Sacramento school board candidate loses endorsement over political comments in Facebook vlogs
City Councilwoman Mai Vang has rescinded her endorsement of RoLanda Wilkins for the Sacramento City Unified School District board after a video of the candidate sharing her views on Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump surfaced. Vang told the Sacramento Bee that she “made the decision with a heavy heart” after the video was brought to her attention. Vang had also donated $1,000 to Wilkins’ campaign.
In an archived Facebook livestream from 2020, Wilkins, who is a community activist and nonprofit founder, said that she “does not have a problem with Donald Trump” and called Harris a derogatory term for women. The vlog centers around her criticism of several Democratic party leaders who she said have not done enough to support Black Americans, saying that they are “worse than the KKK.”
Wilkins said that she was shocked to learn that Vang rescinded her nomination, but that she understands and still respects the city council member.
“I’m not upset at Mai,” she said. “I think she’s a wonderful city council member and I thank her for the support that she did give me.”
A two-minute clip of the vlog has been making the rounds in the Sacramento political sphere. The clip includes Wilkins saying “four more years of Donald Trump may be the best thing for Black people.”
“What it does is give those of us at the bottom who folks did not value, now we can rise up and take our own place. Those fake Black leaders, we gotta kill them. We gotta make them be out there pissing in the wind. They can no longer represent Black folks. They’re not qualified, and they ain’t ready.”
Wilkins is largely referring to Harris, who she criticized earlier in the video and in other Facebook posts, for claiming Black identity and for her career as a prosecutor in California. Wilkins takes issue with the presidential nominee’s involvement in passing truancy laws that disproportionately affected Black families and her disputed involvement in jailing marijuana-users when she was the San Francisco district attorney. Political experts have said that her home state’s high rate of incarcerating people of color hurt her support among Black voters nationwide during the 2020 primary election.
“Don’t be so in love with the image of a person that you don’t even look to see if this b---- is poison,” Wilkins says in the video.
In several other Facebook posts, Wilkins contests Harris’s identity as a Black woman, drawing attention to her Indian heritage and questioning her loyalty to African Americans who are descendants of slavery. Harris has long publicly identified as both Black and South Asian American.
“I don’t see her as a Black woman, I just don’t,” Wilkins said in the video. Later on, she said “what’s going to make you think that Kamala really understands our struggle? She’s not even African American-Black — her father’s Jamaican and mother’s from India, no disrespecting that, God bless you, they don’t owe us anything.”
Beliefs about the Democratic Party
In the full 18-minute vlog, Wilkins does not state support for the Republican party and said that she planned to vote independent, but did say that she preferred a candidate like Trump as opposed to liberal politicians who state support for the Black community but ultimately do not help them. She calls President Joe Biden “the devil.”
“At least they are who they are who they are,” she said. “I can deal with a person who reveals themselves, who tells you who they are. That’s why, to me, Donald Trump doesn’t scare me, it just means we need to pull together, which is what the hell we should have been doing.”
She goes on to address Democrats who she says had the opportunity to help Black people, saying “you didn’t because you didn’t want to appear like you were giving favoritism but yet you helped every other group.” Earlier in the video, she said that she doesn’t connect with politicians’ promises to help LGBTQ and immigrant groups because those issues do not involve her.
In another two-minute video posted to Facebook Tuesday, Wilkins addresses the controversial video, clarifying that she does not support Trump and that her words were largely taken out of context. She said that her words were sarcastically pointed at Black Democratic leaders who she said would be put in the same social position as the average Black person should Trump be reelected for another term. She claimed that her opponent’s supporters, such as the local teachers union, have circulated the video to her endorsers and maintains her right to share her opinion that Black Democratic leaders have failed Black people.
“Right now in the Black world there is a big debate happening around the grassroots Black folks, everyday Black folks, feeling like Kamala wants our vote but she doesn’t want to address our needs, and that’s basically what I was talking about in the video,” Wilkins said.
Wilkins said she will likely vote for Harris, but that people should be open to a dialogue that questions leaders’ allegiance to the groups they claim to represent. In a phone call with the Bee, she expressed regret for calling the vice president the swear word.
