Authentically Detroit
Authentically Detroit is the leading podcast in the city for candid conversations, exchanging progressive ideas, and centering resident perspectives on current events.
Hosted by Donna Givens Davidson and Orlando P. Bailey.
Produced by Sarah Johnson and Engineered by Griffin Hutchings.
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Authentically Detroit
Candidate Series: The Healer in Politics with Abdul El-Sayed
Last week, Abdul El-Sayed sat down with Donna to discuss his candidacy for the U.S. Senate!
Abdul is running for the U.S. Senate because he believes life in Michigan shouldn’t be this hard — or this expensive. After a successful career of making government work for Michiganders, he wants to take his vision to Washington and make the United States Senate work for you.
He was born and raised in southeast Michigan and proudly attended public schools where he captained his high school football, wrestling, and lacrosse teams. Abdul was raised by his father, Mohamed, an Egyptian immigrant, and his stepmom, Jackie, whose family has lived in Gratiot County, Michigan, since the 1800s. he graduated from the university of michigan with the highest distinction and played on the wolverines men’s lacrosse team. Abdul earned his medical degree from Columbia University on an NIH-funded fellowship and a second doctorate at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.
Abdul currently lives in Ann Arbor with his wife, Sarah, and their two brilliant young daughters, Emmalee and Serene.
To learn more about Adbul El-Sayed and his vision for Michigan, click here.
Up next. Abdel El-Sayed joins the Authentically Detroit Candidate Series to share why he's running for the US Senate. Keep it locked. Authentically Detroit starts after these messages.
Orlando Bailey:Have you ever dreamed of being on the airwaves? Well, the Authentically Detroit Podcast Network is here to make those dreams come true. Formerly known as the Deep Network and located inside the Stoudemire, the Authentically Detroit Podcast Network are for studio space and production staff. To help get your idea off of the ground, just visit authenticallydetcom and send a request through the contact page. Interested in renting space for corporate events, meetings, conferences, social events or resource fairs? The Mass Detroit Small Business Hub is a 6,000 square feet space available for members, residents and businesses and organizations. To learn more about rental options at Mass Detroit, contact Nicole Perry at nperry at ecn-detroitorg or 313-331-3485. Hey y'all, it's Orlando. We just want to let you know that the views and opinions expressed during this podcast episode are those of the co-hosts and guests and not their sponsoring institutions.
Donna Givens Davidson:Now let's start the world. Welcome to another episode of Authentically Detroit broadcasting live from Detroit's Eastside at the Stoudemire Wellness Hub inside of the Eastside Community Network headquarters. I'm Donna Givens-Davidson. Thank you for listening and supporting our efforts to build a platform of authentic voices for real people in the city of Detroit. We want you to like, rate and subscribe to our podcast on all platforms. Welcome back to the Authentically Detroit Candidate Series.
Donna Givens Davidson:Today I'm here with Abdull El-Sayed discussing his candidacy for US Senate. Orlando is out of town today, so it'll just be the two of us. Abdull El-Sayed wasn't supposed to be a politician. He studied to be a doctor but realized it was our broken politics that was making people sick. Abdull is running for US Senate because life in Michigan shouldn't be this hard or this expensive. After a successful career of making government work for Michiganders, he wants to take his vision to Washington and make the United States Senate work for you.
Donna Givens Davidson:Abdul rebuilt a government agency to make it actually work, and then he did it again. He rebuilt Detroit's health department after bankruptcy. Then he restructured Wayne County's Department of Health, human and Veteran Services, serving 1.8 million Michiganders in the state's largest and most diverse county. As a public servant, abdul secured free glasses for kids who needed them, removed lead from Detroit's elementary schools, took on Michigan's biggest polluters and made life-saving Narcan universally accessible. He also spearheaded a program that will cancel up to $700 million in medical debt for 300,000 Michiganders over two years. His work earned him recognition as a Public Official of the Year by the Michigan LCV and a spot on Crane's Detroit Business 40 Under 40 list.
Donna Givens Davidson:He was born and raised in Southeast Michigan and proudly attended public schools where he captained his high school football, wrestling and lacrosse teams. Abdul was raised by his father, muhammad, an Egyptian immigrant, and his stepmom, jackie, whose family has lived in Gratiot County, michigan, since the 1800s. He graduated from the University of Michigan with the highest distinction and played on the Wolverines men's lacrosse team. Abdul earned his medical degree from Columbia University on an NIH-funded fellowship and a second doctorate at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Abdul lives in Ann Arbor with his wife Sarah and their two brilliant young daughters, emily and Serene. He's been a car-carrying union member of AFT Local 477 and 6244, seiu Local 500, the National Writers Union and the AAUP. Abdul, welcome once again to Authentically Detroit. This is not your first time with us.
Abdul El-Sayed:Ms Donna, it's always a privilege to get to join you. I'm grateful to be here. Thank you so much All right.
Donna Givens Davidson:So how is this blessed day finding you?
Abdul El-Sayed:Finds me well. I just got here from a protest held by the OPEI local against McLaren Macomb and I got the privilege to walk with nurses and support professionals who are fighting for safe staffing, and for me that fight is personal. As you just read, I trained as a physician and I know the critical work that nurses and certainly support professionals, offer to our patients across our state and so the opportunity to stand with them in their time of need, when they're fighting for both a safer working environment for them. But then let's not forget, when nurses fight for safer working environments, they are fighting for safer healthcare environments for the rest of us. So it was a real privilege and I'm honored to have been able to walk with them and also inspired by their leadership.
Donna Givens Davidson:Yeah, I think we can't say enough great things about nurses. My late sister was a nurse and very proud of it. One thing I observed in seeing family members hospitalized is the amount of care nurses provide. Nurses really provide the care for sick people. Doctors provide the instructions and the diagnosis and the oversight of that care. But it's that day-to-day stuff with the nurses that makes a difference. And I've been in situations, especially during the pandemic where my mother was hospitalized, where I could see the impact on nurses, not having enough nurses, on the patient health. So it's a great fight to be in.
Abdul El-Sayed:It is, and my grandmother was a nurse and my mother is a nurse and their work has been about, like you said, providing the actual care, and you learned that in med school is that you get to show up and make a set of decisions that will guide a person's health care.
Abdul El-Sayed:But the folks who are showing up for them day to day, right, who are making sure that their pain is taken care of, their needs are met, those are the nurses. And then there's all kinds of staff who work hospitals, who make healthcare possible, and sometimes we forget about them. I'll never forget the folks that we call one-to-ones right, and their job is to monitor patients who need one-on-one monitoring. That's a really tough job, right, because most of the time when somebody needs one-on-one monitoring, it's a situation of life and death, and you know we somewhat take them for granted. They don't have one of those titles that you think about, but they're part of the connective tissue that makes a hospital run and in this particular circumstance, right, this hospital is barely paying these folks a living wage. You know they're Medicaid eligible. At least they would have been Medicaid eligible before, not the nurses.
