July meal. Bottom: The first haboob, or sandstorm, of the season blows in with the start of the monsoon season. | Patrick Cavan Brown for POLITICO Magazine

A new POLITICO/AARP poll shows Democrats ahead by 7 points in generic ballots in both the governor’s and Senate races. But to actually win statewide elections in this highly ethnically polarized state, Democrats will need to juice turnout among younger and especially older Latinos, who have tended to vote at lower rates than other voters in their age group — who also are trending ever more Republican. And not just in purplish Arizona: All across the U.S. Southwest, Latino voters could be the key to flipping Republican strongholds from red to blue, if only the Democratic Party can figure out how to get enough of them to the polls. Solve that mystery, and even a GOP-dominated state like Texas could suddenly be in play.

One answer to the Democrats’ puzzle, says Joseph Garcia, director of the Latino Public Policy Center at Arizona State’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy, is that many Latinos don’t realize their potential power at the ballot box. Latinos think of Arizona as a red state, “so they’ve tended not to vote,” Garcia says. The question, in the Trump era , is whether that assumption is safe any longer.

Top: Daniel Ruiz, 16, canvasses the city streets for Mi Familia Vota. Bottom: The first Friday of the month brings local artists and residents together on the streets of Phoenix.

***

Phoenix, and Maricopa County in general, is saturated in Latino—and specifically, Mexican—culture. (More than 90 percent of Arizona Latinos are of Mexican origin.) Vast swaths of the sprawling county, population 4.2 million, are essentially barrios. Take Central Avenue, south of downtown Phoenix: It’s a seemingly endless strip of Mexican supermarkets, restaurants, body shops and convenience stores, dominated by Spanish signage.

Or Tolleson, a town just west of Phoenix, which is more than 80 percent Latino: Its pleasant, low-slung downtown, recently rechristened the “Paseo de Luces,” or “path of lights,” is a cornucopia of Mexican-American businesses — butcher shops, taquerias, grocery stores selling imported tortillas and salsa. Off the main drag, there are apartment buildings with names like “Casa de Merced.” On a recent weekday, two young men at a local restaurant in downtown Tolleson discussed—in English—recently having attained U.S. citizenship. “It was such a relief!” one exclaimed.

Yet even as Latinos now make up an increasingly large percentage of the population in Arizona (currently estimated at 30 percent), their participation—and representation — in politics has lagged. About a quarter of Arizona’s registered voters are Latino — and, in most elections, only 18 percent to 20 percent of ballots are cast by Latinos.

The last Latino elected statewide here was Raúl Héctor Castro, a Mexican-born immigrant who became a lawyer and diplomat. That was in 1974. (President Lyndon B. Johnson, who tapped Castro as U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, asked him to change his last name to avoid confusion with Cuba’s Fidel Castro. He refused.) The contrast between Arizona and nearby states like California and Nevada, which boast heavy Latino political participation and representation, is striking.

Part of this disconnect is a matter of timing, according to political hands in Arizona. The state had long boasted a small Mexican-American population, dating back to when its current territory was actually part of Mexico. But it wasn’t until the early 1990s that the Latino population began to take off.



New Window Arizona’s Deciders in Their Own Words: Arizona voters over 50 have strong opinions about President Trump, immigration, and the state's shifting demographics. (CLICK TO OPEN INTERACTIVE) | Patrick Cavan Brown for POLITICO Magazine

Ironically, it was a steep reduction in illegal migration into California and Texas that spurred the move into Arizona. “You had Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold the Line, which were fortifications of urban cross-points in El Paso and San Diego, respectively, which is where everybody crossed without permission,” recalls Ian Danley, a longtime Arizona political operative currently managing the gubernatorial campaign of David Garcia, the Mexican-American Democrat running to replace Ducey. “They believed that if you sealed off the urban crossing points, the natural terrain of Arizona would be its own natural barrier,” Danley says. “And it wasn’t. The economy was too strong.”

