Meet Anoushka Chander

Anoushka Chander is a senior at Harvard College from Washington, D.C. studying Social Studies and African American Studies with a focus on women’s rights, racial justice, and the law. She works as an Assistant Producer and intern at Ms. Studios at Ms. Magazine, where she hosts The Z Factor: Gen Z’s Voice and Vote and helped produce Torn Apart: Abolishing Family Policing and Reimagining Child Welfare and United Bodies. At Harvard, she runs the Future Leaders in Public Service Conference for public service-minded high school students and is the lead singer in the all-senior pop/funk band Charles Revival. Her work has been featured in Vice News, the Harvard Gazette, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Ms. Magazine. She is excited to champion youth voices in every space.

Background Reading

• Tennessee State Rep. and National Figure Justin J. Pearson ’17 Gives Black History Month Keynote | Bowdoin College
• Check out the Future Caucus website, an organization dedicated to empowering young leaders.
• Gen Z seeks to grow ranks in Congress, The Hill. 

Transcript

00:00:22 Anoushka Chander:

Generation Z, we’re the most diverse generation in American history. We’re the Screenagers, the digital natives, the Zoomers. We are the youth activist generation and the climate change generation, but who is Gen Z, really? Welcome to episode two of The Z Factor: Gen Z’s Voice & Vote. I am your host Anoushka Chander. On this podcast, we amplify the voices of young people in America, from students in Florida fighting book bans, to young lawmakers in Tennessee working to end gun violence, to young people just trying to make it by every day. 

Are you Gen Z? Gen Z was born between the mid 1990s and early 2010s, so we are between the ages of 12 and 27. Our formative years were marked by a global pandemic, rapid climate change, rampant gun violence, democratic backsliding, and movements for women’s rights and racial justice. Joining me, as we unpack Gen Z’s voice in state legislatures, is Representative Justin J. Pearson from Tennessee.

A community organizer and advocate for gun violence prevention, Rep. Pearson serves the people of Memphis in the Tennessee House of Representatives. When he was elected in January 2023, he was the second youngest person to serve in the Tennessee Legislature. In April 2023, Rep. Pearson was expelled from the Tennessee House by his Republican colleagues for protesting gun violence on the House floor in the wake of a mass shooting in Nashville that killed three 9-year-olds.

Rep. Pearson was reinstated in the House and officially won his seat back in August 2023 with 94% of the vote. He’s been serving the people of Tennessee ever since, and has also become a national leader, speaking out for gun safety at the Democratic National Convention this summer. We’re so excited to have you on the podcast. Welcome, and thank you for speaking with us, Representative Pearson.

00:02:20 Representative Justin J. Pearson:

Thank you so much for having me. I’m grateful to be here, Anoushka.

00:02:23 Anoushka Chander:

Thank you so much. So, I want to start by asking you about your roots. You come from a service-minded family. Your mom is a teacher. Your father is a preacher. So, how did your upbringing inform your values and your commitment to social justice?

00:02:38 Representative Justin J. Pearson:

Yeah. My upbringing has everything to do with where I have gotten, and I am so fortunate and grateful to all of the people on the journey who helped me to be, and to become, who I am. My grandmothers, God rest their souls, my Grandma McGuinn and my Grandma Pearson, they always wanted us to know this phrase. Never forget where you come from, and that is something that extends across our community, whether it be the folks who work at the gas station or the people who you meet on Sundays at church.

You never want to forget where you come from, and that was really instilled in me, because it instilled in me a belief that our work as a community, in our community, matters, and remembering all of the people and the experiences and the journeys, the difficult days, the hard times, the challenging moments, as well as the beautiful joy that we create amidst strife is something that lives within who I am. I mean, the truth of the matter is, you know, I grew up financially poor, but spiritually rich. I had the good fortune and privilege of having two parents, four brothers, and two strong matriarchs in our lives, who helped to direct and guide my path. Allowed me the opportunity to go to college.

My parents went to college before me, earned master’s degrees, up from the challenges where they were. Now my mom’s earning a doctorate degree, and so, I had a value in education. Had a value in community. Had a value in family, and had a value in service. That all really helped to shape my perspective, and I always wanted to give back. I always wanted to give back to the kids who grew up like I’d grown up. I wanted to give back to the community that I had come from.