Donna Givens Davidson:No, I'm talking about the one-to-ones.
Abdul El-Sayed:Yes, and you got to imagine you show up to work every day and you're still Medicaid eligible. Right, you should be able to, in the richest, most powerful country in the world, show up to provide necessary healthcare and know that you're going to be able to get paid a living wage to provide for your family. And the fact that that's not possible in any context in America is exactly the problem.
Donna Givens Davidson:Exactly. I mean, we shouldn't even have Medicaid, we should have Medicare for all, universal healthcare so that it shouldn't matter where you work. And I think we have this mindset that only certain people deserve quality of life, only certain people deserve housing and water and healthcare and clean environments. And yet these feel like human rights to me that we should all be fighting for, for the least of us in terms of our social standing, so that all of us live better.
Abdul El-Sayed:You know, ms Donna, I really appreciate you saying that, because I think one of the most impactful aspects of my upbringing was that I spent a lot of my childhood summers in Egypt, where my family immigrated from, and I got to meet all my cousins who were just as smart, just as capable as me.
Abdul El-Sayed:They didn't get to live the lives that I got to live, and a lot of that had less to do with how hard you work or how smart you are, had everything to do with opportunities you've got. And the crazy thing for me is that when I'd go to Egypt and come back, I'd travel 15 hours either way and I'd travel about 10 years difference in life expectancy. I grew up in Oakland County. I could go 15 minutes and cross the same gap, and the crazy thing is that that kind of chasm exists in our country, and it exists whether you go 15 minutes from Oakland County to Detroit or you go five hours north from the city of Detroit into you name the rural part of the state, or you go five hours north from the city of Detroit into you name, the rural part of the state.
Donna Givens Davidson:I mean there's parts of the rural parts of Michigan that I would never want to live in. I think we look at Detroit as being the most deprived part of the state. My rule of thumb is how many dollar stores exist in your community? How many people in this community?
Donna Givens Davidson:are shopping and buying food inside of a dollar store, and there's all kinds of places in your old Michigan where, that's it, there's no fresh grocery stores. I think it's really tragic. I think we become so aware of our own pain and suffering that we don't realize that people are underhoused in rural communities and suburban communities. The myth that America is this wealthy nation where most people are doing well is simply that it's a myth, isn't it?
Abdul El-Sayed:It is, and the crazy thing about it is our current political system. It thrives on keeping us apart.
Donna Givens Davidson:Yeah.
Abdul El-Sayed:And one group tells another group that the reason you don't have is because of them over there and vice versa.
Abdul El-Sayed:And what we're trying to do you know, I was up North in Antrim County. I'm going out West uh, this week later on what I'm trying to do is be a bridge that connects folks across the challenges and the pain of living in America in 2025, right, because if you are working or retired or unable to work, in Detroit or in Flint or in Oscoda, you're experiencing the same set of challenges. It's hard to afford a second bag of groceries, it's hard to see a doctor without worrying about medical debt, it is hard to take a big, deep breath of air or drink water right, here we talk about or in Flint you talk about lead. Here we're talking about water affordability, there they're talking about PFAS. All of these challenges are one in the same and we have an opportunity to help folks see that if actually all of us are willing to come together around a movement of working people, there's an opportunity to come together to actually rebuild and fight for the kind of government we need and deserve.
Donna Givens Davidson:Absolutely. I think that what you're doing is I'll say it's God's work right Connecting people and helping people see each other as human, especially in this divided state of our nation where everybody is against everybody. We had here a couple of months a few weeks ago, I don't know how long ago, it was a couple of weeks ago we had a unity breakfast, trying to bring together people from all different groups. Whether you are Jewish or Muslim or Hispanic or LGBT or disabled or black, why aren't we working together towards a shared justice? Justice can't be for one group of people.
Donna Givens Davidson:And one thing I've been thinking about lately is the way our civil rights are taught in schools. Thinking about lately is the way our civil rights are taught in schools. Civil rights, when you look at the civil rights movement, you look at the movement for black people being treated as human. But civil rights are the rights of women being treated as human. Civil rights are the rights of people who are from different backgrounds being treated as human. Everybody deserves those rights, and so it's interesting to me to really witness how civil rights is not one thing, it's all of it Right.
Donna Givens Davidson:And there's been multiple civil rights movements since before this nation was founded, with people saying I have the right to you know basic freedoms. I have the right to jobs, I have the right to have a banking account, I have the right to be treated as human, as human. If we saw that this is all civil rights and that we either have them or we don't. On my way here, I was talking to one of our interns, cedric, and he was talking about how fascism sort of develops from people taking away rights little by little by little and then you have a dictatorship.
Donna Givens Davidson:But thinking through also how me turning my blind eye to your rights being taken away threatens mine.
Abdul El-Sayed:Right.
Abdul El-Sayed:You know, when you hear the word rights, usually the other word that comes with that is responsibilities, and I think we're really good at showing up for our own civil rights.
Abdul El-Sayed:But there's a second side of that, which is how do you show up for other folks? And I think there's a civil rights and there's a civil responsibilities. I think part of that is the willingness for all of us to show up for one another's fights. Right Securing, like you were talking about, securing my rights is in part, my showing up for you to help you secure your rights, and I think it's that civil rights and civil responsibilities piece of it that I think can be profoundly powerful when we're willing to see our rights as connected to one another. Across the different boundaries, they tell us that we cannot bridge and we cannot step over, and I think there's an opportunity here to be thinking together, especially in a moment where you see the impending fascism of this moment trying to come for all of us not to be tricked into thinking that when they come for somebody else, they're not coming for you too.
Donna Givens Davidson:But there's a lot of anger.
Abdul El-Sayed:There is.
Donna Givens Davidson:And there's a lot of anger and there's a lot of blame. So during the same breakfast, there were a couple of people who said listen, I need to hold the people who voted for Trump accountable. Not just those people, but the groups of people who are part of the same group. They need to be held accountable. No-transcript wait a minute. You know I'm from this group and I'm upset too. What are you talking about? This was not done for me. The way that the news media, I think, perpetuates these narratives is really harmful, so I'm interested in hearing your approach. You want to go across the state. As you know, like a certain ex-president, your name does not necessarily generate instant trust and receptivity. How do you deal with that?
