Rutland City Alderwoman Lisa Ryan says she’s still traumatized by a meme that fellow Alderman Paul Clifford posted to his Facebook page last summer.Â
It depicted a photo of low-income white children, with the caption “White privilege: The ability to suffer life’s universal indignities without blaming another ethnic group.” Ryan said the post, and the comments that followed that she said targeted her directly, deeply affected her.
“I suffered emotionally, psychologically, physically,” said Ryan, who is the only person of color on Rutland’s board.
She was one of the members who garnered backlash for challenging the meme publicly for dismissing racial inequities. “I didn’t trust anyone. I wasn’t comfortable being in chambers with the people I was serving the community with. I became paranoid.”
Ryan recalled the story on a Zoom call Thursday night with fellow Vermont politicians and activists. The call mimicked a virtual roundtable and aimed to give advice and resources to other minorities who were thinking about running for office in Vermont “in an era of rampant hate crimes.”
The call was organized by Kiah Morris, the newly appointed movement politics director for left-leaning nonprofit Rights & Democracy Vermont. Morris is a former state representative, and was the only black woman serving in Vermont’s Legislature. But she rescinded her seat in 2018 because of consistent racist harassment.
Now she’s working to make sure other candidates of marginalized backgrounds don’t face the same bullying she did, or at least make sure they have the resources to survive it.
“I was getting individuals, people of color, folks from the LGBTQIA community, folks from various religious identities, who say I want to run for office but I’m worried … about my safety,” Morris told attendees on the call. “There are individuals who want to run, who want to step into this work … with deep concerns about their own safety.”
“That might be the piece that keeps someone, a qualified candidate, from stepping forward,” Morris added. “And we cannot have that.”
Burlington City Councilor Ali Dieng shared stories about harassment he’s faced as a black man on the council. At one point, Dieng said he had a serial harasser who would send him frequent messages “swearing” about his “race and accent.” When this person began threatening Dieng’s family members, that’s when he went to the Burlington police.
Eventually, he was able to get a restraining order against him.
“It started to really affect me emotionally,” Dieng said. “I asked the city to leave a police car on my street.”
Reps. Emilie Kornheiser, D-Brattleboro, and Diana Gonzalez, P-Winooski, also joined in on the call. While both said they haven’t experienced severe instances of harassment, they both take precautions to keep themselves safe as a public figure.
Kornheiser, who is Jewish, said she has a separate landline she uses as a public number for constituent calls. She also said she has a “really big and really scary” dog. She said her family was deeply affected by the Holocaust, so she’s always had a fear that someone was “coming for” her.
Gonzalez said she uses a post office box for mail so that her home address isn’t publicly available. And while Gonzalez said she hasn’t experienced harassment or stalking, she still fears it could happen, especially because of her identity as a queer, latinx woman.
Many spoke about how important it is to have support systems they could turn to.
“Commit and be with people who care about you,” Ryan said. “Know who your allies are.”
Attendees also heard from Jessica Robinson, a security expert and founder of Pure Point International, a firm that specializes in security for women and women-owned businesses. Robinson spoke about the importance of cybersecurity and having varying, secure passwords for all social media accounts.
She also instructed attendees to invest in a VPN, a virtual private network, which protects an internet connection from being traced and potentially hacked on the web. She said that if any activist or political hopeful receives threatening or harassing messages online, they should always document the harassment in case it’s needed later as evidence in a case.
Morris said she thinks there are many barriers keeping marginalized people from running for office in Vermont, beyond safety concerns. She said pay for lawmakers is too low — Vermont lawmakers make about $14,000 a year — and inaccessible to those who are low income or have another job with a work schedule that doesn’t fit into the session calendar.
“As individuals who are already pressed to the margins, do they have visibility within their community in the ways that those who do not have barriers in front of them might have?” Morris said. “They may not be the most well known business owner but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been doing much in their community.”
Rights & Democracy will continue holding trainings specifically catered to those who are interested in running for office who have marginalized backgrounds, Morris said. She said the organization will also be reinvigorating its endorsement qualifications for candidates.
That means candidates who have been endorsed by the organization before might not get the same support for Rights & Democracy this year, she said. Candidates will be asked about how their work and votes have furthered social, economic and racial justice issues that the nonprofit supports, Morris said.
For Morris, candidates will be challenged with a core question: “Are you building an awareness and building a muscle memory around understanding the nuances of how these policies truly create disparate outcomes when voices are not at the table?”