“If You Wanna See Change, It’s Up To You”
posted by Keyona Smith | November 23, 2019 | In NewsOn October 28, White House correspondent and CNN political analyst April Ryan approached an audience in room 242 of the Rudolph Jones Student Center here at Fayetteville State University to encourage college students to exercise their right to vote and explain why the outcome of this particular election depends heavily on it.
“I cannot overemphasize how important it is for us to vote, especially in our community,” started Ryan from the podium at the center of the room.
She emphasized our history and why the stakes are so high, pointing to the current commander-in-chief of the United States of America. Careful not to concentrate on the negativity of the previous election, she chose to evoke an inspiration to continue to create change as our predecessors have done before us.
Looking back through history, Ryan said: “The stakes are so high. At the end of the day, too many people had the bite of the dog break the flesh of their skin for my right to vote.”
The 2015 NAACP Image award nominee, and 2019 honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. believes that we may have become a little too comfortable sfter the election of the first African American president. Ryan highlighted the fact that numbers have been against us in the past, despite the type of change we were able to band together and create in the era of President Barack Obama. In the African American community, we have the highest numbers of negatives in almost every category, such as the being incarcerated at 5 times the rate of whites, according to the NAACP, and being concentrated in schools that spend an average of $733 less per student per year than mostly white schools, according to the Center for American Progress, but those numbers don’t necessarily reflect who we are, where we are or from whence we come.
Ultimately, the responsibility is on the voter and the believer. Ryan touched on the fact that her eldest daughter was coming of age, learning to drive and attaining the big responsibility that follows, which is the power of voting and exercising the right to choose who represents your country and how your country will be run.
Ryan left everyone in the audience with powerful questions to consider when researching or selecting your candidates: “What areas can affect you? How can the candidate help you? How can the candidate positively affect my healthcare, my housing situation and education?”
Following such a powerful move, she urged that we hold the politicians accountable. “Politics is personal, not cerebral,” ended Ryan.
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