“To make change you have to bring large issues into the context of people’s daily lives:” Interview with Daphne Frias
The original interviews I did for Youth to Power were longer than could fit in my book, but I wanted to share the valuable information with you all. These interviews will be up online as a permanent, free resource for people, young people in particular, looking for inspiration.
— Jamie Margolin
Daphne Frias (she/her), 22, is a county committee representative; climate justice and disability rights, gun violence prevention, racial justice, and anti-gentrification activist, and the founder of Box the Ballot.
Jamie Margolin: What is your story — how did you become an activist and politician?
Daphne: As a disabled woman of color, I have always been an activist because I have always had to advocate for myself. I have cerebral palsy and I’ve been disabled since birth, so I’ve had to push for my rights ever since I can remember. Doctors and adults have tried to push me down and say that I have to stop going to school. They told me that with my condition, I can’t be a student and take care of myself at the same time. I told them I could, and I am. In middle school, high school, and my current college, I have taken my health into my own hands and made sure I had all the accommodations I need.
So I have always had the underlying qualities of an activist, because I have always campaigned for myself and the disabled community. I travel in a wheelchair, and the college process was really hard for me. Out of the thousands of colleges in the United States, I could only apply to a few because of accessibility. When I talked to the disability officer, it was made clear that the school didn’t actually know how to take care of me and my needs. They lack and they haven’t had a person like me to push and make sure that people actually follow through with their promises. The school treated my accommodations as a privilege that I was being awarded, instead of what it really is: a necessity to be a successful student. I advocated every day that accommodations for my disability is my right as a student.
My activism really kicked into full gear a little bit after the 2018 Parkland school shooting. The day of the shooting, my brother was in high school. I live in New York City, and here in Manhattan, because of 9/11, any time there is some sort of national threat or attack, our schools get put on lockdown. So my brother’s school was on lockdown. He was terrified, and I was five hours away in college, so I couldn’t do anything to comfort him.
Soon after that horrible event, the March for Our Lives was taking place, and the youth in my college really wanted to turn out to protest gun violence. But the nearest march happening to was in Syracuse, an hour away from our school. So I worked my butt off organizing two buses to take one hundred and twenty students to the march that was one hour away, and back. That was the start of me taking my activism to the next level.
How did you decide to take the plunge of running for local office in your community?
I am running for the office of “County Committee Representative.” My neighborhood is in Manhattan, and I am running to be the representative of my district.
There are a lot of issues my community is facing. I live in a predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhood, and it is going through a major shift in gentrification because Columbia University is just eleven blocks away from my apartment and Columbia has been buying up the land. The university and affluent communities are driving up the rent rates and kicking us out of our own homes so they can replace us with the wealthy people who want to live in our area.
There has also been a recent rise in gang violence in my community.
There have been so many politicians from the outside of our community that ride in on their white horses and try to save us and pretend they know better about our own community than we do. Those “saviors” are only there to get what they need from us. Once they do, they do not actually solve our problems.
But I am different than the colonizers who come into my community. I’ve lived in this neighborhood all my life, I know my community, and I know what we need to make our lives better. So I can best represent it and build solutions for it.
The kickstart for me running for office was during my first summer back home from college. That summer was really weird — I had gotten all this independence being away from my neighborhood and family, so coming back I saw the community I had grown up [in] with a fresh perspective. I saw the community the way others walking into it for the first time saw it, and what was first normal to me now stood out. Suddenly the crumbling buildings, gang violence, and rapid gentrification wasn’t just normal to me. Taking a step back and then stepping back in allowed me to see my community through a different lens.
It was around this time that I was volunteering for a community center in my neighborhood, and I was floating the idea of me running for local office — the community members thought it was a great idea. When I realized that people in my community believed in me and were willing to put their responsibility in me, I just went for it.
My community needs someone from the grassroots like me to represent them. Politicians who try to come in and act like colonizers who know better than my community don’t even try to reach the people. The vast majority of the people in my neighborhood speak Spanish, but their campaigns aren’t even bilingual!
My community is a made up of a lot of older immigrants, people who have become complacent. A lot of them have a large fear of using their voice, because they are undocumented.
They don’t feel like they can speak up against the gentrification and violence in the community out of fear of having a run-in with authorities and being deported. I am using my privilege as a documented American citizen to speak up for the needs that those living in the shadows cannot. A lot of the immigrant mentality is be grateful and don’t ask for more. So asking for more than the violence and crumbling infrastructure that we have feels like something people can’t do. With my campaign I am working to make sure that the community realizes we deserve a better life.
