Lizzo has never been shy to use her platform to amplify the issues that matter to her, and her recent Instagram Live with Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) was no different.
On Friday, September 18, the Grammy winner hosted a conversation with the vice presidential candidate in honor of National Black Voter Day, which was hosted by BET, the National Urban League, and other partner organizations, per The Hill. During the 30-minute chat, Lizzo asked Harris about her work as a district attorney in San Francisco and later as the Attorney General of California, how she would respond to viewers who are calling to defund the police, and what the Biden/Harris campaign is doing to ensure folks that a vote for them goes beyond a lukewarm “anyone but Trump” mentality.
“We live in a culture that demands accountability, especially from our public figures. You and I are not excluded from that, we’ve both known our fair share of backlash. I have seen backlash sometimes about your policies being anti-Black,” Lizzo said in her very first question. “How do you feel about that, and how does that inform your campaign for VP so that Black people feel heard?”
In response, Harris touched on her work in California, and explained that her career was driven from a desire to “to go inside the system to see if I could fix it from the inside.”
“We really ought to know the power that we have in every place, and never decide that any one place is excluded from us being there to get the kind of change that we want,” she said. “So I made the decision to go up the rough side of the mountain, to go inside the system, but I also understand the brilliance of being outside of the system when you have the brilliance of Black Lives Matter and that movement and what it has done to force change.”
Harris also touched on the importance of voting as a means to enact change. “When we talk about National Black Voter day and voting day, it is about saying each one of us should use our voice and own our power,” she said. “And when we own our power I think we know that there is no place that is off-limits for us, no matter what people suggest.”
The two also talked about voter suppression specifically as it impacts Black Americans, the Trump administration’s attempts to gut the Affordable Care Act (which would decimate healthcare access to millions of people in the middle of a pandemic), and the outsized ways in which Black people in America are being impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The moral of the story is vote, vote, vote, vote, vote,” Lizzo said after their call was over. “Do not be discouraged. Do not feel swayed either way but just use your voice, period.” She also touched on what she described as an “insane amount of privilege to be able to speak to a candidate” for national office, “but the fact that I can was important to me because I need to know things. I’ve got a lot of questions and I need to know.”
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