“I had always told myself people like me don’t run for office.”
Twenty-six-year-old Mariah Parker went viral this week after being sworn in as an Athens-Clarke county commissioner in Georgia on Tuesday, June 5. The new commissioner is black, openly queer, a PhD candidate in linguistics, a rapper, and dedicated to transformative politics for communities of color. She’s also a viral star thanks to an unconventional choice she made during her swearing-in.
Images of the new District 2 commissioner being sworn in on the steps of Athens City Hall using a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X instead of the Bible were quickly disseminated via social media. They’re stunning, showing a millennial black woman with an Afro that might make Angela Davis proud taking the oath of office with her right fist raised high. Her mother stands next to her, holding the radical book and beaming as her daughter is sworn in to represent District 2, a district described by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as “an economically struggling swath of east Athens that lacks some of the same amenities that other parts of town enjoyed.”
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“I honestly did not expect there to be such a clamoring of public response,” Parker tells Teen Vogue when asked about the social media responses. “It just seemed to me to be the sensible thing to do given my politics and who I am.”
Parker told the Journal-Constitution that she hopes to embody some of Malcolm X’s qualities, including his “willingness to uneditedly speak about black people at large.”
In many ways, Parker had always felt like she was unfit to run for public office. A rural Kentucky transplant who has battled depression, anxiety, and substance abuse, she had resigned herself to making a difference behind the scenes. Before running for county commissioner, she worked on the campaign of District 9 candidate Tommy Valentine, according to BuzzFeed News, and worked to integrate predominantly white spaces in downtown Athens as a hip-hop artist under the stage name Linqua Franqa.
“You can’t wait for a hero to show up. If you see injustice and you see a need for someone to take action, it has to be you,” she says. “Some of [those past struggles] are important for the styles of governance I strive to have.”
Parker credits Valentine for encouraging her to run for county commissioner. She replaces Harry Simms, who vacated his seat to run for mayor, according to Online Athens.
A doctoral student in linguistics at the University of Georgia (UGA) who identifies as queer, Parker won by 13 votes, according to the Journal-Constitution. She says she now sees growing up with a tumultuous family life and experiencing self-doubt as a result of “repeated racial aggressions” as a strength and way for her to ensure she’s always working to be the voice of underserved communities.
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Even attending UGA — a school where just 8% of the 2017 freshman class identified as African-American, according to The Red & Black, the university’s student-run newspaper — has helped shape Parker’s political goals. The publication reports Parker has worked as an activist in Athens, participating in DACA protests and local Women’s Marches.
“When I walk the halls of the university, a lot of the times the only people of color I see are maintenance workers,” Parker tells Teen Vogue. “I’m aware that when they go home at night, they might be food insecure, [struggle with] housing security and whether or not they’re going to be able to send their children to the University of Georgia.”
Parker ran as a progressive on a platform of fair wages, ending discrimination, affordable transportation (including free bus fare), and “fair access to lifelong education opportunities for every single person in Athens, regardless of economic background or past criminal history,” according to her campaign website. During a phone interview, she emphasized that her political beliefs are more about transformation than progression.
“We want to progress things, but we also want to transform them because the current systems that we have just aren’t working for most people,” she says. “Trying to make them as best we can isn’t enough. We have to completely restructure them.”
Parker, whose website says her responsibility as a commissioner is to “propose, lobby, and secure funding for ordinances that uplift the people of District 2,” describes being a minority in politics as “incredibly lonely.” After being sworn in on Tuesday, she immediately attended her first meeting, according to Online Athens.
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“A number of activists stood up to speak about an issue of police brutality and urged the community to support the police chief who fired an officer for assaulting a man with his police car,” she says of the meeting. “As I looked around, I realized that maybe no one sitting behind the rail with me had ever felt afraid of the police and that I was the only person potentially who knew what that felt like. It’s intimidating. It’s scary, but it’s truly an honor because I feel like for all of us to finally have that voice has been overdue for so long. I’m really, really glad that I have the chance to represent us in that way.”
Parker, who was voted in during a special election, hopes to run for a second four-year term in two years when the county's even-numbered districts will be on the ballot again. But for now she’s focused on changing the conversation in future meetings.
“A lot of commissioners are comfortable with keeping the conversation on sidewalk widths, but I want to have a bigger conversation about decreasing the prison population, income equality, and encouraging our young people to engage with society rather than getting involved with crime and increasing the prison population,” she says.
Like Parker, many black women and other women of color are running for public office, potentially making 2018 a year that could elect a record number of women to office.
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