00:04:12 Anoushka Chander:

Absolutely, and you know, I read a little bit about your advocacy work when you were in high school, for education equity in your high school community. So, how did you get started as an activist and organizer when you were in high school in your hometown?

00:04:27 Representative Justin J. Pearson:

Yeah. So, I had lived in Virginia for 4 or 5 years while my dad attended Howard University and earned his master’s degree. We came home when I was in 10th grade, and immediately, I realized a lot was different from the schools that I had attended. We didn’t have as many textbooks. We didn’t have as many resources. Teachers weren’t even in some of the classrooms.

And it was really apparent to me, at 15 years old, that there was no way we were going to be able to access a college degree without even having textbooks, right, the resources that we needed to be able to go to the elite universities or colleges that we might want to attend, nor have the scores that we’d need to be able to get inside of those places, and so, I went to the school board, again, at 15 years old, nine weeks after school started, and said, I don’t have textbooks in all of my classes. We are being deprived of resources in our school, and I know this isn’t the way that it has to be.

I’ve experienced what it’s like to have an infinite amount of resources, seemingly, and know that we are being deprived of resources in an intentional way, while other schools across town have a smorgasbord of resources and textbooks and information and people in their classrooms and teachers in their classrooms, and so, that fight really began at that moment, and over the next several years, we would not only get more textbooks, we would get new teachers. We’d get more advanced placement courses. We’d get a new principal, and we saw transformation really taking place and taking hold for our entire class and our entire school, and the community benefited, not just those of us who were there at the time.

00:06:06 Anoushka Chander:

That’s an amazing story, and it’s very clear that your transformational work only began in high school, and so, after you went to college, you were a community organizer. I’m curious, what inspired you to decide, you know, at 28, you wanted to run for public office? Did you always know you wanted to be in politics and policy, or was that something that you decided later on?

00:06:29 Representative Justin J. Pearson:

Yeah. No, I always wanted to be in politics and in government. I studied government and legal studies at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. I ran for president in kindergarten, I think, in sixth grade, and in college, I ran for office to be student government this and that.

And so, I always liked politics and was engaged in it and appreciated those small experiences, because it taught me that, you know what? You can make a difference. You can make an impact, even as a young person, and you know, when I moved to Boston, where I worked first, I learned community organizing from my Godmamma, Sister Phaedra. She would host these picnics to end gun violence. We would host fall festivals for the kids in the neighborhood, and our neighborhood was sometimes difficult and challenging, particularly with gun violence in Roxbury.

And those skills really came in handy after I moved home during the height of the 2020 pandemic, and we learned about a project that was seeking to be built, a multi-billion-dollar crude oil pipeline through our community, and I used those community-organizing skills and the skills I’d learned as an executive in a nonprofit dealing with workforce development, really, to fight back and to help organize and mobilize our community for the fight against these corporations, and we were successful in that fight, glory be to God, and so, we protected over a million people’s drinking water.

We protected hundreds of people’s land in Tennessee and in Mississippi, actually, and my mentor throughout that fight was Representative Dr. Barbara Ward Cooper, my predecessor, and she passed away at 93 years old in 2022 in the fall. She still won her election posthumously, and I ran for office in an effort to continue her legacy and her work of being a conduit of power from the General Assembly to the people and being a proximate leader, and that’s why, ultimately, I ran for office, in order to continue that work and to elevate the issues that we know are so prescient in our community.

00:08:40 Anoushka Chander:

Wow. That’s incredible, and I love the phrase, you know, being a conduit of power, because, you know, it’s so impactful for you to be one of the youngest representatives in the Tennessee Legislature. So, I’d love to hear about your experience. You know, how do you think your youth provides a unique and important perspective in the House, and do you think you focus on different issues than your colleagues because of your age?

