Twenty-nine-year-old Mckayla Wilkes is running for Congress to bring power back to the people.

When the Democratic congressional candidate took my call, it was the first day of her officially working on her campaign full time. I had hoped to interview Wilkes during one of her canvassing stops closer to Baltimore, but it was President’s Day, and her two children were home from school. Freedom from those kinds of challenges eludes newer, younger, progressive political candidates, and the burden is even heavier for working class candidates of color, like Wilkes. Securing childcare on a federal holiday or delaying full-time campaign duties until just a few months before the primary probably doesn’t burden Steny Hoyer, the white male House majority leader who, since 1981, has held the Maryland seat Wilkes is vying for.

Campaign finance rules add another set of hurdles: Under these rules, a candidate running for office can only take a salary from the campaign after the filing deadline for entering the primary has passed, meaning Wilkes could not start taking a salary until January 24. Before the coronavirus pandemic delayed Maryland’s Democratic primary to June 2, that left only three months for her to campaign full time. “We can’t use campaign funds for health care, and that was one of the reasons my plan to go full time was actually delayed," she explains. "I can probably sustain not having health care, but if something happens to my kids, God forbid, I'm not gonna have health insurance. There's all of these barriers that are put in the way if you’re a regular person running for Congress.”

Wilkes may be a “regular” person in some ways, but her trajectory has been remarkable. She has been very forthcoming about her encounters with the criminal justice system, but I was interested in how poverty, race, and gender make women like Wilkes targets in the system, and how she wants her potential congressional career to address the roots of the problem.

“Where I grew up, the nearest grocery store was miles away. You had to have a car to get here,” she says of the food deserts in her Suitland, Maryland, neighborhood, a town in Prince George’s County, near Washington, D.C. “The nearest hospital was, maybe, about 15 minutes away, on the other part of southeast D.C.” She shared a home with her mom, siblings, an aunt, and her aunt’s three kids.

“We came over to Waldorf when I was about nine or 10 years old," Wilkes recalls. "Coming out there, seeing the different houses... the education system was different. There were other opportunities. The grocery store is, like, on every corner.”

Wilkes still lives in Waldorf, Maryland, and the disparities remain. “Just seeing how [life] really is different depending on where you live... It's a shame, and it's definitely something that I want to change," she says. "It’s something that I have witnessed, and I still witness it. I mean, my friends still live in those areas.”