Focus on women of color at a forum of candidates

Enter the She the People Presidential Forum, hosted in Houston on Wednesday by the political group She the People. Eight of the 19 Democratic candidates spoke at the event, which was billed as the first presidential forum for women of color and drew an audience of more than 1,000 people. The topics ranged from voting rights to health care, and the questions came exclusively from women of color — who make up about one-fifth of the primary electorate and more in some key states, said Aimee Allison, the group’s founder and president.

“The broad thing I was hoping to do was to get a sense for the competency and comfort that each candidate had talking about racial, gender and economic justice,” Allison said in an interview after the event. “Are they even comfortable talking about it, and can they engender trust?”

Sens. Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Bernie Sanders all spoke, as did Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, and the former housing secretary Julián Castro. But the star of the afternoon was Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who received a standing ovation and was singled out by multiple attendees afterward. They cited the specificity and thoroughness of Warren’s answers — a hallmark of her campaign — starting from the first question, which concerned maternal mortality.

After noting that maternal mortality is increasing in the United States and that black women are three to four times more likely than white women to die in childbirth, Warren described a plan to tie hospitals’ reimbursements to their patient outcomes.

Instead of the current “fee for services” model, in which hospitals itemize charges, Warren proposed a model of lump sums for specific procedures. “And if they bring down those maternal mortality rates, then they get a bonus,” she said, “and if they don’t, they’re going to have money taken away from them.”

Warren “hit it out of the park, to be honest,” said Alia Salem, the founder of Facing Abuse in Community Environments and former executive director of the Dallas/Fort Worth chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “She spoke with a lot of specificity, she had plans for everything, and I didn’t see anybody respond to the other candidates the way they responded to her.”

Allison praised Castro, too, for the specificity of his remarks. Castro — who began by pointing out, to laughter, that the organizers had mistakenly used a photo of his twin brother, Rep. Joaquin Castro, in the program — called for property tax relief and more affordable housing to protect people of color in gentrifying neighborhoods. He also discussed universal prekindergarten, a major element of his platform.

Sanders, who is polling well ahead of any of the other candidates at Wednesday’s event, received a mixed reception.

Salem said she saw him as authentic, contrasting him and Warren to several of the other candidates, who she said seemed to be reading from a playbook on “how to speak on issues that are important to women of color.” But after an enthusiastic greeting, Sanders seemed to lose the crowd somewhat. He did not discuss many policy details, and when asked what he would do for women of color as president, he talked instead about helping marginalized groups in general.

“For a lot of women of color, the challenge is we’ve heard that before,” Allison said. “If you don’t specifically call out those who are most marginalized, often we’re forgotten.”

Several candidates were asked about criminal justice and the so-called “war on drugs,” which has disproportionately affected people of color. Harris, a former prosecutor, focused on this issue in particular, calling for the legalization of marijuana and saying laws against it had “contributed to the problem of mass incarceration in our country and led disproportionately to the criminalization of young black and brown men in this country.”

Klobuchar, also a former prosecutor, was asked about a different element of law enforcement: police killings of black people. After saying that she had supported the prosecution of the officer who killed Philando Castile in Minnesota, her home state, she called for more funding for police training; said police departments and grand juries should “reflect the communities that we serve”; and argued that police departments should not be able to run the investigations of their own officers.

Allison praised that answer, but added that Klobuchar had seemed “unprepared” for one question that every candidate was asked: With so many candidates to choose from, why should women of color choose you?

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, who was the first candidate to speak, received his biggest applause for noting that climate change is already disproportionately affecting poor communities and people of color. He also denounced President Donald Trump’s attacks toward Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of the first Muslim women in Congress, who has reported an increase in death threats since Trump began targeting her.

“What Donald Trump has been saying about her is reprehensible, it is trafficking in Islamophobia, and it should be condemned by everyone,” Booker said, adding that the president’s language was fueling the far-right attacks that have been the most common type of terrorism in the United States since 9/11.

O’Rourke, meanwhile, focused on immigration, pointing to his home city, El Paso, Texas, which Trump has cited as an emblem of disorder. El Paso is actually one of the safest large cities in the country, O’Rourke said, adding: “That safety is not despite the fact that we are a city of immigrants and asylum-seekers and refugees. It is because we are a city of immigrants and asylum-seekers and refugees.”

And Gabbard, who drew criticism early in the race for her past views on gay rights, said she wanted to repeal Trump’s ban on transgender service members. She also denounced “regime change” wars and said, in response to a question about Syria, that the United States could not continue to be “the policeman of the world.”

As the last segment — Warren’s — wrapped up, the moderators brought up something of an elephant in the 2020 room: the sense among some Democrats, after the experience of 2016, that Americans are not ready to elect a woman.

“We’ve got a roomful of people here who weren’t given anything. We have a roomful of people here who had to fight for what they believe in,” Warren responded. “Are we going to show up for people that we didn’t actually believe in because we were too afraid to do anything else? That’s not who we are. That’s not how we’re going to do this.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.