Kerry: “Addicted” – I love it. There are worse things to get addicted to than building democracy. Miss LaTosha Brown, what about you? Your aha moment.
LaTosha Braun: It is interesting. I’m sitting here pondering the question and I don’t know if I have an answer to an aha moment in the sense that I think there were multiple moments. I was brought to work because I love people. Two things have shaped me – this deep love for life and for people and then this pronounced feeling for injustice. I never liked seeing people use power against people who were powerless
I keep telling people that my job is not about elections. It’s about how are we going to restore or reclaim our humanity? And for me, voting is an expression of that. Every single person should have the right to influence decisions about their life, and that’s why I basically believe that. I want the world to be better.
Kerry: You won’t make me cry today
All: I love it.
Kerry: Nsé, what about you?
All: Like LaTosha, I have the feeling that I have always been a precocious child who felt things very deeply and had a strong sense of “this is not right”. I didn’t know if I could do anything about it, but you will hear me say something because I don’t like what I see!
Look, I’m an immigrant child from a working-class family; [the daughter of] a single parent from Nigeria. They don’t play games. I got my first D in organic chemistry during my junior year in college and was prior to medical school. I thought, “All right, so I’m going to be murdered.” I didn’t feel like I had many career opportunities, but the truth was, I did. It was the summer of 2001. I had promised a sisterhood. I had a little friend. And I’d done an internship at CNN for the summer. [The network was] about the World Conference Against Racism, and that’s how I spent the summer in Durban, South Africa. I have met so many lawyers who did not practice law. There were communicators, there were fundraisers, there were graphic designers. It felt like, “Oh, this could be something I could do to keep my family happy, but also get paid or find a way to support myself to do the job that gets me is very important; the democracy work that is important to me, the justice work that is important to me. “
LaTosha Brown in an Eloquii dress