I am also working to bridge the large divide that exists with in my neighborhood. There is one side that’s mostly Hispanic, one side is mostly Black, and we are trying to compete for resources. Colonialism works by dividing and conquering marginalized people and pitting us against each other. As minority communities we face a lot of the same challenges, and through my campaign I am working on making the Hispanic and Black folks realize we have more in common than different.
There has been a resurfacing of gang violence in my neighborhood because of the discontent with the condition. Right now, gangs inhabit public housing communities because the housing complexes are not given any resources, so no one is overseeing those areas. Gangs are taking them over.
In my campaign trail, I actually went into the gangs and the public housing complex and showed that they’re still people.
I am revitalizing the community to care. I go places nobody goes. I talk to and connect with the people other politicians are too scared of talking to.
I never see these other colonizing politicians go into the public houses and speak to the community — a lot of people just want to piggyback on Columbia University’s gentrification plan and demolish the whole neighborhood. But I won’t let that happen.
What are your strategies for creating change?
It’s about having people realize that your individual voice does make a difference. For example, on my college campus in my sustainability club, we just passed a resolution to ban all single use plastics. I started an intensive program for people who use reusable water bottles. People who sign onto the campaign get stickers on their reusable water bottles that they scan every time they refill it, and each scan gives them points. They can redeem those points for a gift card or a small prize. Getting them to realize the importance of being environmentally conscious intensifies and then people slowly start to realize they are making an impact.
At my college I work on bringing a big issue like climate change into a local perspective.
My college campus is right by Lake Ontario, and the tides have been rising every year. Every summer there is huge erosion and lake-side houses and communities are being destroyed. There’s even been flooding in our dorms! The local animals have been moving away because of the changing climate, which is affecting the whole ecosystem. By bringing members of my campus community to the shoreline to see the climate destruction, I am making people realize how these large issues affect us personally.
To make change you have to bring large issues into the context of people’s daily lives.
What are your tips for other people of color disabled youth who aspire to do/be like you?
The first step, especially in the disabled community, is to understand what the stigmas are around you. Being a woman, being a person of color, being disabled, all come with their own stigmas. So you have to understand the barriers and obstacles that you’re coming up against, and then you can strategically plan how to break them down. For example, I am very self-aware of how people react to me as a disabled woman of color. And I have the confidence to call it out!
Finding a place to start is always hard. I suggest you think to moments in your life when you thought things along the lines, “I wish something was different, I wish this situation weren’t like this…”, because those moments of I wish this was different are the foundation of your activism.
Nothing is too small. Everything is important and everything can contribute to a bigger change. Something small like re-paving a street can start the domino effect of general improvements in communities.
I also need everyone to know that as activists of color, it’s important to own and embrace your stories. Don’t be afraid to talk about your lived experiences. Those stories are where your power comes from. Telling my story about perpetually living paycheck to paycheck and being evicted, I always felt like I was token diversity. The token “low income woman of color.” I have to take back the narrative and own it — yes, that is who I am. But that is not the only reason why I matter.
Understand your story and find what makes you the most proud of yourself. Even the low points might be that; those low points are important in your building of who you are as an activist.
As you work outside of your circles, don’t let people use your story as a way to get themselves forward. Always be in control of your own story.
Can you tell us a little more about your nonprofit, Box the Ballot?
Yes! I started my nonprofit Box the Ballot shortly before the 2018 midterm election to make sure that votes from disenfranchised communities were counted. The purpose of Box the Ballot is to collect and deliver absentee ballots so that those votes are counted. There aren’t really any clear instructions for how to deliver an absentee ballot, and all my friends living on college campuses away from home have trouble figuring it out — so their votes ended up not counting.
Box the Ballot has seventy college and community chapters (in communities that have historically had their voting rights infringed) to collect absentee ballots and turn them in so that every person’s vote is counted!
The week before midterms, we campaigned, we tabled at campuses, collected people’s ballots, and sorted them and delivered them to the board of elections in each county. We do everything by hand and on the day that they’re handing to us. We were able to send over 370,000 ballots to be counted in the 2018 midterms. That’s 370,000 votes heard in the American political system that wouldn’t otherwise [have been] heard.
Not only have we been making votes count, we are also creating voting coalitions in student communities and communities of color. So they now know how to take charge of their voting process. They now get trained and know how to hold town halls so that candidates are held accountable and coming into the communities they represent.
It is very important to me to give back a voice to communities that lost their voices.
We really do have the power.
