POLITICS
Gay Progressive Offers Working Class Albany Vision
Democratic socialist public school teacher running for State Senate in Brooklyn
BY MATT TRACY
Up until the very moment
his interview with Gay
City News took place,
out gay Brooklyn State
Senate candidate Jabari Brisport
was plugging away at numbers
on his laptop. But the 32-yearold
Democratic Socialist of America
endorsed progressive wasn’t
crunching data for his campaign.
He was working overtime for his
students.
Brisport spends his days as
a public school math teacher at
Medgar Evers College Preparatory
School, and after the fi nal bell he
morphs into an energetic political
candidate hungry to take on
the most pressing issues facing
working class communities in the
25th State Senate District, which
encompasses all or parts of Fort
Greene, Boerum Hill, Red Hook,
Bedford-Stuyvesant, Sunset Park,
Gowanus, and Park Slope. He’s
running an historic campaign —
he would be the fi rst out LGBTQ
Black member of the State Legislature
— on a platform dedicated to
strengthening public schools, addressing
gentrifi cation and homelessness,
implementing single-payer
healthcare, fully decriminalizing
sex work, maintaining bail reform
advances, and legalizing marijuana
— that last in a way that prioritizes
the communities of color
that have long been on the losing
end of the war on drugs. Those are
among the progressive ideas Brisport
emphasizes most.
And at a time when at least one
billionaire is pumping hundreds of
millions of his own dollars into a
political campaign, Brisport is positioning
himself as the antidote to
that: He says he isn’t taking corporate
donations or cash from real
estate developers, landlords, lobbyists,
charter schools, or the fossil
fuel industry.
It’s Brisport’s second go-around
on the political circuit after mounting
an unsuccessful general election
bid for City Council in 2017
against incumbent City Councilmember
Laurie Cumbo, though
Jabari Brisport, seen here with Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, hopes he can build on his
2017 race for the City Council in a primary bid for the State Senate in Brooklyn.
he still managed to snag more
than 9,300 votes as a Green Party
candidate.
This time around, Brisport isn’t
facing an incumbent. The current
state senator representing that
district, Velmanette Montgomery,
is retiring after her term to close
out more than three decades in
offi ce, setting up a wide open primary.
Brisport’s main competitors
in the race include Jason Salmon,
a former aide to Montgomery, and
State Assemblymember Tremaine
Wright.
“I’m a working class candidate,”
Brisport said during an interview
with Gay City News at the Center
for Fiction in Fort Greene. “I wake
up every morning at 5:30 and I’m
out the door by 7 a.m. to make
sure our students have the best
possible education they can get. I
go in there knowing they may be
housing-unstable or haven’t eaten
breakfast that day, or they might
have a home that they don’t feel
loved in.”
After work is over, his night job
FACEBOOK/ JABARI BRISPORT
begins. Brisport is a part of a wave
of progressive politicians who were
inspired by Vermont Senator Bernie
Sanders’ 2016 insurgent campaign
for president when he emerged as
a formidable challenger to former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
and won 23 contests on a platform
that, even in defeat, prioritized social
justice issues and helped move
the Democratic Party to the left.
Brisport was front-and-center during
the aftermath of the 2016 election,
working alongside Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez to help her clinch
an astonishing upset victory over
Queens Democratic Party boss Joe
Crowley in the NY-14 Democratic
primary.
“I am a Democratic Socialist because
of Bernie Sanders,” Brisport
said. “I knew America was racist
but I didn’t realize that capitalism
and race were so intertwined
until 2016 when it dawned on me
that capitalism is why people were
brought to the United States as
capital and sold on open markets
as a commodity, and I realized that
capitalism commodifi es things that
shouldn’t be commodifi ed. How do
you put a price tag on insulin if
you’re a diabetic?”
There are reasons why ideas in
Brisport’s wing of the party are
gaining traction. Both Obamacare
and employer-sponsored private
healthcare plans are often so expensive
that individuals are resorting
to online fundraisers to pay for
routine procedures or life-saving
medical needs; public schools are
gasping for air in the face of funding
shortages; and rent costs make
it diffi cult or impossible for many
to make ends meet, especially for
individuals saddled with tens of
thousands — or hundreds of thousands
— in student loan debt.
Should he be elected, Brisport
plans to be a champion for a broad
slate of initiatives including the
New York Health Act, which is the
state-specifi c version of single-payer,
and he is stressing the important
role that system would play
in bolstering HIV/ AIDS-related
treatment and prevention and providing
gender-affi rming care. In
the area of housing, he supports
Brooklyn Senator Julia Salazar’s
Good Cause bill that would limit
rent hikes in unregulated units
and place certain restrictions on
landlords trying to evict tenants.
Brisport is also prioritizing education
because he has fi rst-hand
insight into the realities public
schools face when they are cashstrapped.
“My stance on charter schools
is pretty cut and dry,” Brisport explained.
“I’m a union public school
teacher. I see charter schools for
what they are, which are an attempt
to drain funding away from
our public school system slowly but
surely to make it privatized even
further. It’s a conservative tactic
that has been done for decades.”
Brisport’s activism took off
more than a decade ago when he
immersed himself in the fi ght for
marriage equality in New York. He
recalls dialing his state legislators
and encouraging all of his friends
➤ JABARI BRISPORT, continued on p.7
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