Abdul El-Sayed:Yeah, just on that note, which is really fascinating, right, for a lot of my life, as long as I've been in the public eye, I have felt the responsibility to speak on behalf of people who look like me or have names like mine or pray like I do, and I've had a very intense relationship to that, because I don't speak for all Muslims. And then, you know, in the last election I endorsed Kamala Harris. I was the first Arab and Muslim leader to do it, not because I agreed with the administration's position on Gaza In fact I had endorsed the uncommitted movement before that but because, if you look at the election from the eyes of a child in either Gaza or Detroit or Oscoda, there's no world in which Trump would have been better, and so I tried to do the right thing. It's been fascinating, sort of watching exactly this conversation of saying, well, your community did X, y and Z and you're like, well, despite me, right, because I was trying to help. But also that same sort of logic applies, which is that sense of saying, okay, so how much does any one person represent a community from which they come? And what's been fascinating to me is, as I've traveled the state I was in Petoskey last week.
Abdul El-Sayed:A lot of folks are particularly interested in what you have to say.
Abdul El-Sayed:If you're uncommon and you come from an uncommon background and I come from an uncommon background, right, and I come from an uncommon background, whether I'm talking to a community of Arabs and Muslims because I was raised in a household that was half Egyptian, half white, or I'm uncommon in a community like Petoskey where, you know, I probably contributed to half the melanin in the room.
Abdul El-Sayed:And so if you ask yourself the question of all right, what does it mean to try to explain us to us rather than me to you, or try and get you to see me, but how do I actually explain the human condition beyond?
Abdul El-Sayed:There's actually a really unique opportunity you have, because the minute that people see you talking about the challenges that they face from your background, you've instantaneously right, you've crossed the whole chasm that they might have in their mind put between you. And what's an amazing thing about having been sort of a student of people who are maybe not like me right, because I've had to be my whole life, because there was never a room in which everybody was just like me is that you start to realize that the things that we love the most or the things that we fear the most tend to be the same, and if you can bring folks to see the things we love the most and hope for the most as the antidote to the things that we fear the most, I think there's an opportunity to start bringing the people together, and that's what our movement, that's what this work is about.
Donna Givens Davidson:You know, it's interesting when you refer to yourself as Arab, because many people would see you as African because you come from Egypt.
Abdul El-Sayed:And.
Donna Givens Davidson:I think that sometimes there's this feeling that Egypt has been separated. I mean Ta-Nehisi Coates I don't know if you've read his most recent book goes into great detail about how Egypt has been robbed of its African influence and Africanness and you know, one of the challenges I see is a lot of black people feeling rejected or as though people are distancing themselves from them, and so, therefore, it's like you don't love me, I don't love you back.
Donna Givens Davidson:You can't speak for me, and you saw that happen in New York City, right? Because if people have to, I mean most black people in New York City voted for Cuomo. Now, I wouldn't have, but most people who are black in my age would have right or did, and I can't remember.
Abdul El-Sayed:I think Mamdani won the 29-year-old group, but that's okay he did he won the younger group right. Which I'm counting you among.
Donna Givens Davidson:Yes, you can absolutely count me among. I will be 21 plus 33, 29 plus 33. What's that math? Yes in September, but no, I think that-.
Abdul El-Sayed:Those other 33 don't count?
Donna Givens Davidson:They don't. I just keep on repeating my 29th birthday, groundhog Day, until I get it right. Well done, one day I'll get it right, trying to live your best 29.
Abdul El-Sayed:You've just had 30-some tries at it.
Donna Givens Davidson:I don't know if you know Gail Perry Mason, she has that. I think it was Forever 39 thing. Yes, yes, I thought I was 39, but now I'm 29. Anyway, but you see that, and I'm sitting here on the other side of this thinking, wow, these are my people who would not vote for Mamdani, even though I think he stood for everything I stand for, and his mother made Mississippi Masala, so how can I not love her right Great movie. But I mean, I think that people made the assumption about him that he doesn't care about us. Do you think that's true? And what is the evidence that he has bridged those gaps? Also, speaking to you, how are you bridging those gaps in Michigan so that black voters can see themselves in you?
Abdul El-Sayed:Yeah, I'm proud of my African heritage and I'm proud to be both, in the spirit of authenticity authentically African and authentically Arab. And yes, there are many countries where people are both authentically African and authentically Arab. And you know it's a wild thing, my, you know, the concept of race doesn't really exist in Egypt Because, depending upon where you go, people look all kinds of different ways and they're all Egyptian. In Egypt, because, depending upon where you go, people look all kinds of different ways and they're all Egyptian.
Abdul El-Sayed:My dad tells the story of his own experience meeting a friend of his he had not seen for decades. They went to engineering school together and his friend, whose name was Hamdi, moved to Nebraska. My dad moved to Michigan and they didn't really see each other until they ran into each other at a conference and they reconnected and they were so excited to see each other. And my dad has curly hair, but it's less curly than his friend Hamdi, who is more Nubian. Right, all of us have some Nubian ancestry and some Greek ancestry, because Egypt was this melting pot of like Africa, asia, europe.
Abdul El-Sayed:And my dad looks at his friend he's like Hamdi you're black and Hamdi's like I know and the idea was that they had never registered this idea of race until they had lived in America for decades and then had to self-identify around some sort of racial hierarchy. And so if you were to meet my grandmother, my grandmother looks a lot like you, right, and a lot of folks, if she was in America, would say she's black, right, but like me, because of the texture of my hair, right, would be categorized as white. But then my family is, my blood is 100% African, and so these things were like foisted on us in a caricature of where people come from. That is not quite accurate. And Egypt breaks all those molds, right, because Egypt is. It is a jewel of African culture and history and also a crossroads for Arab culture and history and also the gateway from Africa into both Europe and Asia.
Donna Givens Davidson:Like all of those things are true. I really appreciate that explanation. Thank you for sharing. So going back to Mondami, who is Ugandan, right? So another example he's Ugandan and Indian, but people black people see him as not many black people don't see him as one of theirs or as being connected to their cause. What do you know about his background and why do you think that might be?
Abdul El-Sayed:I don't know as much about his background. And why do you think that might be? You know I don't know as much about his background. I know there's a very large South Asian diaspora in a lot of parts of sub-Saharan Africa and I know he was born in Uganda, and you know I can't-.
Donna Givens Davidson:Kash Patel was as well, right.
Abdul El-Sayed:That's right.
Abdul El-Sayed:That's right, and I can't speak specifically to how he identifies or how he thinks of himself, but I can say that you know there is a lot of pride for folks who spent time on the continent in being authentically African.
Abdul El-Sayed:What I will tell you is, in my work, racial equity has been fundamental to the work that I've tried to pursue my whole career as a professor. When I taught before I came to the city of Detroit, my work was focused on racial and ethnic disparities in adverse birth outcomes, so things like preterm birth and low birth weight and infant mortality. And then it was a point of immense pride to get to serve this city as a health director who got to rebuild the health department around taking on deep inequities that we faced, and in my role in Wayne County, the same applies. And at the same time, often in my engagement with the community, I have found myself trying to be as humble about understanding that many people who come from an ethnic background that I share have not had the same humility for the experience of Detroiters, and black Detroiters in particular, and I think there is a history that a lot of folks will point to that unfortunately, folks from immigrant backgrounds have sometimes seen black communities as an opportunity to be tread upon rather than a community to build with.