Maricopa, a sun-drenched valley that sprawls across more than 9,000 square miles, still contains remnants of its frontier origins. Thanks to its then-plentiful water supplies, the area became a way station for forty-niners seeking their fortunes in the California gold fields. A gold strike in nearby Yuma in 1862 brought an influx of prospectors from the East Coast, who established the mining town of Wickenberg to the northwest of present-day Phoenix.

But it wasn’t until the advent of air conditioning, and innovations like Sun City, the pioneering retirement community that opened in 1960, that the county’s growth first exploded. The Phoenix area, a desert with roughly 300 days of sunshine per year and nearly 200 golf courses, quickly became a magnet for mostly white, middle-class “snowbirds” looking to escape the dreary weather up north. Given this history, Maricopa is very much a land of migrants of all backgrounds.

But because of the heat, the huge number of transplants, its sprawling nature, and the way it developed — think gated communities and highways—it at times seems to lack a unified culture. For a county of Maricopa’s size, there’s a relative dearth of public spaces, like large parks, where citizens can gather. Public transit is sparsely used, too; in my time here, there were never more than two or three people waiting at the light rail stations that dot downtown Phoenix. Sports allegiance, a sign of civic engagement, is weak as well. Even when they’re good, the Diamondbacks are among the lower-drawing teams in Major League Baseball.

Top: A typical, medium-sized Mexican market has more fresh and raw ingredients than its big-box counterpart. Bottom left: Mexican Art Imports, run by the Montez family, is filled with color. Bottom right: It isn't until the sun goes down in the evening that folks begin to venture out into the heat of the summer. Night temperatures in Phoenix often do not dip below 100 degrees Fahrenheit until the early hours of the morning. | Patrick Cavan Brown for POLITICO Magazine

For a time in the early 2000s, Maricopa was America’s fastest-growing county, driven largely by booms in real estate and tourism. Those industries are magnets for immigrant labor, which only added to the appeal for Mexican border-crossers.

Driven by continuing political and demographic changes, Arizona is poised to be a major battleground in this year’s midterm elections and a potential swing state in the 2020 presidential race, a new POLITICO poll shows. Click here to view the poll.

As a result, Arizona’s Latino population trebled from 1990 to 2015 from 700,000 to about 2.2 million. Thirty-one percent of Maricopa County residents are now Latino, according to the U.S. Census. But because the population is so new to the state (and in many cases, unable to vote), political representation has lagged. In terms of Latino political participation, Arizona is “in a place California was in the 1980s,” says Montserrat Arredondo, who runs One Arizona, a Phoenix nonprofit that works to register Latino voters. Her goal is for “political representation to reflect the local population,” she says.

There could be a giant leap toward that objective this year in the state’s governor’s race. Ducey, the incumbent Republican, a mostly moderate, Chamber of Commerce type, is unpopular, and an NBC News/Marist poll from mid-June found that 59 percent of voters, including more than 60 percent of registered Independents, want him replaced this November. The POLITICO/AARP poll had more bad news for the governor, with only 34 percent of registered voters saying they’d vote for him if the election were held today. (Forty-one percent backed the Democrat, and a quarter were undecided.) A prolonged fight with the school’s teachers unions over salaries earlier this year weakened his standing.

Ducey will likely face Garcia, an ASU education professor who leads his closest primary opponent by 25 points according to the latest polls. Garcia previously ran for superintendent of Arizona schools in 2014, and lost by a whisker. (He did better than any other Democrat who ran statewide that year.) Because of the current focus on education in Arizona, Garcia seems tailor-made for this year’s contest.



University professor and gubernatorial candidate David Garcia participates in Red For Ed, an initiative to improve public school education. | Patrick Cavan Brown for POLITICO Magazine

He’s also tailor-made for the state’s rapidly changing electorate. Garcia, 48, is a fourth-generation Mexican-American who grew up in eastern Maricopa County, served in the Army, and attended Arizona State before earning a doctorate at the University of Chicago. He married another Mexican-American who grew up in the same neighborhood and the couple has two daughters. At 48, he stands at the crux of two generations of Arizona Latinos — and he says he notices a big difference between the older and the younger folks.

