Soft Skull: How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office The Anti-Politics, Unboring Guide to Power by Edited by William Upski Wimsatt and Adrienne Brown;

POLITICIANS BEWARE! A new book is about to hit the shelves that may end your political career. As an emergency response to the current political stupidity, 12 of the most brilliant young political artists and organizers in a generation have come together to create the most important political book of 2004. How to Get Stupid White Men Out Of Office is going to revolutionize the way young people who don’t do electoral politics do electoral politics—and how they win.

With an unprecedented 80-city tour focused on key swing states, the 12 co-authors and the League of Pissed Off Voters have built a war chest of creative new online and offline political tools that will capture the imagination of young non-voters just in time for the November 2004 elections. Without question, this book and organization will help swing local elections (the creators of the book and their friends have already done that). And if the presidential election is close, people who read How to Get Stupid White Men Out Of Office in the next few months could wake up on November 3 and realize they have shifted the entire course of world history.

What is the book about?

How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office documents 20 success stories from the past five years of young people who have swung or won elections—from city councils to the Senate—in 16 states, South Korea, and on the Internet.

*Alisha Thomas, a 24-year-old black woman won a state legislative seat in suburban Cobb County, Georgia, the heart of Newt Gingrich country.

* University of Michigan students leveraged a student government election to catapult themselves into and shift the national debate about affirmative action.

* A 21-year-old city council member in Providence, Rhode Island, and a 25-year-old mayor in New Paltz, NY—both Greens.

* Young Native Americans in South Dakota who swung a Senate seat by 528 votes in 2002.

* Ras Baraka, Newark’s hip-hop deputy mayor.
* The young Latina campaign manager who beat the Daley machine in Chicago.

How to Get Stupid White Men Out Of Office puts its finger on the pulse of an unprecedented historical moment when the blossoming youth-led political movement—from Seattle to peace to sweatshops to immigrant rights to hip-hop—has awakened and begun to flex its cultural influence and organizing muscle in the nasty new battlefield of electoral politics.

William Upski Wimsatt is Director of the League of Independent Voters (indyvoter.org), a new national 501(c)4 advocacy organization which facilitates the creation of local progressive voter guides and voting blocs nationwide. Indyvoter also has an attached 501(c)3 non-profit organization, The League of Young Voters Education Fund, and is developing an attached 527 PAC Indyvoter PAC. Wimsatt has written two books: No More Prisons (more than 30,000 in print) and Bomb the Suburbs (more than 40,000 in print) and is a popular speaker on the college lecture circuit. He also co-founded the Active Element Foundation and facilitated the creation of The Future500.com. He has made a 5 year commitment through 2008 to build Indyvoter.org as a vehicle for pissed-off young people to make their power felt in electoral politics. Boom!

Adrienne Brown is a freelance writer, activist, and singer living in Brooklyn, NY. During the day she is Program Manager of the Harm Reduction Training Institute (www.harmreduction.org) and is Co-Director of Conscious Movements Collective (www.healinginnovations.net), through which she is working with Africa Action on the Africa Right to Health Campaign. Adrienne recently began organizing with the League of Pissed Off Voters, through which she is co-editing How to Get Stupid White Men Out Of Office. She is a member of the Third Wave Foundation, Women’s HIV Collaborative, Amnesty International, Justice 4 Youth Coalition, and Artists Youth Educators. Adrienne studied political science, African-American studies, and vocal performance at Columbia University.

Davey D is a Hip Hop historian, journalist, deejay and community activist. Starting out as an emcee in the Bronx, Davey D came out to Cali to go to UC Berkeley and started deejaying in the Bay Area. As well as webmaster of Davey D's Hip Hop Corner, one of the oldest and largest hip hop sites on the web (www.daveyd.com), he is also a co-founder of the Bay Area Hip Hop Coalition [BAHHC] and a member of the Bay Area Black Journalist Association [BABJA]. Davey D has been featured in CNN’s Talk Back Live, ABC’s Nightline, BET, VH1, Rolling Stone, Vibe, and Stress magazines. Davey D also hosts a weekly Hip Hop/Political TV talk show on Oakland's Soul Beat television. Davey D sits on the advisory board for Black Youth Vote and Rock the Vote. He was the guest curator for the Rock N-Roll Hall of Fame Hip Hop Nation Exhibit when it came to San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center in June of 2001. The Source Magazine (Jan 2003) named Davey D one of the Top 10 Most Influential People in the country when it comes to dealing with Hip Hop and politics.

