021724 Qasim Rashid—Author, Activist, and Attorney Running for Illinois 11th Congressional District (Part 2)

very special guest with us today on Civic Cipher. The man goes by the name of Kassim Rashid and he is an actor, an author, activist, and attorney who is running for Illinois eleventh Congressional District and a social media constantly viral social media presence who uses his social media platforms for activism the kind that you would know and love. Welcome back with us. We certainly have a lot more to talk about, and again it is an honor to have you on the show today, Sir.

allied businesses as well as make an impact with your spending. Again, that's Fotmglobal dot com. And today we're going to talk about Erica Gaines, who is the president and CEO of a company called TAC.

number one cop killer in America. With inadequate clinical research to pull from, in twenty nineteen, Erica created the world's most extensive ongoing study of law enforcement officers and cumulative stress arm with data in twenty twenty Erica created a four hour Peace Officers Standards and Training post training course accredited through the National Certification Program developed by the International

Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training. The training program and fiscally sponsored nonprofit tax Mobility, Controlling the Mind and the Machine offers stress and trauma awareness, rehabilitative stretching, and self awareness to police officers in the United States.

become a better ally and give her some support. All right, seem it has been a pleasure to get to know you, sir. You were everything that I was expecting. And now let's shift gears here and let's talk about your campaign. What makes you different from your opponent Bill Foster.

that's your thing, okay. But on policy we see a massive contrast. I'm fighting for guaranteed universal healthcare. He is heavily funded by the health insurance companies and refuses universal healthcare. He's a pro for profit kind of guy. I'm taking the climate crisis seriously and calling for twenty to thirty carbon neutrality. He's shooting for twenty fifty, which scientists tallis is too late. He's pro fracking, pro drilling, pro Exxon,

pro carbon capture, which is a debunk technology. On civil rights, I think civil rights are sacred. I strongly support HR forty, the bill to study reparations. I strongly support ending the George W. Bush Patriot Act, which has been used to conduct wantless searches on US citizens over the last twenty years, disproportionately black and brown people. I strongly support protecting disability rights.

He voted a strip down disability rights. I strongly support ending AID that has been used by the Israeli government to detain Palestinian children. He refuses to co sponsor that bill. Let's talk bank regulations. While I'm a human rights lawyer, I did spend four years working on bank regulatory compliance. It is as boring as it sounds, but it's also

so critical to protect consumers. I gave him credit for voting for dot Frank in two thousand and eight, but then he decided to vote Donald Trump to deregulate banks, and I think that was a terrible vote. It also helped enable the bank collapse we saw last year. I take the opiate crisis seriously. I've lost love ones to the opiate crisis. He is funded to the two of a half million dollars in the same companies like Walgreens who are causing the opiate crisis. You can google the

article right now. Walgreens just settled a two hundred and thirty million dollar lawsuit for enabling mass deaf via illegal opiate prescriptions. The list just goes on and on, but fundamentally, the difference between Bill Foster and I comes down to this principle. Every vote and policy decision I make is based on what the facts tell us and what will benefit working families. Every vote and policy he takes depends on whether a corporation is funding him for that vote

or not. And I gave some examples earlier where you can see him vote the right way, take corporate money, and then vote the wrong way. You know, in law school teach you that you recuse yourself if there's a conflict of interest, and you recuse yourself when there's even

a perception of a conflict of interest. And so I want voters to know that by supporting my campaign and by electing me, they will know that every vote I make will be one hundred percent and exclusively accountable to what working people need us to do as elected officials. This is why I think he has been hesitant is probably too generous of a word even to show up

to debate. He committed to three canceled all three, showed up last minute to a fourth one, and then midway through, just thirty minutes into it, gets up that says I have to be somewhere else and just left the debate midway through. It was extremely shocking for me, But this is what I mean. We are ready to not only defend our record, but make the argument on facts and science as to why our platform is better aligned with

the needs of working people. Bill Foster wants voters to vote for a record that even he isn't willing to defend. So it's no wonder to me that that's showing up, because if I had a record like his, I wouldn't show up either.