00:09:06 Representative Justin J. Pearson:

Absolutely. I focus on different issues and bring a different perspective than the majority of my colleagues in the General Assembly, and I pray, as we continue this work, we get even more young people in elected office, and I hope, when I leave this office, somebody even younger, 25, joins the General Assembly, because we need to usher in a new generation of leadership, a new generation of perspective, and a new generation of energy into our political system, because a lot of my colleagues, they don’t think about climate change and environmental justice the ways that we do.

They don’t think about ending the gun violence epidemic that has really been a staple of our lives the way that we do. They don’t think about economic opportunity and the need to have a good job and want to start a life, you know, post your post-secondary education experience. They just don’t think about it in the same ways, because they’re really holding onto a very old way of being and an old way of doing things.

And so, I think the perspective that I bring, as a younger person, it really comes with the responsibility of speaking for the millions of young people who are under the age of 36, really, and younger, who don’t really have a voice in government, and the people who are in positions of power aren’t too keen to listen to us, despite the fact that people 18 to 36 are the most significant voting bloc in the country, and so, now, I think being there in the State House is allowing me a chance and an opportunity to elevate those issues in a way that other people choose not to or may not be able to.

00:10:49 Anoushka Chander:

Absolutely, and so, you know, I’m curious, when you represent young people in your legislative work, do you prioritize listening to and seeking out the opinions and experiences of your younger constituents?

00:11:02 Representative Justin J. Pearson:

Absolutely. I’m always trying to get younger people. In fact, the person who works closest with me…one of the people who works closest with me is a gentleman by the name of Jermaine Cole Jr., and he’s 19, and we’ve traveled across the country on behalf of the Harris-Walz campaign, but he is a consistent thought partner. Not just, you know, a worker on our team, but a thought partner of mine, so that I can be proximate as possible to what’s going on, because that 10 years of difference is still 10 years of difference, right?

We’re all young, but the experiences that we’ve had is still quite different. I think about all the high schools that I go and visit, the middle schools I go and visit, actually, some of the elementary schools I go and visit, people who can vote and people who cannot vote, to hear what are the issues that matter? And hopefully, next year, we’ll be launching a youth advisory board for District 86, which will be a committee where all I do is listen, right, and really hear what the problems and issues are of our younger constituents, so that we can seek to address them.

00:12:06 Anoushka Chander:

Thank you so much, Representative Pearson. So, you know, I want to talk about those issues that you mentioned that young people care about. Gun violence prevention, environmental justice, housing affordability, you know, access to jobs. So, I mean, you, clearly, are a champion for all of these issues and especially gun violence prevention. You spoke about, earlier, that being something that your community experienced, and that really inspired you to become a public servant, and you know, a lot of people may know you because you were expelled from office for standing up for common sense gun laws. So, tell me a bit about the work that you’re doing to address gun violence in Tennessee, what motivates you in this work, and how you’re connected to the wider youth movement for gun violence prevention.

00:12:54 Representative Justin J. Pearson:

Well, I mean, if it wasn’t for young folks, including people like March for Our Lives, David Hogg, Leaders We Deserve, and so many others, I don’t think the conversation around gun violence prevention would be at the level that it is, and I’m really grateful to the young leadership that has really elevated this conversation in a way that it hadn’t been before, in addition to the organizations.

Every town and several others that are providing research data, information, and energy in the South, in particular, in the fight, but I mean, the truth of the matter is, the only way that I’m able to…the best way that I’m able to use my position of power is to bring forward legislation and to fight for it, to be heard, and so, that’s bans on assault weapons. That is moving forward legislation that repeals permitless carry, which is allowing people to carry firearms, despite the fact that they have zero training to be able to do so, and moving forward, legislation that is increasing access to mental health resources, seeking to reduce the amount of suicides that are happening with the uses of firearms in different parts of our state.

And so, it’s got to be a multi-pronged approach, and we don’t have a lot of time to, you know, go pebble by pebble, not even brick by brick, in solving it. We have to have more dramatic and drastic action, and so, legislatively, I have put forward over 20 different bills to address the gun violence epidemic. In this upcoming session, I’ll put up a whole lot more, probably 20 more bills to address the gun violence epidemic, because it is a solvable thing, and I think that’s very important for everyone here to realize. That gun violence is preventable. We don’t have to live in this way.

