Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson on Wednesday said he will vote for Hillary Clinton, even though he said he does “not agree with Clinton on everything.”
In a post for the Washington Post, Mckesson — who also was a Baltimore mayoral candidate this year — wrote that the former secretary of state’s “platform signals both deep understanding of the challenges and a plan to move us forward.”
“When I met with her last week, it was clear that she now understands these issues well at a policy level and that she has researched the implications of the positions that she has proposed,” Mckesson wrote. “In this meeting, she spoke both about the context of change and the concrete actions necessary to open new pathways of equity and justice.”
Mckesson also called Clinton’s racial justice platform a strong one because “it is informed by the policy failings of the past and is a vision for where we need to go.” He also complimented her economic plan, which he likened to a $125 billion “New Deal” that will invest in “youth employment, re-entry, small business growth and homeownership.”
Mckesson called on Clinton to end the death penalty as well as a federal government policy that allows police to seize money and property from people who have never been convicted of a crime.
“But elections do have consequences,” he wrote, calling her rival Donald Trump someone “who campaigns expressly on moving backward from today.”
“I often hear some of my peers say that they may not vote, that a Donald Trump presidency would bring about a productive apocalypse — that the system would grind to a halt and force us to confront everything that is wrong with the system,” he wrote. “But we know that the system will not come to a grinding halt; it never has. In a Trump administration, the system would surely grind us, black and brown folks, even more than it already does.”
