My first phone call with Alicia Garza is cut short because she is very busy. Since she co-founded the paradigm-shifting Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, Garza has won the Sydney Peace Prize, served as strategy and partnerships director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and launched the Black Futures Lab—which recently undertook the massive Black Census Project to assess the complexity of black communities across America in granular detail. So when, a minute or so into our conversation, she apologizes and asks if she can call me right back, I tell her of course, no problem, I completely understand.

My second phone call with Alicia Garza is cut short because, a minute or so into our conversation, I get another call I must take. She graciously assures me that I can call her right back, of course, no problem, she completely understands.

My third and final phone call with Alicia Garza begins with me explaining that my partner, who is black and incarcerated, gets to call me only one day each month. I never quite know when it will happen, and this month, it happened at just the wrong time. And because Alicia Garza has worked with and written about incarcerated people and their loved ones for much of her twenty-year career in activism, she again completely understands.

“No!” she says, with heartening optimism. “It was the right time. It was just the right time.”

Over the course of our discussion, we talked more about the issue of mass incarceration and how it’s become a shaky crutch for politicians attempting to take a stand on racial justice. We talked about how the Black Census Project reveals that black communities are broadly misunderstood and misrepresented in the democratic process. And we talked about how, in the year leading up to the 2020 presidential election, black people might not merely be heard but actually be, Garza says, “powerful in politics.”

Q: Tell us about the Black Census Project. Why was it necessary?

Alicia Garza: It was certainly an opportunity for us to go into communities that are often left out of the conversation when we talk about black people in this country. So you’ll notice, particularly among presidential candidates, that when people talk about black folks they say African American. It’s a holdover from the last period of civil rights, where they moved from “colored” and “Negro” to “African American.”

But the demographics of black communities have changed, particularly over the last decade, but definitely over the last two. So “African American” does not actually capture who black people are in America. Black people are immigrants. Black people are folks who are living in rural areas. Black people are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender-nonconforming. Black people are wealthy and living in poverty. Black people are currently and formerly incarcerated. And black communities exist across the political spectrum.

So we thought this was a great opportunity to put forward a new conception of who black people are in this country. We were able to accomplish this with more than 30,000 responses from all fifty states. We did some digging and made sure that communities often left out or hard-to-reach were prioritized in this survey.

Q: You talked about some of the census results that might be surprising to 2020 candidates. Was there anything in there that surprised you?

Garza: I’m black, so I did know how complicated our communities are. But there were a ton of things I was surprised by. One, I was surprised how much unity there was around issues and solutions, even though there was diversity in the people that we surveyed. One thing I found to be really fascinating was the contradictions that we saw in the data.

When there is divergence from a progressive political agenda, we think those are places for deeper engagement, deeper organizing.

For example, the vast majority of black census respondents don’t think that politicians care about black people, poor people, or immigrants. But they do care about rich people and white people. And despite that, black communities by and large vote Democratic and at the same time express a deep dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party.

We also found widespread support for progressive solutions even among black conservatives that took the survey. The vast majority of our respondents said police violence in their community was a problem, said that police should be held accountable when they commit crimes in our communities. They expressed concerns about whether or not schools were really preparing black children to succeed.

Even with that, what we found was that our respondents wanted to see more police in schools. That was a result of people scared for mass shootings, and there is a lot of work to do there. And we didn’t want to shy away from the contradictions. When there is divergence from a progressive political agenda, we think those are places for deeper engagement, deeper organizing.

Q: How do you feel about what the Democratic candidates for President are saying right now?

Garza: Some in the early parts of the campaign really tried to focus on what they think black communities care about, like black entrepreneurship and mass incarceration. And what we saw early on was mass incarceration became code for “black,” which is incredibly problematic. It is true that black communities are disportionally impacted by incarceration, but I think campaigns are missing a big opportunity to talk about how incarceration impacts all of us.

I really appreciate you saying to me, “Sorry, I had to go, because my partner who is incarcerated gets to call me once a month and this was our time.”