And the people who are against us, the National Rifle Association, the Tennessee Firearms Association, these other organizations and entities are all just beneficiaries of the harm, the hurt, the death that is happening, and the only way we resist that is by getting leaders in place who are willing to fight, which is why our city council is fighting and putting local referendums related to gun violence on the ballot, so that we can reinstate permit to carry. We can ensure we have extreme risk protection orders. We can ensure that we ban assault weapons, at least locally, and that’s contingent upon some things happening at the state, but it’s us making a strong statement, for sure.

00:15:14 Anoushka Chander:

Absolutely. So, you’re working tirelessly on gun violence prevention, but also working to prioritize issues of environmental justice and housing affordability, and these issues are critical for young people who want to be able to, as you said before, afford a home, live in a sustainable world, get a job, when they want to be able to, you know, start their lives. So, I’m curious, you know, how are you building on these issues in the Tennessee House? How are you building consensus in a legislative body that seems stacked against you on many of these issues?

00:15:48 Representative Justin J. Pearson:

Yeah. No, I think the challenge of our General Assembly is a real one. We’ve got a supermajority Republican Legislature that does not really want to listen to the voices of all the people. They are more keen to listen to the voices of the lobbyists and the corporations than of the individuals in our communities that are advocating for their voices to be heard, and so, that does and has created some substantial challenges to the progress that we want to create. I’m not going to pretend that that’s not a reality, but to your point, there is a way that we can find common ground.

The only bill that I’ve ever had to pass through a subcommittee was related to environmental justice and providing access to information about Toxic Release Inventory facilities, and Republicans helped me to pass that thing through. Ultimately, it was defeated in the main committee, but that possibility of finding common ground is something we can never give up on, and I think, ultimately, that’s what we have to remind ourselves. We don’t have to compromise ourselves into oblivion. We need to find common ground on the issues that we can care about, that we care about together, so that we don’t end up leaving people behind.

00:16:54 Anoushka Chander:

Absolutely, and so, you know, you’re working in this Republican supermajority. You’re one of the youngest people in a lot of these rooms. Do you ever get intimidated or discouraged by, you know, these centuries-old structures, centuries-old colleagues that you’re trying to challenge?

00:17:14 Representative Justin J. Pearson:

I mean, I don’t really get intimidated by them, because, you know, my community elected me with over 94% of the vote. I think we’ve never had…our first election, we had 52%. I’ve always had a majority of people, an overwhelming majority of people, who wanted me to serve, and they know, and I articulate clearly what I believe and how I hope to serve, and so, I don’t get intimidated, but I will be honest with you, that racism, sexism, white supremacy, patriarchy are real challenges, and they aren’t going away.

And so, we have to work our way through them and sometimes seeking to destroy those pillars of pain that really do have effects on legislation and outcomes of our people, and so, I don’t get intimidated, but we have to be eyes wide open to the fact that our institutions are being imbued with these unjust systems, and they have been for a very long time, but the only way to solve that, the only way to challenge that, the only way to defeat that is by confronting it head on. We can’t be cowards in the face of injustice. We have to have courage.

00:18:27 Anoushka Chander:

Absolutely. So, you’ve spoken a bit about finding common ground. Not only compromise, but common ground, and I’ve heard you say this before, and you said this just recently just now, and so, I’m wondering, can you elaborate on what you mean by finding common ground rather than compromise?

00:18:47 Representative Justin J. Pearson:

Common ground doesn’t require you to move, right? Compromise, oftentimes in the political sense, says you give a little, I give a little, you get a little, and then I get a little, right? But it requires this movement, and a lot of people, for a long time, have said, politics is all about compromise.

You can’t get everything you want. You can’t get everything you want, but what I’ve realized in my experience serving in the State House of Democrats, in particular, who compromise…they do compromise with the colleagues on the other side of the aisle, but by the time they finish compromising, they’ve compromised the entire community. They’ve compromised black folk. They’ve compromised immigrants. They’ve compromised women. They’ve compromised youth. They’ve compromised a whole lot of things for one bill to get passed, and I refuse to do that.

