JF

The first event that politicized me was Black Lives Matter, when I was a sophomore in college. We took over the 101 Freeway. That was my first protest ever, chanting through the streets of Palo Alto. The moment I got out of college, I was keen to get involved in the Bay Area activist, organizing, or political scene, and I found that there was plenty to do on the end of police policies.

I learned a lot about Oscar Grant and the families that Oscar Grant’s family have connected with through their own pain and struggle for justice. [Oscar Grant was a twenty-two-year-old black man murdered by a security guard while riding on a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train on New Year’s Day, 2009.]

I saw how many millions of dollars police unions pour into state legislative races, including the assembly and senate, and I saw very clearly how that affected bills when they finally got to the legislature. They would get watered down. That’s what we’re seeing still, five years after the apex of Black Lives Matter.

That’s when Standing Rock was going off in my ancestral territories of the Dakotas. My grandfather was born and raised on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, went to boarding school in Pine Ridge, which has a really dark history.

My grandmother grew up on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, which is where the Dakota Access Pipeline ends in northwest North Dakota. Both of my grandparents passed before I was even old enough to be interested — my grandma passed when I was two, my grandpa passed when I was fourteen.

So when this movement came around, I found a ton of people like me who had been alienated or disconnected from their family history, and for the first time in generations, we saw an indigenous resistance in physical form in one location, and to no one’s surprise, there was a concerted, militarized law enforcement response and violent crackdown on unarmed water protectors there — indigenous and nonindigenous.

I saw that happening at the end of 2016, around the time Donald Trump got elected. I was studying for the LSAT, but when he was elected, I thought to myself, “Why the heck am I studying law when this guy doesn’t have to?”

Around that time, I was trying to see how I could support Standing Rock. I went for a day just to drop off some donations, but I went home and thought, “There’s something I could do from afar.”

I wasn’t sure what that was until I saw Seattle had this gigantic movement focused on getting their city’s money, which amounted to billions of dollars, out of Wall Street banks that were financing the pipeline, which turns out to be all the Wall Street banks we know of — Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank.

I saw that, got in touch with them, they supported me and my motivation to bring it into San Francisco. So a month later, we got the Board of Supervisors to pass a resolution, which is a nonbinding intention saying we’re going to divest our $10 billion from Wall Street. But I’m not satisfied with symbolic moves. I actually want that money divested.

We’ve spent the past three years focused on finding ways to reinvest the $12 billion budget of San Francisco. It makes sense to a lot of people here that we need to be in control of our own finances and our own investments. We’ve gotten this bill passed called AB 857, working with our assemblyperson, David Chiu. Now all California cities have the option of having their own public bank.

But we’re trying to make San Francisco the first in line next to Los Angeles to actually apply for a public banking license, so we can divest all of that money from Wall Street and reinvest in things like affordable housing, renewable energy, reducing student debt, public infrastructure, and keeping small businesses open that keep closing.

That’s been our approach for the past three years. Public banking will always be my passion. It’s in a good enough place now where I feel like I can actually speak to the issues that I’ve been facing myself and that my communities have been facing here, namely displacement and unaffordability and the weight of the economic system on our shoulders.

It’s literally physically painful to work several jobs at minimum wage and try to organize for a better world. I have students at San Francisco State who are leaving with so much debt, a handful of them are unhoused or housing-insecure. We deserve better, plain and simple.