Donna Givens Davidson:We're going to take a break and when we come back, I want to explore that a little bit further. Talk about your work at the Detroit Health Department, when I met you, and then your plans for Senate. Absolutely About how you have race. You have people come to America, right, and they look down on black Americans. Not just Arabs, not just Asians, not just white people from Europe, but people who are from black Africa come here and look down on black Americans and don't necessarily have a sense of connectedness to them Not all people, but many people do. What do you think that's about and how do you see your ability to bridge some of those divides? Because I think right now, lately, there's been Black America First movements, American descendants of slavery movements, all of these things in reaction to this feeling of being looked down upon by the entire world.
Abdul El-Sayed:Yeah, I think part of it is the confusion of poverty and oppression, and I think for a lot of folks from immigrant backgrounds they say well, I was really poor when I came and I was able to build out. And my point to them would always yes, you had very few material resources and you came as the top student of your class with an opportunity to go to graduate school. Right, and you're confusing money and capital for socioeconomic position and also racism.
Donna Givens Davidson:Exactly yes, and also racism because you came here and you were not necessarily looked at as unbankable, as untouchable, as undesirable in this neighborhood, in this job, and so I think that the stigma the blackness carries impacts Everything in the criminal justice system. People don't understand that racism actually operates separately Many African people. I was talking about this with my son-in-law and his dad is Nigerian and in talking to him he didn't realize he was black until he was in America living I forget where he realized he was black and my son-in-law was like you didn't know you were black and he's like, no, I mean, I knew that I was African, but that same experience that your dad had, his father had coming here, even from Nigeria, understanding how racism really operates, and it takes time for people to do that.
Abdul El-Sayed:That and also the way racism compounds. Yes, right, it shapes the future opportunities of generations. Right, and that compounding takes away opportunity from the get. And I think for me, a lot of my race and, frankly, class conscious came out of trying to explain to myself the experience of being Arab and Muslim post-9-11 and the deep and profound poverty of the family that my father escaped when he got the opportunity, through an education, to come here and in a lot of ways it was reading Malcolm. It was reading Martin.
Abdul El-Sayed:It was understanding the ways and the forces that have often tried to rob generations of black American folk of opportunities and then blame them for the opportunity set that they had and then to leverage that blame to create public policy that compounds that blame, whether that's replicated at the local level or the state level or the federal level. And then the ways that those things intermix. To ask what role can I play in taking on a profound injustice? Right, as somebody who is humbly stepping into partnership with black communities, to ask, given what I've got, how do I bring it here? And we can use this together to create opportunity and try and dismantle some of that structural compounding of the way that racism shapes poverty.
Donna Givens Davidson:So let's talk about the Detroit Health Department. When I met you, you were director of the Detroit Health Department and you didn't bring it back from bankruptcy. You brought it back from Dave Bing because the Detroit Health Department was dismantled under his leadership and I think it was Institute for Population Health that took much of the work of the health department. We didn't have a health department even before the bankruptcy. That took much of the work of the health department. We didn't have a health department even before the bankruptcy, which was devastating to me because my first job was with the Detroit Health Department and affiliated with the Detroit Health Department. My mother worked for the health department as a social worker for the AIDS project. She was the social worker for the AIDS project and I worked for an offshoot, the Community Health Awareness Group, and so that's my career background.
Abdul El-Sayed:Yeah, we stand on the shoulders of giants.
Donna Givens Davidson:Yes, so I was at Herman Kiefer, right, I was at the old Herman Kiefer. So you came and you had to resurrect that.
Abdul El-Sayed:There was so much to build from. I don't want to be clear, right. It's like people with the lived experience of having gone to Herman Kiefer I mean. I remember meeting a gentleman. I was actually eating dinner and he was unhoused and he asked me for some money and we got to talking. I bought him dinner, so we sat down, had a meal together, and he asked me what I did.
Abdul El-Sayed:This was like one of my first couple of months in Detroit. I told him I worked at the health department. He's like oh, herman Kiefer. I was like unfortunately, herman Kiefer shut down, but, yes, that health department. He's like you know what my mom used to tell me? I was like what's that? She used to leave me with five bucks in my pocket and she said if anything goes wrong, you get yourself to Herman Kiefer, they'll take care of you.
Abdul El-Sayed:And so that was the culture of that department in the city, and so our job was to work with folks to try and build on that foundation, that collective memory of what this thing was supposed to be.
Abdul El-Sayed:The other part of it, though, is we needed a thesis, for where do you get started? Right, like. I walked into the back of the municipal parking department. We had about 150 people working in a gigantic room in the back of that department and we needed to create some coherence around it, and so we actually started to think very critically about what is the opportunity for us here that is unique in this particular city, to help this department be an engine to try and disrupt the way that racism works, and structural racism works intergenerationally. And it led us to doing things like building a program to guarantee free glasses for kids, because we found that 30% of our kids would test positive for vision deficits, come back testing positive again next year, meaning we knew they needed glasses. They just didn't get a pair of glasses, and it doesn't matter what's happening at your school board if you cannot see what's happening in the front of the class, and so we set about to solving that problem. Another big challenge asthma.
Donna Givens Davidson:You know question. So if you need glasses and you don't have them, then that can be interpreted as an intellectual deficit, right? And so so many of our kids are misdiagnosed as having intellectual deficits. I wanted to pause right there, because that simple thing helps close the learning gap.
Abdul El-Sayed:Yes, now I'll tell you a story. I was giving a lecture at the University of Michigan, a public health course, intro public health course. This young woman was wearing this very bright pair of red glasses I'll never forget them with gold stars, and I was like that's a fashion choice. And so I finished my lecture. She waited to the very end and she's like do you see my glasses? I was like, yeah, I see your glasses. And she's like well, I got these in my freshman year and before then I just thought I was dumb and I got these glasses. And now I'm a freshman at the University of Michigan and I work on air quality in Detroit. That's what I want to work on in my life.
Donna Givens Davidson:Wow, that's awesome.
Abdul El-Sayed:And so exactly your point right. Like you interpret a kid who and this is the problem Like if you've never known you needed glasses, then it's not like you know that the thing you're seeing isn't crisp and clear, you just think that's how everybody else sees it. And so I've literally seen a kid put on a pair of glasses, look at their hand and then get a little bit afraid that their hand has wrinkles in it. Oh wow, because they never seen the wrinkles in their hand. And so that's the impact. And now, all of a sudden, you go from I can barely see the blackboard to oh wow, actually all of these things make sense, not because my mind couldn't comprehend them, but because my eyes couldn't see them. And so it does change a kid's self-conception.
