Representative Akasha Lawrence Spence | Black Beat Podcast
/Representative Akasha Lawrence Spence joins John Washington and Fawn Aberson for a conversation on the Black Beat Podcast. Oregon House Representative Akasha Lawrence Spence (D) of District #36 serves Portland’s West Side. This includes the Downtown, SW Waterfront and Chinatown areas as well as parts of the NW & SW Hills and Multnomah Village. She was appointed by Multnomah County Commissioners to replace former state Rep. Jennifer Williamson, D-Portland, who resigned in December of 2019 to run for Oregon secretary of state in the 2020 election. Representative Lawrence Spence will hold this position until January of 2021, choosing not to run in the general election. In the Legislature, she strive to create a new level of transparency, engagement, and accountability in the public sphere, centering the voices of the underrepresented and marginalized, a platform she championed during her tenure on The City of Portland's Planning and Sustainability Commission. A transplant from Brooklyn, NY where she worked for Senator Chuck Schumer and a variety of other political campaigns, she became unfulfilled with bipartisan politics and decided to pursue architecture and design instead, and relocated to Portland, Oregon. She is the Founder & Principal Designer of Fifth Element and the founder and President of Melanated a women/femme of color (WFOC) organization, over 250 members strong, based on 3 pillars - civic engagement, financial empowerment, and community stewardship. Everything she focuses on is around economic justice, believing that you can’t have environmental or social justice without it. She joins our host, John Washington, in a conversation that is intellectually empowering and, as always, unapologetically Black in nature. They cover subjects that range from the fear of Black males; the economics of Covid-19; why Black people need to own more buildings; and how politics is in EVERYTHING.
