Hannah Black talks with New York State Senate candidate Jabari Brisport for Artforum "What’s your vision of that different system? Let me back up. It sounds mundane, but Cuomo’s spending cap has a domino effect. A lot of people cannot get unemployment right now. The lines are jammed. I had a friend who reached out in mid-March and didn’t hear back until late April. This is a staffing issue. They should have seen this coming and hired an additional one hundred, two hundred, five hundred people to handle the influx of claims. But the state couldn’t hire that many people because we have this spending cap that says you can’t rapidly expand a social service. It’s so frustrating. That’s the microcosm of what we’re seeing now. In a just New York, spending would be based on human need, not a random 2 percent prescribed by the governor. We would have robust protections for workers, with sick leave. We would have hospitals with all the beds we needed. We would have a world where we did not use law enforcement to do the work of social workers or public health workers. I would like to see a system that is more proactive than reactive, that has a fully funded social safety net, and is decarceral in that it doesn’t equate safety with more police. When people vote for you, they’re really voting for themselves. People imbue their own personal hopes and dreams into a candidate. That’s part of why politics gets so nasty sometimes and why people get riled up. When they’re voting for you, they’re voting for the things they believe in. You give people a chance to feel like they’re participating and have a voice in government, especially at a time like now when people feel silenced and distanced from each other and forced to be alone. I don’t know exactly who reads Artforum, but I imagine some of them are wealthy. Maybe the rich are beyond persuasion, but just out of curiosity: What would you say to a hypothetical rich person reading this who says, “What if I want to have five houses?” We all derive our wealth from the people around us, from working with the communities around us. That’s not a hippy-dippy thing to say; that’s just economics. Every single dollar that comes to you has been generated by someone else. It flows out. Whether you’ve amassed five thousand dollars or five billion, you have to give back in some way to the society that got you where you were. Everything comes from the interconnectedness of our lives."