Donna Givens Davidson:So you worked on glasses, you worked on dentistry.
Abdul El-Sayed:Worked on glasses. We helped to upgrade access to dentistry for kids in particular. One of the big things we took on was air quality, and asthma exacerbation is actually a principal reason why kids miss school. So a kid with even persistent, moderate asthma will miss on average, about a day a week, right, because they can't breathe. And so one of the big things we started to work on was air quality, with the key goal of taking on some of the biggest polluters in our city, in large part because in who are you taking on?
Abdul El-Sayed:Well, the Marathon Petroleum Refinery.
Donna Givens Davidson:In Southwest Detroit.
Abdul El-Sayed:Yeah, in Southwest Detroit. So they're the biggest polluter in the most polluted zip code in the entire state they say that, but that's also the zip code that's tested.
Donna Givens Davidson:The challenge is the EPA came here a couple of years ago and said we have not done any real monitoring of what's happening here. We had a whole incinerator here and the highest asthma rates are actually right over here 4213, 4214, and 4215, the highest asthma rates in the state and so there's also this concern I have that you know what gets tested Gets treated.
Abdul El-Sayed:Gets treated.
Donna Givens Davidson:But there's very little advocacy for what's happening here and you can see I mean when you worked at the health department the first time you came here, you weren't looking at that factory behind us, that new.
Donna Givens Davidson:Solantis factory which has polluted and the mayor actually allowed or facilitated this administration, facilitated the destruction of the Conner Creek Greenway which buffered the pollution in the adjacent neighborhood and the adjacent school. They put up a wall with a mural on it and said, well, this will protect you, I suppose. But then there's been multiple air quality violations and they rezoned that buffer M5, m4 rather intensive industrial, which is not supposed to happen next to residential, and so it feels like there's nobody fighting for us right now.
Abdul El-Sayed:And Donna. That's exactly the challenge. So that's one of the big reasons. While I was at Wayne County most recently, we put up an air quality monitoring system where we've got 100 air quality monitors across the county, and that's exactly. The point is that we haven't been systematically measuring and the EPA's measurements are few and far between and the EPA's measurements are few and far between, so it's very difficult to actually get high quality data with the level of inference that you need to be able to identify who is actually getting hit hardest. And so that work sort of evolved into saying well, we know that marathon is a problem in southwest Detroit.
Donna Givens Davidson:And, by the way, it's a horrible problem. I'm not trying to minimize that.
Abdul El-Sayed:No, but also to your point is what problems are we not measuring Right? And so we said, okay, well, we can build a unit where we can start measuring everything at a level of detail. Right, Working with a local entrepreneur, right, to put this program together, who did you work with? So, Darren Riley at Just Air. So it's a local company that does exactly this at Just Air. So it's a local company that does exactly this. And we said you know what, as a county, we can invest in this local company to build a 100 air quality monitoring system. You can go to waynecountycom, slash air quality and get real-time air quality in your local community. In fact, you can sign up for a text message that helps us do two things. Number one, to your point it helps us collect systematic data to actually understand how big the problem is at a finite local level. But then the other thing it lets you do is it gives you information that you can use today if the air quality is poor.
Donna Givens Davidson:All right, I could talk about air quality. Environmental justice is our thing. I love this conversation, but I want to make sure we have a chance to get to why you're running for Senate and what specifically you plan on doing as a senator if elected.
Abdul El-Sayed:Yeah, we all know the absurdity that is being waged out of the White House and I don't even want to sully our podcast with his name and a lot of focus has been who can stand up to him? Right, I got receipts on fighting big fights. Anybody who knows me knows that I don't back down. But it's not just about what we're fighting against, it's about what we're fighting for, and I think too many folks, too many Democrats, are willing to take that corporate money from the very same people who have created the challenges that we've been talking about all day and then come up with some message that's just a little bit better than what Republicans tell you and expect that that's actually going to change our politics. And I don't play that game, right? Folks might remember I ran for governor back in 2018. I didn't take corporate money then. I won't take corporate money now. I'll never take corporate money because my sense of it is that you've got to be willing to talk about the challenges that real people are facing and the big issue in our politics.
Abdul El-Sayed:Right, and I said this back when I ran, but I think folks weren't ready to hear it Donald Trump is not the disease of our politics.
Abdul El-Sayed:He's just the worst symptom of the disease. So if you want to take him on, it's not enough to just beat him. You also have to rethink the system of our politics that has been essentially corrupted in the ways that billionaires and corporations can buy off politicians to do their bidding. And here you look at the Blue Cross, blue Shields of the world. You look at the DTEs of the world spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy access to politicians and lobby for the policies that will help them. If we're serious about taking on our politics right now, you've got to be serious about fighting for things like Medicare for All, eliminating medical debt, being able to take money out of politics and to make sure that you're standing up for union rights and the opportunities of small businesses, and so I think that fight has to happen at the federal level. I think it means being willing to represent our communities in an authentic and a local kind of way, and it means being willing to rethink the fundamentals of our party politics in the way that we are in this campaign.
Donna Givens Davidson:Well, you know Liz Lusslachin in Lansing, I mean in DC and she's not being silent. She actually has an economic war plan.
Abdul El-Sayed:Yeah.
Donna Givens Davidson:Tell me how do you differ, how does your plan differ from her economic war plan?
Abdul El-Sayed:You know, the subtext of my politics is probably a lot more about healing than making war, and I think the other part of it is I mean, she's CIA and that's her proud accomplishment, and also being a soldier, so I can understand why she chooses warfare.
Abdul El-Sayed:Yeah, I'll tell you this right. When it comes to where I think our politics need to go, I think we need to be addressing consistently the pain that people feel in their lives. We need to address it by virtue of a very honest assessment of what has gone wrong with our politics and why our system doesn't seem to be working for people, and how it might, and so, for me, the way in which the most powerful buy-off politicians that, to me, is the essence of the issue and so where Donald Trump, to his credit, has been very, very good at identifying people's pain and responding to it in some way by demagoguing either the radical left or immigrants.
Donna Givens Davidson:I mean, that's what demagogues do. That's what demagogues do Demagogues you know it's like your narcissistic ex right, who can read your mind and understand all your pain points and use that to manipulate you, gaslight you and everything. And then it takes years of deprogramming. Not that this has ever happened to me, but just in case any listener has ever been with a narcissistic ex yeah, that's who he is. He's a malignant narcissist and he does to the nation what an abusive spouse does to somebody they're married to.