“The intergenerational split in the Latino community is fascinating,” Garcia tells me in an interview in his campaign office. (With temperatures hovering around 112 degrees outside on this summer day, it’s nice that Garcia runs an office in which casual attire is de rigueur.) “Take, for example, my grandparents. They grew up in almost exclusively Spanish-speaking environment. My dad had to go out of his way to not be Mexican, to not be in a neighborhood where it was all Spanish.”

Garcia, on the other hand, had the opposite experience: He was raised in a mixed neighborhood and didn’t actually master Spanish until later in life — and only after a conscious effort. Indeed, his parents didn’t want him to learn Spanish for fear he would end up in a substandard, segregated classroom, as had been the experience for much of their generation. His dad’s thinking was, “Why would I subject you this Mexicanness, while my goal is for you to be as American as possible?” he recalls.

Garcia says the younger generation of Arizona Latinos is far more ethnically conscious than their parents and grandparents. His experience growing up is “totally different from his daughters,” he says. They, for example, speak Spanish, and have worked to cultivate their Latino identity.



Top left: Student volunteers from One Arizona canvass the local mall for potential voters. Top right: Posters decorate the walls of an office housing several get-out-the-vote causes. Bottom left: The city is broken up into segments highlighting areas of potential voter participation improvement. Bottom right: Latino student volunteers from One Arizona participate in social ice-breakers prior to canvasing the streets. They were each asked four things they were proud of. All mentioned their culture. | Patrick Cavan Brown for POLITICO Magazine

And they’re not alone in that. “We’re seeing a younger generation that’s much more vocal about being Latino, Latinx, Mexicano,” he says. Garcia allows that older Latinos have a more restrictive view of immigration than younger Latino Arizonans do, but says that distinction is eroding. “If [immigration] becomes a racial issue, about who you are rather than what you’ve done … we [Latinos] all in the same boat whether you came over here recently or were here for generations.”

***

“It’ll all come down to turnout” may be the hoariest chestnut in politics, but it’s conventional wisdom for good reason: To win, you’ve got to get your voters to the polls.

And in Arizona, as in the rest of the country, partisan identification is increasingly tied to ethnic identity. The state hasn’t yet reached Mississippi-like levels of racial polarization (in that state, more than 90 percent of whites tend to vote Republican, and more than 90 percent of blacks vote for Democrats), but its elections do look increasingly like censuses, with three-quarters of Latinos voting Democratic and more than 60 percent of whites pulling the lever for the GOP. Those figures are going up: According to Danley, Garcia’s campaign manager, white Arizonans of all ages are trending more Republican.



Top: Volunteers seek elderly voter registration applicants at a supermarket. Bottom left: Arizonans wearing home-crafted headgear for their Fourth of July celebration. Bottom right: Harry Garewal fills his grandson's swimming pool. His family is growing to occupy two side-by-side lots in a Phoenix neighborhood recovering from a period of rampant crime. | Patrick Cavan Brown for POLITICO Magazine

Demographics, fundamentally, are why Democrats here are so bullish on their chances in 2018 and beyond. It’s not that they’re winning the argument, or that there even is an argument per se: It’s simply that their numbers are growing. That’s a trend that will continue, given that the median Latino Arizonan is aged 27 while the median age for white Arizonans is 47. More than half of public school students in Arizona are Latino; the figures are even higher in Maricopa County.

It wasn’t always this way. In the early late 1990s and early 2000s, Republicans regularly won more than 40 percent of the Latino vote in Arizona. In 2018, under the polarizing presidency of Trump, they’ll be lucky to muster a quarter of the vote.