Marisol Enyart is the Southwest Regional Organizer for United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), the largest student labor rights organization in the US. She has traveled to the Dominican Republic and Puebla, Mexico to research factory conditions and supported workers who were creating a union. Her work has been highlighted on ABC News, the Albuquerque Journal and the New York Times. A Latin American Studies and Spanish Major at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, Marisol is a hip-hop fiend and organizer in the 505. ‘Burque Represent!

Malia Lazu is the project director for Democracy Action Project, a national youth electoral reform organization, focusing on rebuilding trust in government and ensuring that every vote counts. Democracy Action Project has a signature annual event called “Democracy Summer”. Last year over 300 youth activists from 30 states participated in the week long training school and did an action to support DC enfranchisement. Ms. Lazu is the founding Executive Director for Mass VOTE, a statewide non-partisan coalition of community-based organizations, faith-based institutions and neighborhood associations working to increase voter participation in urban neighborhoods. Starting in Boston with Boston VOTE in 1999, Ms. Lazu created a model for connecting voting with issues people care about and the communities they live in.

Piper Anderson is a queer woman of color performance poet, writer, activist, and educator based Brooklyn NY. Currently, she the youth development coordinator at the East Harlem Tutorial Program. Organizing co-chair for the Listen Up, America initiative and coordinator of the Lyrics on Lockdown national anti-prison tour. She has been published in the Austin Downtown Arts Monthly, Blu Magazine, Show-n-Prove, and Philadelphia Inquirer. In 2004 she will be publishing a collection of her poetry and prose entitled For My Sisters On the Overpass.

Mattie Weiss is a 24-year-old white girl from south Minneapolis. Though a Midwesterner to the core, Mattie has also lived in Nicaragua (where her parents worked in solidarity with the Sandinistas in the late 1980s), Bolivia and South Africa. Mattie graduated with a Political Science degree from Swarthmore College. As a student activist Mattie organized students and staff around issues of global economic justice, local race politics, and a campus-based living wage campaign. While still in college, Mattie worked for the Active Element Foundation in New York, doing research for the Future500 youth organizing directory. Mattie has also worked as a community muralist and a union organizer in Minneapolis. Before starting her current job as a waitress at two bourgie restaurants in Oakland, she worked as a writer and researcher for the Applied Research Center, a racial justice “think and do tank,” where she wrote and published a major report on youth organizing around the country. Mattie loves to paint, draw, and read. She hates writing (but does it anyway cause a whole lot needs to be said). She dances salsa every chance she gets, loves hip hop, and wants to learn to samba. She also plays center midfield with Left Wing Futbol Club, an off-the-hook anti-imperialist soccer team in the Bay.

Jackie Bray was born in New York City in 1982. She moved with her family to Ridgewood, New Jersey when she was ten and at the completion of high school packed up her bags and headed to the Midwest to attend the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is currently a senior expecting to graduate in May 2004 with a Bachelor of Arts in United States History. From the first semester she arrived on campus Jackie immersed herself in political activism. From the winter of 2001 through fall of 2002 Jackie was a leader in Students Organizing for Labor and Economic Equality and rose to national leadership of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). She served on the National Coordinating Committee of USAS from August 2001 through August 2002 and was the student representative to the National Jobs With Justice Board of Directors from December 2001 through December 2002. With USAS Jackie coordinated their relationships with key allies and most of their media strategy. In the winter of 2002 Jackie helped to found Students First, a political party on the University of Michigan’s campus that ran on the principle that government must represent all students. The party’s goal of doing away with an elitist unresponsive government came to fruition in the fall of 2002 when she managed their second campaign and lead her slate to a sweep. In January of 2003 Jackie helped to revive Students Supporting Affirmative Action (SSAA). SSAA went on to organizing the Michigan campus around the affirmative action Supreme Court cases that spring. After the hearings Jackie assumed the role of Communications Coordinator and lead on the student response to the decisions in favor of the University, handed down in June of 2003.

Bouapha Toommaly was born in Laos in 1975. Shortly thereafter her family escaped to a nearby refugee camp in Thailand where they stayed until 1979 when they came to the United States to settle in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. At the age of 19, she started her organizing career with the Asian Pacific Environmental Network as a part of their Laotian Organizing Project (LOP) around Environmental Justice issues. In 2001, with the desire to help strengthen youth participation in the environmental justice movement nationally, Bouapha took on the task of coordinating the youth component of the Second National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, DC., where youth participation greatly impacted the documents and principles that came out of the conference. After the completion of the Summit, she went on to work for the Rural Coalition where she is coordinating their trade campaign work to help establish fair trade for farmworkers and small minority farmers in both US and Mexico. In her spare time she is working on her own campaign to replace GW with an intelligent being.