Abdul El-Sayed:That's very well put. I think the hard part, though, is because he sees people's pain. That's very well put. I think the hard part, though, is because he sees people's pain. Democrats have responded by being opposed to him, rather than also articulating people's pain and coming up with real solutions to solve it. Well, not all.
Donna Givens Davidson:Democrats, though right.
Abdul El-Sayed:Not all.
Donna Givens Davidson:So you have the Our Revolution folks. Are you part of that?
Abdul El-Sayed:We were glad to be endorsed by them back in 2018 when I ran.
Donna Givens Davidson:Okay, yeah, so this is, and I didn't agree with everything. Right. I don't agree with this mindset that caring about the needs of black and brown people is identity politics. I look at white supremacy as identity politics. Everything else is just survival right. But our revolution is an example of a movement that looked at people's pain and has been marginalized by the larger party forces.
Abdul El-Sayed:Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly right, and our revolution was birthed out of Bernie's 2016 campaign and I'm honored to be running with his endorsement now in 2025, 2026. But I think to your point. What we're building is a movement founded on the pain of people, with an answer that speaks to the ways that too much of our lives has been monetized by big corporations in ways that leave us getting paid less and paying more for the basic things we need All right, so let's talk about answers. All right.
Donna Givens Davidson:What are we going to do about housing?
Abdul El-Sayed:Look, I think. Well, there's a couple things. Number one you've got big tech corporations like Vrbo and Airbnb that have enabled people from faraway places to buy housing, driving up the cost for everybody else, and I think we need to get serious about regulating big tech generally and them specifically. Two, I think we need to address the fact that we have not invested in the ways that we need to in systematic, affordable housing that is integrated across all of our housing stock, I think. Three, we need to be thinking about the ways in which zoning empowers local developers over everyone else to build the kind of housing that people can't afford in the first place. And then, finally, four, I think we need to be serious about rethinking where we subsidize in the housing system. We've been really focused on making sure that people can afford to buy homes, which we should continue to do, but we also need to be thinking about making sure people can afford to rent as well.
Donna Givens Davidson:I mean fewer and fewer people can afford to buy homes now and the you know what is it? The interest deductions on taxes Far exceed we spend on, you know, public housing or on housing for low-income people. So I'm hearing you is we've got to balance that.
Abdul El-Sayed:We've got to balance that. It's like housing is a housing problem. We've got to build more housing and then we've got to balance that. We've got to balance that it's like housing is a housing problem. We've got to build more housing and then we've got to make sure people have the money to be able to access it, yeah, and we have to build it affordably Right.
Donna Givens Davidson:A hundred years ago we didn't have any of the housing programs that we have right now, and so it seems like we're at an inflection point, and I'm really looking forward to some really innovative and specific solutions to what we'll do. If it's not going to be Section 8, it's not going to be public housing, it's not going to be FHA, and, quite frankly, what we do is we nibble around the edges of those things and we never come up with anything new. What are some new ways to envision what housing looks like? Social housing in other parts of the world looks a little different than public housing, so I'm interested in ideas as your campaign progresses. I think people have to be able to envision this. I have to be able to see it and taste it in order to believe it can be.
Abdul El-Sayed:I think part of the challenge right, it's like we, especially in our part of the state or our part of the country, we build out instead of building up, and we got to be building up a lot more, and what happens is you can build up in ways that make it easier to access not just housing, but to access all the other things that you want to be around.
Donna Givens Davidson:Now in Detroit we look like gap tooth sister. Detroit has so many vacant spaces. Many Detroiters want to see more single family homes. Are you opposed to that?
Abdul El-Sayed:No, I'm not. I'm not. I just think that part of the challenge that we have is that the single family home system, the way Detroit was planned, is. It was planned in almost entirely around having to get around by car, and I think that that system hasn't always benefited everybody. So I'm okay with more single family homes as part of the solution. I'm just thinking that when you look at the preferences of younger folk, there are opportunities for us to kind of rethink different neighborhoods around how you get access to the things that you need without necessarily having to get in a car and go get it, and so more single family homes is certainly part of the solution for folks for whom that's the preference Great. I just also think that we need to be thinking about urban planning in ways that allow us also to build up and to get the same kind of creature comforts that you expect from a single-family home in a multifamily space.
Donna Givens Davidson:In a lot of the spaces that we're building, you're building a lot of studios and one bedrooms. We're not really building family-sized housing. Yes, yes, so I would imagine changing. I have to be honest. I was just in LA visiting my son for his 30th birthday. He turned 30th on June 29th.
Abdul El-Sayed:So he's a year old in the US. That's fantastic.
Donna Givens Davidson:Yes, that's right, he was thinking about me when he was born, right? No, so we're in his apartment building and he's in a one-bedroom apartment, but the reality is the building has so many living spaces above and beyond his apartment. I've lived in apartment buildings before, but nothing like this, and so what I'm hearing you say is that we can create places where the living room is not necessarily in your home, or the party room is not necessarily the game room, and certainly not the swimming pool.
Abdul El-Sayed:And even then you can imagine. You know so, when we think about apartments or condos in Michigan, because we've been so focused on single family homes, we think of apartments as a certain kind of housing for a certain kind of person, right, so we build studios in one bedroom apartments. But if you rethink what these spaces can be, you can imagine building in a lot of the kind of space that you would expect in a multifamily home, in a single family home, in a multifamily unit in a very diverse kind of building.
Donna Givens Davidson:You know, if you go into Palmer Park, for example, a lot of those apartments are large family size apartments.
Donna Givens Davidson:While we were visiting him, there were many people there who were families in the pool little kids and so I saw and it's like, wow, there's two and three apartments, his is a one bedroom, but you have that diversity and I think you know one of the things some people talk about is having homes that can accommodate people's needs from cradle to grave, so that even the seniors have a place within that community. All right, we're going to take another break and we'll be right back Talking about your Senate run. I want to get back to some other ideas. We talked about one, which is housing. We had conversations a couple years ago about water policy and the mayor rolled out the Lifeline program, and the Lifeline program is on life support now, and so pretty soon people's water is going to be shut off like it was before, unless we come up with another solution. Is water a human right and if so, is there a role for the US Senate in protecting that right?
Abdul El-Sayed:Yes, and it's a crazy thing that, in a state that's surrounded by 21% of the world's fresh water, that we have affordability issues here in the city. You know, I think the state legislature had an opportunity to solve this problem. The fact that they did not is terrible. I do think that there is a role for federal policymaking to guarantee water accessibility and affordability in this country. Is, what are we without water? And I think we've got space, coming from the experience in Michigan whether it is water affordability in Detroit, or it's the Flint water crisis in Flint, or it's PFAS plumes in spots all over the state to step up and lead on what water affordability so accessibility, affordability, safety and purity can mean, leading from a state with some authority on both water issues and also water conservation, given the surroundings by the Great Lakes.