The new POLITICO/AARP poll shows that among Arizona Hispanics only 26 percent “strongly” or “somewhat” approve of the job the president is doing; 72 percent “strongly” or “somewhat” disapprove. The congressional and gubernatorial polls tell a similar tale, with only 22 percent of Latinos supporting the generic Republican candidate for Congress and the same percentage backing Ducey’s reelection bid.



Left: James Garcia, local playwright and activist, in a tent protesting the removal of migrant children from their parents. He spent the day writing scripts which are then performed by local actors and streamed live on the internet. Right: Anna Flores, a poet local to Phoenix, performing a poem she wrote about the idea that "Mexican men work so hard", and what that means to their families in their absence. | Patrick Cavan Brown for POLITICO Magazine

It wasn’t always that way. James Garcia, a 59-year-old Mexican-American playwright in Phoenix, traces the beginning of ethnic polarization to 2010. That year, Arizona passed SB 1070, touted as the toughest anti-illegal immigration law in the country. Its most famous clause mandated that local law enforcement check the immigration status of anyone they deemed to have a “reasonable” chance of being an illegal immigrant. (The law was never repealed, but subsequent court rulings have largely gutted it.)

Much like the current contretemps over the separation of children from their parents at the Mexican-U.S. border, 1070 was an issue that broke through into the broader national consciousness. Russell Pearce, the state senator who sponsored the measure, became a fixture on cable television. So did Joe Arpaio, then the sheriff of Maricopa County, who came up with ever-more flamboyant — and, his critics say, brutal — ways to enforce 1070. (Pearce ended up being recalled in 2011; Arpaio lost his reelection bid in 2016.)

The law not only drove Latinos away from the Republicans, but also spurred a new era of political activism. “1070 was definitely a watershed,” Garcia says. “It sparked not only grass-roots organizations but drew a ton of national attention from organizations who could provide funding.” The law quite literally hit home for Garcia. He recalls his daughter, then about 8 years old, asking, “Are we going to get arrested?”

As a result of 1070, immigration became “existential” for Arizona Latinos, Joseph Garcia of ASU’s Morrison Institute says. And the issue incites voter passions like nothing else—on both sides. Lupe Conchas, a 25-year-old Mexican-American Phoenix native and political activist, for example, traces his political awakening to 1070. And the gubernatorial candidate David Garcia points out that of three big liberal political movements in Arizona—the push for higher teacher salaries; gun control; and immigrant rights—only the latter has invited a palpable backlash. When the “March for Our Lives” gun control rally happened in Phoenix, “there were only 10 or 15 counter protesters,” he notes. Immigration rallies, on the other hand, always draw a sizable counterforce. Arizona’s politics are defined by backlash. Whereas Californians, also riven by identity politics, can chill out at the beach, in arid Arizona the tension just bakes, Danley says.



Top: At the Arizona Latino Arts and Cultural Center local artist Roman Perez Reyes, 71, works in his studio making a giant Day of the Dead mask. Bottom: Ashley Diez manages Mexican Art Imports with her father, her aunts, and a growing family.

Democrats are hopeful that immigration will energize a population that traditionally hasn’t voted much in Arizona—older Latinos. Harry Garewal, a 66-year-old Mexican-American who served on the Phoenix school board, says that Latino political participation, particularly among people of his generation, has long been low because “mostly, people were too busy working.” Garewal rattles off a list of Latino candidates for various local offices in Arizona, noting, pointedly, that all are under 40. Another middle-aged Mexican-American, a well-connected politico here, exclaims, “My mother doesn’t even vote!” She reasons that she’ll be shackled with jury duty if she registers.

In the previous installment of The Deciders, we looked at a retirement community that represents a key bloc in the swing state of Florida. Click here to read.

Activists and Democratic partisans are counting on young Latinos to spur their older counterparts to visit the voting booth—in many cases, for the first time. Take “Dreamers,” the young people who were brought to the country illegally as children. They, of course, can’t vote—they’re not citizens. But Joseph Garcia of the Morrison Institute says they’re very politically active, pleading with older Latinos in their community to register and then vote. The same goes for young Latinos who are American citizens—there’s a movement to “get your nana to vote,” Garcia says.

