Meet the Black Woman Candidate Who'll Talk to Men in Confederate-Flag T-shirts
By Joan Walsh
TODAY 1:16 PM
Stafford County, Virginia — Under a dazzling purple-and-orange sunset at the Stafford County Fair last weekend, Jennifer Carroll Foy, a candidate for the state House of Delegates, strolled confidently toward a skinny young white man wearing a Confederate-flag "Don't tread on me" T-shirt. One of the first black female graduates of the Virginia Military Institute, Carroll Foy was there to ask for his vote. The man looked stunned as she approached, while his wife seemed mildly curious. And then Carroll Foy was really there — smiling, standing tall, handing out literature, explaining why she was running to represent the good people of Virginia’s Second District.
But first she had to figure out if the couple actually lived in her district. Even explaining where her district begins and ends proved complicated, as every district in the state has been distorted by GOP gerrymandering. Virginia's Second District, for example, pulls in only half of Stafford County; the rest is in Prince William County. The couple stared at her, confused and silent. Then the man broke the spell by saying, No, they didn’t live in her district. He looked down at the ground, while his wife, carrying a toddler, awkwardly thanked Carroll Foy.
The very fact that Carroll Foy even attempted to reach a man in a Confederate T-shirt — just 95 miles away from where white supremacists menaced counter-protesters and where one of them murdered Heather Heyer with his car two months earlier — felt like a victory of sorts. A victory for showing up in the age of Donald Trump, for standing your ground, asserting your equality — and our common humanity — whether that young man believes in it or not ...
On the October Saturday I visited Carroll Foy's campaign .. there was no visible enthusiasm problem. Every few hours, a new crew of at least a dozen canvassers showed up at a staging location, a corner home in the diverse Port Potomac neighborhood of Woodbridge, where they picked up maps and literature about Carroll Foy, as well as the whole Democratic ticket, and set out to knock on doors to identify Democratic voters and get them to commit to voting on November 7. The time for persuasion had mostly passed. Now the main job was to reach out to registered Democrats and/or people the campaign had already identified as Carroll Foy supporters ...
https://www.thenation.com/article/meet-the-black-woman-candidate-wholl-talk-to-men-in-confederate-flag-t-shirts/
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This is the kind of outreach needed across the country.