Donna Givens Davidson:I was going to say. Water is another example where you have rights and also responsibilities. Right, we have a responsibility to protect this fresh water source and the right to access freshwater for personal use. Maybe it's not all the water we want to use for anything we want to use it for because we do waste water.
Abdul El-Sayed:Yeah.
Donna Givens Davidson:Many people do.
Abdul El-Sayed:When I ran in 2018, obviously I was running for governor, where you have a little bit more opportunity to sort of tailor specific policy we ran on guaranteeing the basic amount of water that any family would need to be able to cook, clean, bathe and make sure that you can drink, and then you would charge a little bit more for additional water. So if you want to water your lawn, the cost of that water it's okay if it's a little bit more expensive. If you want to fill a pool, it's okay if you're paying a little bit more, but the basic amount that everybody should have for their basic daily needs, that should be covered and we can do that again. Like, anybody who tells you that in the richest, most powerful country in the world that you have to charge people for water or drainage like is not actually paying attention.
Donna Givens Davidson:It's so stupid. We treat water as if it is a resource. You know A commodity.
Donna Givens Davidson:A commodity. Thank you, I was trying to think of the word for that. We treat water like it's a commodity and not like it's a resource worthy of protection. Mayor Pingree was actually in favor of free water, right? And I think beyond that.
Donna Givens Davidson:I've been talking to people and very few people say well, you know, somebody has to pay for water. Well, somebody has to pay for roads, somebody has to pay for police service and fire service and you know, just, public lighting and all of those things come out of tax dollars, not out of rates. And the problem with a water rate is that a flat rate is regressive, right? If I'm rich, the water rate means nothing to me, but if I'm poor, it means so much it feels to me as though the rate should be tethered to ability to pay. And the mayor the current mayor who's running for governor says well, you know you can't do that because there's a bolt to decision in Lansing that stops that from happening, but it's never been tested, right? You can't tell me that you believe in me having rights and then you don't test the law to see how far you can push it to grant me those rights.
Donna Givens Davidson:Now, if the mayor tested that, I would have been in one position, but you know, since then I've been in another. Okay, so that's water. We've talked about environmental justice, somewhat right, but I want to say something else about water. The Colorado River, all of the draining of aquifers in the Pacific Southwest is really damaging and scary to me, because the rivers and lakes are shrinking or they're declining. But it feels like there's very little federal protection for that and this current president is doing everything he can to unprotect every resource in the United States.
Abdul El-Sayed:So anyway, other things that you're running on. Let me comment on that real quick. Sustainability is a real thing, whether people want to admit that, you need to be thoughtful about how you use your resources. Everybody in their life knows that if you use too much of a thing, it goes away, and when you do it on a grand scale, it's a lot harder to make up for in the long term. And part of the way that we as a society have addressed unsustainable situations is to invest deeply in research that helps us to unlock new opportunities.
Abdul El-Sayed:Right Like. There is no reason in America in 2025 that we shouldn't be investing deeply in desalination research, or that the Southwest should be draining a very, very limited resource in the Colorado River when instead you should be able to desalinate like places like the Pacific Ocean. Now look, I know that that might be the long term, might run into its own challenges, but the idea that we're not invested in more research and we're pulling back on research investment in a time when they're making deeply unsustainable decisions makes zero sense to me, and that's a place where federal policy really matters.
Donna Givens Davidson:I remember there was a 13-year-old kid in Africa who was able to desalinate water.
Abdul El-Sayed:Yeah.
Donna Givens Davidson:And it made the news, and so you take it to the next scale. But it feels like this president is targeting research, universities and research, because not only does he not want the federal government to invest, he doesn't want these things to be done. Yeah, so crazy to me. Okay, so we have that. We have the environment, and I want to hear about the environment and healthcare.
Abdul El-Sayed:Yes. So let's start with healthcare, because that happens to be my jam. So I literally wrote the book on Medicare for All. I have a very clear and succinct grasp on what the challenges in our current healthcare system are. Right now, unfortunately, we spend nearly one in every $5 in this country on healthcare, and that cost is going up. To compare that, in places like Canada they're spending just a bit more than one in every $10, right, and for that we are getting a system that has huge holes in it, where you have multiple classes, where there are some people who can't get high quality healthcare and there are some people who can get as much of it as they want, and we're in a situation right now where they're about to strip it away from even more people because of this big ugly bill. Right, You're watching as Medicaid is going to get gutted. Rural and urban hospitals are going to get destroyed.
Donna Givens Davidson:But that's 2026, right? So they very cleverly kick the can down the road so that people will not feel that pain at the midterms. I would imagine in your run you're going to let people know what's coming in December, right?
Abdul El-Sayed:I mean absolutely. And also I'm going to be running against a Republican, highly likely, who's voted to raise the price of your prescription drugs 60 times. I'm the guy who led the effort to eliminate $700 million in medical debt. So, when it comes down to it, right, it's not enough just to get Medicaid back yes, of course. Medicaid back yes, of course. But also we should have access to healthcare for everyone guaranteed, regardless of whether or not you turn 26 or got married, or got divorced, or got a job, or lost a job, or turned 65, all reasons why you can lose your healthcare in this country. You should have cradle to grave healthcare guaranteed for you, without the worry of having to pay a premium or a deductible or a copay. It should just be there for you. And in the richest, most powerful country in the world, what they just showed is that they don't actually care about budget deficits, right, because they just blew out the national debt another $3.5 trillion to give billionaires a tax cut.
Donna Givens Davidson:Republicans always explode the budget deficit. They run against Democrats, criticizing Democrats for the budget deficits, and then they explode it. The manipulation of this party is nothing short of sickening. But yes, I agree with you that we need to do something different and I really hope that we can take on healthcare as a human right right, absolutely.
Donna Givens Davidson:Because as advances come in human knowledge and in our understanding of the world, those advances should be shared freely among people. It shouldn't be hoarded for those people who can afford to pay. It's shocking to me that in a nation that calls itself a Christian nation, people don't believe in Christ. But let's move on to the environment.
Abdul El-Sayed:And this is the place where I think these things all connect. Right now, we have a sick care system, and all the incentive in the system is to wait for you to get sick and then charge you up the nose for having gotten sick. We can and should and must invest in keeping people healthy, and part of that is keeping the globe healthy. I think oftentimes when we've talked about climate change, it's been talked about as an issue happening over there right, like the picture you see is of a polar bear, and let's be clear, none of us see polar bears. What I want folks to think is that every single greenhouse gas that we emit gets sieved through the lungs of our children and it makes them sick as it goes out to the atmosphere and makes the globe sick. And we're watching. As you know, rainstorms right come out of nowhere in Texas and swallow whole communities alive 26 inches in 45 minutes.