Instead, I’m willing to stand on the strength of my district support and what I know to be true about my district and say, well, if you are worried about gun violence, I also am worried about gun violence. What can we do? You’re worried about climate and environment, I’m worried about climate and environment. What can we do? Start from a place of common ground instead of a place that starts with the deficit mindset that, oh, I’m going to have to give up something. I’m going to have to give up my belief that climate change is real. I’m going to have to give up my belief that everybody deserves a good job and living wages.

You know, instead of coming from a place where…a deficit where we’re starting behind, what if we start from the strength that we are morally right and we are also politically right and standing from the strength of that? And that’s what I encourage a lot of young leaders to do. It’s like, you don’t have to compromise yourself and your community that you love and that loves you, right, into oblivion just to get somebody to curry favor from, right? You got to stand strong with what you believe and fight for that and fight with people who believe a similar thing.

00:20:53 Anoushka Chander:

I think that’s a really beautiful political philosophy. So, I’m curious, you know, this February, you spoke to students at your alma mater, Bowdoin College, to commemorate Black History Month, and I’d love to hear, for our listeners, what was your message to them, and what is your message for all young leaders today?

00:21:15 Representative Justin J. Pearson:

Yeah, I loved Bowdoin. I had an amazing experience there, and the first thing that I shared with them, particularly for the students of color, was that you can do this. You are capable. You are smart. You are brilliant, and that the institutional challenges that you will face are not insurmountable. That’s an important thing for us to realize and recognize, particularly when you come from groups that are historically oppressed. I think the other thing that I wanted them to realize, and is important for young folk to recognize, is this is our moment, and this is our time.

We only got the one that we’re in, and there’s no need to wait. So, you don’t need to wait your turn, right? You need to make your turn, and that’s in politics. That’s in government. That’s in media. That’s in all the other ways or facets that people are seeking to have impact, because the fierce urgency of this moment is real, and we can’t afford to have anybody sitting on the sidelines, and I think a really important thing for everyone to realize is that you’re powerful, and so many things try and tell you you’re not.

And if you’re a woman, you got the Supreme Court telling you you’re not powerful. If you’re a person of color, you got an entire criminal legal system telling you you’re not powerful and political systems devised to make sure that people are told that they’re not powerful, but we are. We are powerful, and people are terrified of our power and of the beauty of an intergenerational, multiethnic, multisocioeconomic movement for justice rooted in love, but we cannot be scared of our power. We have to be inspired by it, motivated by it, and use it to help uplift everybody.

00:22:58 Anoushka Chander:

Well, Representative Pearson, this has been an incredibly inspiring and moving conversation, and I know I look up to you as a leader in our community, and I know so many young people look up to you, as well, and thank you so much for the work that you’ve been doing. I have a final question for you, which is what I’m asking all of the guests on this podcast. I’m asking you guys to think about what your political walk-on song would be. Actually, because you’re actually a political representative, you probably have one, but like, for example, Kamala Harris’ is Freedom by Beyoncé. So, what is your walk-on stage song?

00:23:36 Representative Justin J. Pearson:

Yeah, I love that. The song we have used most often is all we do is win, win, win, no matter what. It’s an oldie, but goodie.

00:23:47 Anoushka Chander:

That’s amazing. Well, Representative Pearson, thank you so much for joining us on The Z Factor, and we look forward to seeing where your amazing political career goes next in the people’s lives who you transform along the way. Thank you.

00:24:01 Representative Justin J. Pearson:

Thank you so much.

00:24:12 Anoushka Chander:

Thank you for joining us on The Z Factor: Gen Z’s Voice & Vote, a podcast by and for Gen Z. I’m your host and producer, Anoushka Chander. The Z Factor is a Ms. Magazine and Ms. Studios production. Michele Goodwin is our executive producer. Our producers for The Z Factor include Allison Whelan, Morgan Carmen, and Roxy Szal. Art and design by Brandi Phipps, sound engineering by Natalie Paredes, and music by DimmySad and SKH Sounds. We’ll be back next week with more episodes about what young people across America are thinking, feeling, and experiencing. See you next time.