“I probably shouldn’t have said that word,” Wilkins said. “I think I got really emotional and it flew out of my mouth. I’m a human being, sometimes I do stuff like that, but my community knows who I am.”
Wilkins stands by her comments about Harris’s heritage, saying that she feels Harris uses her identity as a Black woman to garner support among Black people without speaking to their needs directly.
“My thing is that, this is what I am every day. No one has to Google me to see what I am,” she said. “We need to stop playing these racial politics with Black people’s identity. I’m descended from people who were enslaved and in spite of the system I’m still making waves.”
Comment about Latinos
Wilkins was also asked to answer for a comment she made in 2018 in response to another Facebook user within the comment section of a post about crime rates among Black people in Chicago. The comment to which she was responding has been taken down.
“I am not of Latino Ancestry and an a pure blood Black Woman,” she wrote. “Please stop trying to make me be concerned with other group. Because at the end of the day. They do nothing for us. Unlike you I worked and travel thought out South and Latin American as well as the US and most of them are anti Black. We are not in the same situation. If you cannot just focus on Black People please block me. I have no need for people like you. We are at war,” the comment reads.
Wilkins said that the comment does not reflect her feelings about Latinos and that the war she was referring to was not between the Black community and Latino community, but within the Black community about how to handle the social and political issues they face. She felt frustrated with the distraction from the Black issues she was trying to highlight.
“I meant we are at war with poverty — Black people are the disproportionate amount of the homeless, ” she said. “I was really talking to my own people, because in the Black community we are at war with each other.”
Who is RoLanda Wilkins and who is supporting her?
Wilkins is a longtime community activist and founder of Earth Mama Healing, a Sacramento-based nonprofit that “provides youth empowerment opportunities with a focus on health and wellness.” Her many advocacy programs have put her in classrooms within Sacramento City Unified, Folsom-Cordova Unified and Elk Grove Unified School Districts, mentoring students and holding workshops. For more than a decade, Wilkins has organized a monthlong road trip across the country for high school-age girls to learn about the historical contributions of Black women. In 2008, then state Senator Darrell Steinberg named her the district’s California 2008 Woman of the Year.
Her advocacy has long surrounded young Black women. Prior to starting the nonprofit, Wilkins worked for the Birthing Project, a nonprofit that mentored teen moms and sought to reduce infant mortality in the Black community. She was originally empowered to do this type of work after intervention by her sixth-grade teacher, Winnie Bender.
“That’s why I do the work that I do with young people,” she said.
According to the Office of the Attorney General’s charity registry, Earth Mama Healing Network is currently delinquent. Wilkins said this is because the organization had a bad bookkeeper, and that the organization is running under a new title, Earth Mama Healing Foundation.
The community organizer is running for Sacramento City Unified School District Area 3 seat with the blessing of Christina Pritchett, who currently occupies the seat and opted not to run again. Pritchett said she is aware of the video circulating but has not watched it. She will continue to support Wilkins’ candidacy.
“I can tell you that seeing RoLanda’s work and seeing what she’s done in our community is remarkable, especially compared to her opponent,” Pritchett said. “I really want to see the best person who really wants to work for our students win, and seeing what she does in our community, she is definitely the right choice.”
Sacramento County Board of Education member Bina Lefkovitz also reaffirmed her support for Wilkins, saying that the video was concerning, but that she is satisfied with the candidate’s explanation of the posts and response to the criticism.
“What I observe is that she embraces all the young people she works with,” Lefkovitz said. “At her core, she cares about kids and is not in the pocket of any special interest group.”
Wilkins’ opponent for the seat is Jose Navarro, who unsuccessfully ran against incumbent Christina Pritchett in 2020. Navarro, an IT specialist and member of the Service Employees International Union, received significant financial support from the Sacramento City Teachers Association during his last campaign — amounting to nearly $120,000. Navarro has not yet reported any campaign contributions this election cycle.
This story was originally published August 22, 2024 at 7:00 AM.
