CAR Office of Advocacy

OFFICE OF ADVOCACY

Working together, everyone can become an advocate.

We are at a critical moment in our country’s history.

It’s clear that no single person, organization, or sector working in isolation will solve all of the issues that perpetuate and maintain racism in our society today.

In order to envision and construct an antiracist society, we must be intentional about building connections across sectors, disciplines, issues, and locations.

To do so, the Center’s Office of Advocacy cultivates and equips an interconnected ecosystem of racial justice advocates to build a society that meets everyone’s needs.

The Office of Advocacy strengthens antiracist efforts across the country and propels the Center’s mission to dismantle systemic racism through these initiatives: • Through the American Antiracist Society, we are connecting organizations, institutions, and individuals across the country to advocate and work together on antiracist initiatives. Inspired by the American

Anti-Slavery Society, which was a leading force in the abolition movement, members of the Antiracist Society will be able to harness the Center’s broad range of research, narrative, and policy tools to create racial change in their local communities.

• The Antiracist Campaign Tracker is a centralized database of antiracist advocacy campaigns across the country. This gives us a greater understanding of how and why different antiracist campaigns are most effective, and it allows us to capture practices in real time that can benefit advocacy and movementbuilding organizations as they scale and create impact.

• To connect antiracist work happening on the ground to academic research, we offer community-driven advocacy research support to grassroots partners that are members of the American Antiracist Society, amplifying movement-building efforts and advancing the broader field of racial justice organizing.

By supporting the Center’s Office of Advocacy, you will help us galvanize antiracist advocacy and empower local communities to make racial change.

> AMERICAN ANTIRACIST SOCIETY: FOUNDING PARTNERS • Demos • Alliance for a Just Society • Race Forward • SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) • Black Voters Matter • Native Organizers Alliance • PolicyLink

> EXPLORING THE POWER OF “THE OTHER SWING VOTER”

Each election cycle, campaigns invest much time and many resources gathering data on swing voters: center-right or center-left voters who are typically white and older. In partnership with Black Voters Matter and other voting rights groups, the Center for Antiracist Research will conduct an in-depth research study aimed at gathering data and deepening our collective understanding of the “Other Swing Voter”—a concept popularized by Dr. Kendi in The Atlantic. Unlike non-voters who rarely if ever vote, “Other Swing Voters” swing between voting in some elections and not voting (or voting third party) in others. These voters are most likely to be people of color, young people, and especially young Black and Latinx voters.

We plan to conduct research to assess this critical demographic’s conceptions of power, through the lens of voting rights. The findings will offer an entry point into a larger conversation about how power operates in this country, people’s ideas of how much power they do (or don’t) have, and our collective vision of how power should operate in society. This will help inform organizing efforts across the country, for voting rights and beyond.