Name: Kelsye Adams 

Occupation: Director of Programs at DC Vote and Executive Director of Long Live GoGo 
Hometown: Washington, DC 

Tell me a little bit about yourself. How long have you lived in DC? 

I am a young activist and advocate by choice. Everyone says advocacy is my artistry, so I like to intersect politics and culture to make moves for various different issues, one specifically being DC Statehood, that I currently work on — in a few facets, not just locally but nationally — as well as other issues that affect disenfranchised communities here in Washington, DC. I’m a graduate of Dunbar Senior High School, which was the first high school for African Americans in the country. I’m also a resident of the U Street Corridor, so I’m a proud Ward 1 resident. I’m doing a lot of work in the U Street community to uplift the idea that used to lie here, which was ‘Black Broadway,’ so I’ve been working on various efforts to bring back that unity to the community. I’m basically just a vehicle for unity in the community — that’s how I would term myself. 

Why did you decide to move to DC?

 

After college, I did come back to DC. I just teleworked for the most part, because I was a fundraiser so we did a lot of work on the phone, and I would just travel to my office maybe once a week which was in Richmond, [about] two hours away. When a bunch of turmoil occurred in Virginia — and me being an African American woman — it led me to leaving Virginia and being more dedicated to what was going on here in DC. That was in response to the Metro PCS incident that occurred when they tried to disenfranchise the Go-Go community here in DC. I feel like I was more so pushed back to DC because of the space that I was in and me wanting to make sure that I was showing up for my people. 

What do you love most about living in DC? 

The thing I love most about DC is probably the opportunities that it opens the door for. With it being the nation’s capital — which is so cool — it’s just a lot going on all the time. We have a vibrant nightlife scene, we have beautiful museums, the tourist rates are pretty high, so we have a lot of things for people to do here. And it’s pretty diverse in [terms of] meeting new people. As far as residents actually living here, it [was] formerly “Chocolate City,” now, [it’s] more like a ‘vanilla bean pie.’ As far as tourism is concerned, with us being the nation’s capital, it just drives a lot of people to the city, so you get to meet people that are from different places, and you get a background of what others are going through in different parts of the country. 

Could you talk about your own experience being disenfranchised, or in other words, what it has been like to lose the rights you had when you were living in one of the 50 states? 

It wasn’t necessarily something that I felt as an actual [feeling] — this disenfranchisement and not having a voice in Congress — but once you start learning more about the nuances on things that people who we did elect here in the city aren’t able to move on, that’s where it opened the door to that layer of the disenfranchisement. 

I worked in Virginia politically before transitioning back to DC. I’m a graduate of VCU and during my time at VCU, I became a finance intern for the Democratic Party, which led to me being the former Governor Ralph Northam’s finance director for his PAC ‘The Way Ahead.’ I feel in that space is where I was more hands-on with learning about [the priorities of] members of the state and how they bring stuff into play and into action versus going back to DC and seeing kind of the same movements being made, but the results are just vastly different, so you [ask why] and it’s literally because of that blockade of the federal government. Coming from working in Virginia, the realization of not having that voice and not having that anchor like a Tim Kaine and a Mark Warner that Virginia has — and not having anyone at all here in DC — on a national level, makes the city not show up at its best and it’s more so, again, because of that lack of being able to make your own laws.

 

What does achieving statehood mean for you? 

I know it might seem like a boring response, but it really just means an actual voice in Congress. I say that so lightly because the voice is also just the first step. Again, working with Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, I’ve seen what having seniority in different committees looks like, and just being involved in the congressional conversation for so long, puts Virginia in a different place than DC would be in, because DC would be new to the conversation. Then the next go would be to build that reputation of what the need looks like for the DC members of Congress. 

Generally speaking, it is a voice — at minimum, we can at least get a voice. I think that is the basic fundament of democracy. It’s just unfortunate that we’re the only nation’s capital in the world whose residents don’t have a voice in the democracy [and] making decisions for the nation. We’re disenfranchising over 700,000 people who actually live here for the same reasons that we’re [providing] support to other places. The actual voice seems like something so light, but it’s so meaningful when you’ve been blocked out of the conversation, for not just some time, but the entire time. 

What do you think needs to be done to get closer to achieving statehood? 

It’s blasphemy that the last vote before the last disapproval resolution was 86-14. I don’t want to embarrass us as DC, but we know how many Democrats are in the Senate — there’s more than 14 of them, so that vote should have looked differently. If the Democrats would step up and really support the issue, I feel the rest of the country would — as patrons and citizens — see it as an issue and then would want to foster more support around it. I believe the current situation that we’re in, is hopeless. If you can’t even rely on the party who’s endorsing this as an issue and [championing] it and bringing in that change, but as soon as something occurs [they’re] disapproving it, that’s literally the complete opposite of what it would look like if we had voices in Congress. 

The first layer is going to be either for the Democrats to step it up or DC residents to just not show up so democratically. Either way, the democratic system of the country, where the Democrats are making it seem like they’re going to support x issue but not, is the ultimate issue, because if you’re not going to show up for us, there’s literally no way we can rely on anybody else to show up for us. If that means we need to take another approach to this, then that means we need to take another approach. It’s just not clear that the Democrats are supporting DC Statehood. They say they are, but then again, this disapproval resolution — mind you, I majored in political science [and] never heard of a disapproval resolution — they’re saying it hasn’t occurred in thirty years; I feel like even if it happened thirty years ago, it still should have been in a textbook — it wasn’t! The whole idea of disapproval resolutions not occurring anywhere else and they only affect residents of Washington, DC doesn’t seem democratic at all. Again, the Democrats are going to have to step it up for me to feel at least a little bit hopeful about the current [situation] the Statehood fight is in. I always say that we’re no longer asking, we’re demanding, but to make this demand make sense, we still need the people who say they’re on our side to be intentional about being on our side. 

Is there anything else you would like to say? 

I do want to mention something about artistic activism as far as where Statehood is going. I feel like the use of artistic activism is becoming a huge vessel for success for what that fight looks like. I feel like the influence that we’re building from artistic activism approaches we’re taking is building a bigger supporting audience for DC Statehood.