Montserrat Arredondo of One Arizona says her organization’s goal is to register 200,000 voters before Oct. 9, which is the deadline if you want to vote in the November elections. (One Arizona is nominally nonpartisan, but plainly politically liberal.) To reach that lofty target, her groups sets up shop at “the local grocery store, the park, Target.” In recent years, they’ve gone beyond the traditional set-up-a-booth approach, too: They’ve implemented techniques like text messaging to encourage Latinos to vote.

Arredondo says One Arizona gained “a lot of energy” after Donald Trump’s election, but that obstacles remain, particularly in getting middle-aged and older Latinos engaged. They recall the 2006 ballot measure, she says, which overwhelmingly passed, that made English the official language of the state. After that the older group became “turned off” to politics, according to Arredondo. The other big problem is simply taking the time. People tend to view voting as akin to “going to the DMV,” she says.

But there are signs more people are willing to make that trek to the DMV. At Mexican Art Imports, a Phoenix art store chock-a-block with treasures from south of the border, store manager Ashley Diez, a married, 32-year-old mother of two, told me, “My first time voting was 2016.” The Phoenix native, a fourth-generation Mexican-American, plans to vote this year as well—likely for Democrats.

Diez’s father, Fred Montez, typically votes for Democrats. (Interestingly, Diez’s mother votes Republican, but she doesn’t live in Arizona.) But like many older Latinos, he didn’t have much connection to his Mexican heritage growing up. He didn’t speak Spanish at home, for example—“speaking Spanish was frowned on by older generations”—Diez says, and only learned it when it became a necessity for his business.

Republicans agree that the Democratic electorate seems unusually fired up this year. “Arizona Democrats are experiencing a genuine enthusiasm that I have not seen previously in my 30 years of experience with such things in Arizona,” says Stan Barnes, a longtime conservative consultant here. But he cautions the Democrats that might not be enough: “Republicans have natural advantages in Arizona that give their candidates a meaningful head start,” he points out, starting with the fact that there are still more registered Republicans than Democrats here. Republican voters are older, too, and they tend to vote much more reliably than the young—another boost to the GOP’s prospects. Motivating older white Arizonans to vote is less of a challenge than it is for Latinos—in 2016, more than half of Arizona voters were over the age of 50, according to exit polls. Their turnout will be key to Republican hopes this year, too.



Top: Lupe Conchas, a local activist, stands in front of a sign near a center housing migrant children separated from their parents. Bottom left: Interracial couples are far from the exception in Phoenix. Bottom right: Young people relax during a first-Friday-of-the-month celebration. | Patrick Cavan Brown for POLITICO Magazine

***

Nonetheless, it’s because of new voters like Diez that Arizona Democrats are increasingly confident that they’ll be able not only to win the governorship, but snatch the Senate seat being vacated by Jeff Flake, who announced his retirement after his criticism of Trump sent his popularity plummeting among Republicans. Polls have presumptive Democratic nominee, Congresswoman Sinema of Maricopa County, ahead of all three Republicans running against her.

Congresswoman McSally from Tucson likely will get the Republican nod; she leads Kelli Ward, an osteopath, by about 10 points, according to the latest polling. Arpaio—yes, Joe Arpaio—is also supposedly running for Senate, but his is essentially a Potemkin campaign. (As recently as this spring, he was picking up the phone at his campaign headquarters.) Arpaio, now 86 years old, is polling a distant third.

A former Green Party member, Sinema is now running to the center, at least on economic issues. “She has cracked the code because she understands pure liberalism doesn’t work. She understands the value of job creation in lifting people out of poverty, not just government programs, so she has embraced the private sector’s ability to create jobs,” says Dave Richins, a Republican former city councilman in Mesa, in eastern Maricopa County.