So again, it’s a missed opportunity to talk about the ways in which these issues that get so siloed in these campaigns intersect and crisscross over our lives. There are white families who have a seat empty at the table during holidays and birthdays and important days in our lives, and there are black families that have that exact same thing.

Q: How can we talk about these things in a way that highlights this common ground?

Garza: If we’re going to talk about mass incarceration, we actually have to zoom out and talk about criminalization and the ways in which we have penalized behavior, exacerbated by systems built and designed to punish poor people, to punish people of color, to punish women. And if we look at it from that framework, then we also have a better sense of what it actually takes to deal with these code words of mass incarceration.

I think we have Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movement to thank for the level of robust conversation that is happening now.

And many of these campaigns have been fearful to talk about the role of policing in the issue of mass incarceration. They’re afraid to talk about the role of policing because police unions and the police lobby are incredibly powerful, similar to that of the NRA. Police and their families, I think, are also caught at a crossroads, where there is widespread sentiment that police need to be held accountable. And at the same time, there is widespread sentiment that, like military participants, these are people making incredible sacrifices on behalf of our country. And so, as long as you have these opposing narratives, you cannot hope to solve those problems.

I use that as one specific example, but I think we have an opportunity right now to ask candidates and their campaigns to stop the performance and start to design policy. This is much bigger than Democrat or Republican. I think actually at this point in history, those terms don’t mean that much.

Q: You’ve said that there’s been some business-as-usual among the candidates on issues of race, but how have black movements and activism coming out of Black Lives Matter materially impacted electoral politics?

Garza: First and foremost, I never thought I would see in my lifetime any conversation on a mainstream stage about reparations, and about the historical and present legacy of slavery in this country. I think the conversation around mass incarceration was not really happening, even four years ago, so we had a struggle to even get candidates to talk in a real way about race and criminality. And I think we have Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movement to thank for the level of robust conversation that is happening now.

I certainly feel that way, and also know that it needs to go a lot further. But, to be honest, I think what happened in 2016 was that campaigns started to get very, very clear that people are not going to vote for the “okey dokes,” and I think Black Lives Matter was a big part of that.

Q: I really appreciate your magnanimous online presence. You consistently encourage others to acknowledge that people evolve and no one doing progressive political work comes to it fully formed. How did you get there?

Garza: I can tell you about the work I was doing in Bayview, San Francisco, with families who were being impacted severely by environmental racism and gentrification and displacement in a city that really wanted black people to go away. I can tell you that I organized with families whose kids had asthma and had nosebleeds three to four times a week because they lived next to a toxic site that the city didn’t decide to clean until they wanted to build on it. I can tell you that I worked with families who lived in public housing who had their houses raided weekly by gang task forces who would show up in multicolored camo gear and bust down people’s doors and completely terrorize them and their families.

I sat in community meetings with people, as we were fighting to get repairs happening inside of public housing, where city officials would literally say things like: “Well, if y’all would stop pouring chicken grease down the sinks, then your plumbing wouldn’t get backed up,” rather than acknowledging that there has been no major overhaul of the plumbing or sewage systems there since the 1950s.

I don’t believe that “Republican” or “Democrat” has really any salience right now. I actually think that the categories are, do you believe everybody should live in dignity, or do you not?

They’re the people who taught me what it means to be generous with each other, for the sake of each other. Because when there’s no help coming to you, you’ve got to help yourself. And part of helping yourself in those kinds of conditions really involves reorganizing what you think about who is deserving and who is not. Because you don’t have the luxury of cutting people out or cutting people off, and you’re all you’ve got.

And so I carry that with me all the time. I think for this generation, our conundrum is to learn how to disagree with dignity. Our conundrum is to learn how to disagree and still walk forward together while also acknowledging that there are some things that are non-negotiable.

Ultimately, the thing I come back to every time is, “Who do we need to change what’s happening in this country?” And the reality is, we need everybody. Earlier, I said I don’t believe that “Republican” or “Democrat” has really any salience right now. I actually think that the categories are, do you believe everybody should live in dignity, or do you not? And when you use that metric, you’ll realize that your team can actually be much more vast than you could ever imagine.