birthday party to get to on Saturday. Those people that live day to day lives for those people who make up the fabric of this country to not be heard, and to then have a candidate come up and say, hey, listen, I'm listening to you, and the incumbent will not debate me again, that word cowardice comes into play, and I know you mentioned the reasons for that, as did I. You know, there's there's money in politics, and there's.

who say I need to do this forever. So I need to make sure that I keep the money moving and I keep you know, enough support from enough people to where it doesn't look like I'm as corrupt or as morally compromised or indeed morally bankrupt as I truthfully am. And this is true not just for Republicans, but this is true in all of politics. And so that's one of the things that at least I found frustrating with respect to your back and forth with Bill Foster because

that was something that I was hoping to see. And the truth is, I don't even live in Illinois. It just is something that was necessary. So you know your response and then we'll move on.

I mean, I think he knows that. And you know, we made a commitment at the start of this campaign that we are going to be unassailable, meaning every critique we make will be on policy. I'm not gonna mustling, I'm not going to name call. At an event a couple of nights ago, he flat out called me a liar. And what's unfortunate about that is is one I think is beneath the dignity of politics, because he didn't give

any examples of what I'm misrepresented because he can't. But more importantly, it's one thing to not show up to defend your record. It's another thing to then just say, well, he's lying without any explanation or excuse. I don't think the American people appreciate that. And I'm not going to respond in kind. I'm not going to call him names. I just I think people are sick and tired of the divisiveness. I think they want adults in the room

making these decisions. And I will say this. You know I'm not running for money or power, or fame or prestige. There's a reason why our campaign slogans justice can't wait. When you think about the you know, the person who's suffering from asthma under the climate crisis, we can't tell them to wait till twenty fifty. When you talk about the fact that Black Americans are arrested seven times the rate of white Americans despite having lower crime rates, you

can't tell them wait a little bit longer. You talk about the woman who has breast cancer and can't get treatment, or the woman who needs reproductive healthcare but doesn't have access, you can't tell them to wait we need to act now. And you earlier you asked me, what's the difference between me and Bill Foster. You know, he admits that he didn't even get involved into politics until well into his fifties, when he had already made tens of millions of dollars.

It must be nice to have that kind of privilege. I grew up wondering where my next meal was going to come from. I knew from an early age that I needed to be actively engaged in the community here and now, and I consider it by distinct privilege that from a low income background, I'm at a place where my wife Eishin and I are doing well enough for ourselves. But we see these issues of wealth and income inequality

worse now than the word thirty years ago. The climate crisis worse now, the opiate crisis is worse now, race relations worse now, and that's not going to be fixed by delaying and saying it will come in due time. We need to be active and deliberate now to make it happen now.

been rebranded as critical race theory. What are your thoughts on the recent attacks on critical race theory and would you do what would you do if you could do anything to impact what's going on with respect to CRT in this country, well at least in Illinois.

It's not about saying, hey, you white person individually, you're racist. That's a nonsensical way of looking at it. But I go even a step further and say, if you think teaching children about America's history of racism will shame white kids, then you need to answer a question, because yes, white people were enslavers, but there are also white people who

are abolitionists like John Brown. If you think teaching about America's history of racism will shame white children, you need to answer why you think those kids will associate more with the enslavers that with John Brown, you're projecting, you're telling on yourself at that stage of the game. And so for me, this is about understanding history in a

way that is constructive, that doesn't beat anyone down. That's never been the point of history is to understand why things happen the way they happen, and how we prevent

them from happening again in the future. And I've long said one of the reasons why we're here today in the country is because unlike South Africa, for example, or unlike even Germany, which I'm not going to hold either country as some beacon of tolerance and prosperity, however, both those countries had a history lesson to reconcile the history of aart conversation about it exactly, and it's actively taught