Abdul El-Sayed:It's insane, but that kind of thing didn't happen all that often in the past. We're setting records for the hottest days, right, and let's be clear, every time it gets that hot, many people die.
Donna Givens Davidson:Well, you know, this is one of the things in my class that I've been teaching. That I talk about is that you may not live near places where the air is being polluted and so you don't know it's being polluted. You may not live near places where the water is dirty, so you don't know the water is being polluted. You may not live near places where there's pollution on the land that has all the legacy pollution that's in our communities, but there's one air, our communities, but there's one air, there's one water and, ultimately, one soil, because pollution travels. And so the challenge is you cannot insulate your kids from what's coming, not really, even if you don't smell it directly. I mean, when Stellantis was expanding, the folks in Grosse Pointe were worried because they understood we're not that far from there.
Donna Givens Davidson:Right, that's exactly right how do you get that message out?
Abdul El-Sayed:I think part of it is. Let's be clear, the reason that we are stuck where we are when it comes to this is because corporations haven't been forced to bear the cost of their pollution, and they've done this by using arguments about two things that they create so many jobs or that the willingness to hold them accountable is going to increase the cost of our electricity. And so there's a couple things we need to do. Number one, we need to take their influence out of our politics. And number two, we need to invest in research that ultimately buys us out of any sort of energy question that exists. And number three, we need to fight for fair unions. And so you do those three things, and at some point, the notion that we're burning stuff out of the ground into the lungs of our babies to destroy our earth becomes so unserious and illogical and ridiculous that it is self-indicting.
Donna Givens Davidson:You know, I have just one point, and we do have to wrap it up the Cilantro plant that's poisoning our community. It's not the engines that are causing the poison, it's not the welding, those aren't the things that are happening. It's the paint. In 2025, we are using paint that makes people sick, as if we don't know how to manufacture non-toxic paint. There are countries in the world that regulate what kind of paints can be used on vehicles that are manufactured there. Maybe the paint is not quite as shiny, maybe it's not quite as durable, but people live.
Abdul El-Sayed:But you know what it's really about. It's about expense. It's that it's less expensive to use that toxic paint, and it's bad for workers, it's bad for the community and it's unnecessary. And the question is ultimately one of are we willing to force a corporation to spend a bit more money to protect the health of its workforce and its community?
Donna Givens Davidson:And sometimes it's a matter of a bit more money now, not continued money, because eventually the cost will level off. I'm so glad you brought up workers, because people get mad at workers in some of these places, not understanding that if we're smelling this stuff out here, they're working in those conditions and it's even worse for them. So when we say we're trying to protect a workforce, I remember Rashida Tlaib came here when this was first planned. She spoke at an annual meeting and she said at that time that people cannot work while they're dead and so we have to look at keeping people alive. We have to look at the fact that we're actually killing people and people's lives are foreshortened by all of these systems of injustice. So how can people get in touch with you for your campaign? How can they support you?
Abdul El-Sayed:So I hope that folks will go to abdulforsenatecom. They can sign up to volunteer, they can sign up to donate to the campaign. They can also follow us on social media. We're on all the major platforms TikTok, Twitter, that other place, Instagram.
Donna Givens Davidson:How about Blue Sky?
Abdul El-Sayed:We're on Blue Sky. You can follow us on YouTube. We're everywhere.
Donna Givens Davidson:Substack Do you have a Substack?
Abdul El-Sayed:We have a Substack. We literally got everything, so I hope that folks will choose where they want to follow us hopefully several, but we're having conversations that I hope folks will find refreshingly honest and direct and specific about what needs to happen and how it needs to happen, and we cannot do this without folks themselves deciding that they want to be a part of a movement for something bigger. I don't take corporate money, because I think it's essentially what's wrong with our system that too many politicians get bought off by corporations and get told what to do when they're in office. That's not what you'd be electing me for, and so I am hoping that I can build alongside you. You can join this movement, and I hope that folks will go to AbdulForSenatecom.
Donna Givens Davidson:All right. Now, when you go to, you're having listening campaigns all throughout the state and I imagine you're going to listen on the East Side one day.
Abdul El-Sayed:Yes, ma'am, all right, You'll let us know when we will.
Donna Givens Davidson:Okay, well, I want to thank you for joining us today. Do you have any shout-outs? Today, it's time for shout-outs, where we just recognize and highlight a person who's done something great.
Abdul El-Sayed:You know, given that we're in Detroit today, I want to highlight somebody who folks probably have never met, who is an organizer out of Soux, st Marie, named Chloe Cannon. And the reason I shout out Chloe Cannon is because Chloe is a member of the Sioux tribe out there and went to all of the most prestigious schools and then made a commitment to an elder that she would move back and she did. And I got to meet her when I was up there and it was one of those experiences where, in sitting down and listening to the challenges that elders talked about, that young people talked about, I could have closed my eyes and I could have been in Detroit, I could have been here on the east side, and Chloe opened my eyes to that problem, reminded me yet again that the challenges that working people who have been locked outside of our politics face are the same Whether you're talking about Sioux tribal elders or elders at the church down the street.
Donna Givens Davidson:You know, what would be really interesting is if you can bring groups of people together to listen to each other, so they can hear from each other, not just from you. I think that would be an interesting campaign approach.
Abdul El-Sayed:I love that. I love that we should do it in the spirit of podcasting. I feel like in the year of our Lord, 2025, we have the technology for that, so I appreciate that, ms.
Donna Givens Davidson:Connell, Absolutely. I think that there's ways for us to listen to each other. In the spirit of my grandmother, and I suppose I will recognize her we were in the federal court today and my sister presided over the immigrants and she raised a picture of my grandmother. And so in the spirit of my grandmother, who invested in me a sense of justice and connectedness of human beings and this idea that God loves all of us and we shouldn't pick and choose, I think this is a year for solidarity.
Donna Givens Davidson:I think this is a year for bringing people together and saying we, together, don't like injustice, so that next year, during your I'm sure vicious Senate, fight because you're running against a Democrat as well right, it's going to be a pretty intense Democratic primary.
Donna Givens Davidson:She's made some pretty disappointing decisions lately to some of us, but we don't need to get into her. But you're running. You're not running by yourself. It's going to be intense. Hopefully we'll still see unity in that process. We will not be divided among ourselves in the way that we've allowed ourselves to be in the past.
Abdul El-Sayed:Yeah, I agree.
Donna Givens Davidson:So listen. If you have topics that you want discussed on Authentically Detroit, you can hit us up on our socials at Authentically Detroit on Facebook, instagram and Twitter, or you can email us at authenticallydetroit at gmailcom. Thank you so much for listening. Love on your neighbor Outro Music.
