The race for California governor won’t make room for Derek Grasty and Ramsey Robinson, and that’s exactly why you should be paying attention to them.
You won’t see either of them on TV much or in establishment debates. You may not even see their names in polling. But if you want to understand what’s really at stake for working and Black communities in this state, you need to hear what they’re saying.
I interviewed both men recently. What struck me wasn’t just that they’re Black candidates in a state where Black people are routinely overpoliced, underhoused and shut out of wealth. It was how clearly they connect California’s crises to the lives they’ve lived and how blunt they are about a political system that prefers they stay invisible.
“I’m not a billionaire,” Grasty said. “I’m not a career politician. I’m not in the back pocket of big oil or big corporations, and I’m not a termed‑out politician looking for a job. I’m running to serve the people, and that’s the only reason I’m running.”
Grasty is, in his words, a “lifelong educator.” He has taught and led schools at every level, preschool, elementary, middle, high school and adult education, and now mentors administrators at the Santa Cruz County Office of Education while serving as a Mount Pleasant Elementary School District trustee.
Education is literally in his blood. His great-great-grandfather, Dr. William F. Grasty, started the first school for Black children in Danville, Virginia in the 1880s. The Grasty Library later became a civil rights hub when white libraries refused to integrate. His great-uncle Fred Alexander, an NAACP leader, had his home bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1965 for pushing to integrate cemeteries where white graves were pristine and Black graves were neglected.
Service and risk are family traditions. Grasty is running for governor because he doesn’t see the “so‑called frontrunners” addressing the needs of the people he sees every day — “The marginalized communities, the working families, the LGBTQ+ community, the Black and brown community, first responders … all the people who are struggling now with housing, with affordability.”
His top issues start with education. California is 50th in the nation in literacy. “There’s no way the fourth-largest economy in the world should be anywhere near 50th at anything,” he told me.
He wants superintendents to have real classroom and principal experience and proper credentials, not to be waved in by what he describes as a for‑profit “cottage industry” of search firms that shuffle unqualified leaders from district to district. He wants funding based on enrollment and community need, rather than average daily attendance, so schools can sustain mental health services, special education, librarians and counselors after one‑time pandemic funding runs out.
Housing and affordability are right behind education. Grasty talks about growing up in Detroit, where working a union job meant you could buy a home, raise a family and maybe even own a boat and bowl on Wednesday nights. That world is gone, he says, but the desire for homeownership and a decent life isn’t. He wants to keep foreign and corporate money from snapping up California homes in all-cash deals, driving up prices and leaving houses empty. In his view, people who live and work in California should have first claim to California housing.
But Grasty is just as sharp on democracy itself.
“Even though some Democratic clubs invited me for a forum or interview, many ignored me,” he said. “Nonprofit organizations used biased data to screen me out of forums or debates. They used polling data that left my name off the survey, then used the survey against me. A traditional Jim Crow tactic.”
He doesn’t buy the argument that Democrats need to thin the field to keep Republicans out of the top two.
“The Democratic Party doesn’t need fewer candidates, they need better candidates,” he said, comparing this moment to 2020, when “no one wanted the first group of candidates, then Joe Biden stepped in.”
Robinson comes at the same broken system from a different angle.
“I see how the system works. It’s not by accident,” he said. “It’s working exactly as designed, as it should be for the billionaires. They’re breaking off just enough crumbs for us to get by while all the extra money we make goes to them.”
In his 40s now, he can count the number of years he had to choose between paying rent and health insurance. Working full-time, sometimes two jobs, and still ending the month with nothing left. No money to start a family. No way to dream about retiring in dignity.
“If you are what you repeatedly do, what I’ve done more than anything else in my life is be a worker,” Robinson told me.
He recites the numbers as they have become secondhand to him: More than 1 million renters behind on rent, tens of thousands facing eviction, 2.5 million Californians without health insurance and about $7 billion a year stolen from workers in wage theft. As an essential worker during COVID, he watched his workload triple while bosses thanked him and his coworkers for meeting the far-too-high workload with pizza instead of fair compensation.
Now running with the Peace and Freedom Party, Robinson talks about organizing as his answer. After the killing of Banko Brown in San Francisco, he helped mobilize hundreds to force the release of a video showing Brown’s innocence and to insist that, in a $4 trillion economy, nobody should be hungry. After Oct. 7, he stood with tens of thousands in Civic Center to argue that billions in U.S. tax dollars fueling war and genocide should instead fund housing, health care and education at home.
As a Black man with family members in prison for crimes of poverty and a lifetime of watching Black people “super exploited,” Robinson insists his platform would always include “ending the war on Black America.” He points to 194 billionaires in California hoarding $1.2 trillion, much of it drawn from the unpaid or underpaid labor of workers, especially Black workers. His answer is socialism, an economy where guaranteed housing, health care, education, child care, dignified retirement and a job are the baseline, not the exception.
Grasty and Robinson disagree about how far we need to go — and how fast. One wants to reform and redirect the machinery of government. The other wants to transform who holds the keys. But they agree on something California’s “frontrunners” rarely say out loud: The current system is working exactly as designed for billionaires, for corporations and for a political class more comfortable talking at people than listening to them.
If California is serious about democracy, we have to stop treating visibility as a perk reserved for the already powerful.
At a bare minimum, every candidate should have access to the local platforms that introduce contenders to the public forums, debates, questionnaires and community media so voters can hear directly from them, not just from whoever money and name recognition have already anointed. Only then can we honestly say the people, not gatekeepers, are choosing who leads this state.
Chuck Cantrell is an economist, San Jose planning commissioner and creator of “Dying to Stay Here,” a video and podcast series that explores the entrenched economic and social barriers facing Black communities in Silicon Valley. His columns appear every third Thursday of the month. Contact Chuck at [email protected].