Jason Rose, a well-known conservative political consultant in Maricopa County who says he has never voted for a Democrat on the national level, nonetheless tells me that even he would “consider” pulling the lever for Sinema. Noting her extraordinary background—so poor was her family that she lived three years in an abandoned gas station when she was growing up—Rose says that “Sinema is the most remarkable statewide candidate in Arizona since John McCain first ran for Senate in 1982.”

McSally, for her part, is a deeply respected Air Force veteran (she was the first woman to fly a combat mission for the Air Force) with a sterling reputation as a thoughtful presence in Congress. She has never revealed whether she voted for Trump, whose approval rating in the POLITICO/AARP poll of Arizona voters remains underwater at 44 percent.



A father and son holding fireworks at a Phoenix Fourth of July celebration. | Patrick Cavan Brown for POLITICO Magazine

As always in Arizona, it is immigration where the clearest lines have been drawn between the Democrat and the Republican. Sinema supports the DREAM Act and said in late June, as the child separation crisis was raging that the Trump administration’s policy had “traumatized innocent children.”

McSally, for her part, has embraced a hard line on immigration. Many Republicans—even conservative stalwarts like Texas Senator Ted Cruz—distanced themselves from Trump at the height of the child separation crisis. Not McSally. When asked about the issue, she said, “I try not to get swayed by what the emotions are or the pressure.” She’s blasted Sinema over sanctuary cities, and even quietly removed herself from legislation offering a path to citizenship to some illegal immigrants.

Indeed, Democrats appear to have handed Republicans a major opportunity with their recent calls to “abolish” Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the division of the Homeland Security Department charged with enforcing immigration laws at home. Many Democrats in Congress have backed the call, and in early July, David Garcia threw his weight behind the campaign as well.

“The ICE issue is the greatest political gift that could have been given to the Arizona Republican Party,” Rose says. Governor Ducey sure seemed to think so: Barely a day had passed since Garcia’s call before he had published an op-ed in USA Today charging that “Calls to abolish ICE are wrong and reckless.”

“The governor is going to go full throttle on the abolish ICE issue,” Rose predicts. McSally won’t be able to: Sinema has said she does not support abolishing ICE.

Rose also notes that the border is a familiar electoral trump card for Arizona Republicans, particularly among older voters. In 2006, Rose recalls, incumbent Republican Senator Jon Kyl faced a tough challenge from a Democratic candidate that he fended off by playing up his support from border enforcement. And “abolish ICE” is not only electoral gold for Republicans in Arizona: Courtney Alexander, communications director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with House Republicans, says her group’s nationwide polling finds that a mere 15 percent of the electorate backs the idea.

Still, the Democrats hope to note only take the Senate seat and the governorship but two House seats here as well. Rep. McSally, the Senate candidate, is retiring from the House, and the race for her seat, which was one held by Gabby Giffords, will be competitive. The Democrats are also targeting the Phoenix-area seat held by David Schweikert, who is contending not only with Trump’s unpopularity but also an ethics investigation into whether he received illegal campaign contributions. And then of course there is the Senate seat held by the terminally ill McCain. An early exit for McCain would set up another competitive race in 2020.

So Arizona does look increasingly like a battleground after years of wishful thinking on the left, and all it took was the surprise election of a certain Manhattan real estate mogul. But it’s going to take an unprecedented amount of Latino turnout for Democrats to win the big statewide races, and it’s likely to get ugly.

Garcia, the Democrat running for governor, expects Ducey to fight hard on immigration and identity issues, perhaps with ads tying him to MS-13, the violent Central American gang. But he’s betting that such an approach ultimately will hurt Ducey—particularly among older Latinos who worked so hard for decades to integrate into American society.

“I’m thinking of my dad,” he says. “It is going to backfire because I can think of my father saying, “Let me get this straight. You served, and they’re going to put this on you? What else do you need to do? ... They’re still going to tag you because you’re brown? I believe that his generation is going to push back. Remember, this was a generation that fought for a place. And they look at someone like me and are proud of the role they played in allowing someone like me to have a place.”