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The Real Empowerment

It was a grueling process. For over a month, we sat through more than eight hours of editorial board meetings a week to figure out what was going on with this year’s ballot — enduring monotonous speaker-phone interviewees who listed accomplishments for 25 minutes, overly-defensive homeless activists, endless packets of campaign propaganda and enough political spin to power an amusement park ride. The height of it might have been the District 6 endorsement meeting, when candidate James Leo Dunn responded to a question about how he would meet the needs of the Tenderloin’s large Southeast Asian population by flicking me off with both hands and, in effect, telling me to go back to my own country.

But here we are: four pages of recommendations to take to the ballot box. There were some really tough choices and in some cases, my arguments just couldn’t win over AsianWeek’s editorial board. For example, District 6 candidate Roger Gordon — the executive director of a local non-profit with Indo-Caribbean roots and what seemed like a true understanding of the city — was neck-to-neck with our final pick, Burke Strunsky. In District 4, Fiona Ma has the personal endorsement of a number of AsianWeek staffers due to her experience and dedication to the community.

But some important state props were agreed on across the board, i.e., Prop 52 — same day voter registration. In fact, a coalition of ethnic media across the state has come together to stand behind this initiative that will, if passed, increase voter turnout 3 to 6 percent. And that is what it’s all about in the end. Here at AsianWeek, beyond the politics of endorsements, the idea of empowering our community to take a real part in the democratic process is the principle that this paper was founded on.

What is painfully apparent is that, as diverse and as empowered as our community is, we need to be more involved politically. There should be APAs running in all the districts and for all the offices, especially at the state level. Not only that, but the majority of campaign managers, lobbyists and political hacks that talked at us in all those meetings were white men. The real empowerment will come when we are represented both on stage and in the wings.