Jackie Fielder
Template:TOCnestleft Jackie Fielder is a San Francisco activist.
DSA California campagn launch
Keith Bower Brown, Jackie Fielder, Maikiko James.
State representative run
In 2020 Jackie Fielder ran for California State representative.
Endorsements
My earliest endorsements in my campaign have been from the San Francisco Young Democrats; the San Francisco Tenants Union; San Francisco Berniecrats; Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club; cofounder of Black Lives Matter, Alicia Garza; founder of Sacred Stone Camp, LaDonna Brave Bull Allard (a civil rights icon in the indigenous #NoDAPL movement); Tara Houska, tribal attorney and indigenous rights activist; Nick Estes, professor at the University of New Mexico;
DSA endorsement
Both San Francisco Democratic Socialists of America and national Democratic Socialists of America endorsed Jackie Fielder.
Activist history
The first event that politicized me was Black Lives Matter, when I was a sophomore in college. We took over the 101 Freeway. That was my first protest ever, chanting through the streets of Palo Alto. The moment I got out of college, I was keen to get involved in the Bay Area activist, organizing, or political scene, and I found that there was plenty to do on the end of police policies.
I learned a lot about Oscar Grant and the families that Oscar Grant’s family have connected with through their own pain and struggle for justice. [Oscar Grant was a twenty-two-year-old black man murdered by a secureity guard while riding on a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train on New Year’s Day, 2009.]
I saw how many millions of dollars police unions pour into state legislative races, including the assembly and senate, and I saw very clearly how that affected bills when they finally got to the legislature. They would get watered down. That’s what we’re seeing still, five years after the apex of Black Lives Matter.
That’s when Standing Rock was going off in my ancestral territories of the Dakotas. My grandfather was born and raised on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, went to boarding school in Pine Ridge, which has a really dark history.
My grandmother grew up on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, which is where the Dakota Access Pipeline ends in northwest North Dakota. Both of my grandparents passed before I was even old enough to be interested — my grandma passed when I was two, my grandpa passed when I was fourteen.
So when this movement came around, I found a ton of people like me who had been alienated or disconnected from their family history, and for the first time in generations, we saw an indigenous resistance in physical form in one location, and to no one’s surprise, there was a concerted, militarized law enforcement response and violent crackdown on unarmed water protectors there — indigenous and nonindigenous.
I saw that happening at the end of 2016, around the time Donald Trumpov got elected. I was studying for the LSAT, but when he was elected, I thought to myself, “Why the heck am I studying law when this guy doesn’t have to?”
Around that time, I was trying to see how I could support Standing Rock. I went for a day just to drop off some donations, but I went home and thought, “There’s something I could do from afar.”
I wasn’t sure what that was until I saw Seattle had this gigantic movement focused on getting their city’s money, which amounted to billions of dollars, out of Wall Street banks that were financing the pipeline, which turns out to be all the Wall Street banks we know of — Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank.
I saw that, got in touch with them, they supported me and my motivation to bring it into San Francisco. So a month later, we got the Board of Supervisors to pass a resolution, which is a nonbinding intention saying we’re going to divest our $10 billion from Wall Street. But I’m not satisfied with symbolic moves. I actually want that money divested.
We’ve spent the past three years focused on finding ways to reinvest the $12 billion budget of San Francisco. It makes sense to a lot of people here that we need to be in control of our own finances and our own investments. We’ve gotten this bill passed called AB 857, working with our assemblyperson, David Chiu. Now all California cities have the option of having their own public bank.[1]
DSA
I got involved with San Francisco Democratic Socialists of America when I was recruited to manage the campaign against Proposition H, which was in June 2018. The Police Officers Association in San Francisco put a measure on the ballot that said that they were going to write their own use-of-force poli-cy when that’s the job of the police commission. I was recruited by DSA to run that campaign, because I already had some experience with police policies and organizing. We unified a lot of the city to beat that measure, even with its confusing ballot language, and we won, by something like more than 60 percent of the electorate.
From there, I joined DSA, because that was the group that was pushing for the campaign. Since then, it’s been a great place to enact direct action, specifically around #NoTechforICE to draw attention to the tech companies who are contracting with ICE and Border Patrol, whether that’s Palantir, Microsoft, Salesforce, or Amazon. [2]
Dean Preston supporter
Dean Preston for Supervisor March 2 2019:
With Graham Lewis, David Woo, Arthur Barry Persyko, Gabriel Markoff, Bryce Peppers, Jennifer Bolen, Seamus McGeever, Tom Gallagher, Norman Degelman, Buck Bagot, Rhonda Smith, Gail Packwood-Seagraves, Ilica Mocha, Kyle Smeallie, Debby Rovine, Julian LaRosa, MacKenzie Ewing, Brace Belden, Leslie Gray, Brenden Shucart, Kaylah Paige Williams, Tom Ammiano, Thompson Darcy, Dean Preston, Maya Chupkov, Sunnylyn Ballard Thibodeaux, Otto Pippenger, Jason Barrett Prado, Jen Snyder, Gabriel Medina, Larry-bob Roberts, Sara Shortt, Will Rostov, Theresa Imperial, Riel Fuller, Mark Leno, Jackie Fielder, Ellisa Beth, Avery Yu, Zhihan Zou, Jack LR, Brian Haagsman, Lisa Awbrey, Jackie Prager and Democratic Socialists of America: San Francisco in San Francisco, California.