in their schools. We've never had a reckoning for the genericide of Native Americans, or for the enslavement and mass murder and trafficking of Africans and non African Americans, or the interment and concentration camps of Japanese and Jactans, reckoning for the outright ban on Asian immigration, or the lynching that black and Latino Americans went through. None of that. Actually there was no reparations paid. I mean, for God's sake, Tulsa survivors are still with us in a court role

that they are not qualified for reparations. So until and unless we can have some kind of reckoning in that space with actual monetary value transferred to those who've been marginalized, I don't know if we're going to be able to truly heal race relations in this country. However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to work towards that space and build capacity so that this younger generation knows that they control the reins into the future and they can bring

about those changes. You know, justice delayed is justice denied, But that doesn't mean that we prevent justice from being implemented in the future. It can still happen if we go after it aggressively.

year she's sixty nine years old. And so for the folks that really push back against again, we're going to call it what it is, American history, the teaching of American history in the you know, K through twelve grades that has been rebranded as CRT. For those folks that push back against that, there's often a sense of shame is that they associated with it that, as you mentioned, may not necessarily translate to their children. They may not identify as the rock throwers in the story. They might

identify as an entirely separate group of people. And this is the way that my youth, you know, because I learned all this stuff, that's the way I thought about it, and I saw, you know, my non black classmates responding to it. So that's a very interesting perspective. I'm also appreciative of how you connected that with the conversation about reparations,

because again by not having that racial reckoning. We covered something recently on the show here it might have been two or three weeks ago, where we talked about the different reparations that were paid in this country to Native Americans, to in slavers or loss of property, to you know, Japanese Americans, to reparations paid to the descendants of the people in the Holocaust and the people who were in the Holocaust, and you know, and they had the total,

we had the total of the amount paid by the government, you know, and adjusted for you know, inflation and you know how money works. And then it got down to the bottom the reparations paid to Black Americans, and that was zero dollars. And when you look at it in terms of the actual harm done just by the act of slavery by itself, it's it's immeasurable. But even if we take slavery out of the equation, on this show,

we discuss everything that followed that. We discuss everything from you know, the black Codes and Jim Crow and the civil rights movement to redlining to the War on drugs too, as you mentioned, you know, over policing, disproportionate arrest rates, judicial sentencing, you know, on and on and on and and and then you know, more recently we're finding out the impacts of environmental racism, how that factors into healthcare

outcomes for black and brown people in this country. And so it's just a very interesting segue to go from why folks are banning CRTA and why we need to push back against that to the conversation about economic restorative justice or you know, in truth.

people combined. I mean, just statistically speaking, because it's not just about education. It's also in the workforce as well. And women. You know, until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of nineteen seventy four, women didn't have basic economic access in this country, white or black. Two. Affirmative action was never about admitting unqualified black people. It was about ensuring that qualified black people also got access considered. Yeah, I

mean and basic consideration. People talking about unqualified people getting admission. That's not affirm redaction, that's legacy admissions. A recent study benefits white folks exactly because legacy admissions is if your grandfather went into Harvard and during Jim Crow and black people weren't allowed, you get automatic admission or you get

preferential treatment of a reason. Study showed that forty three percent of white admittance to Harvard university were legacy admissions, and three quarters of them would not have qualified on their own merit, and so to the comparison, it's like a ten x factor. So even if you go with the incredulous argument that affirmative action admitted unqualified people, even with that ridiculous argument, the number of white people getting admission through legacy is ten x that. But you never

heard anybody complain about that. That's a non issue. The issue is this misperception that a black person got admission. And then look, I think fundamentally it also speaks to just this the systemic racism that we're facing here.

out to us. Let's get involved. And if you're in the district in Illinois or in the northern Illinois area and you're looking for some extra work, we're starting camus like twenty dollars an hour, paying a decent way to get folks engaged. So get get involved, get engaged. Let's let's win this election because why because justice can't wait.

dot com check out anything that you missed. Of course, you can download this in any previous episodes We sure to follow us on social media, and until next week you'll pea