Tennessee Voices, Episode 240: Zulfat Suara, Metro Nashville Council member
Activists have long argued that cities have a responsibility to treat their budgets as moral documents.
That means that elected officials should make a priority of paying for programs that address equity in areas such as education and affordable housing.
When Zulfat Suara ran for an at-Large seat on the Metro Nashville Metro Council in 2019, the budget was her main focus.
She won her election and served in the 2021 fiscal year as chair of the Metro Council Affordable Housing Committee. This issue has been front and center in a booming city with a widening prosperity gap.
On this episode of the Tennessee Voices podcast, Suara and I talked about the topic and what has been done and what is left to do.
Suara is the first Muslim elected to the council and she is an immigrant from Nigeria. We discussed the Trump era travel ban on certain Muslim-majority countries and immigration policy under the Biden administration.
We also spent time talking about police, and particularly, interactions with Black men and women. She expressed gratitude for Nashville's police department, but said it is critical to talk about racial disparities in police shootings. She shared her own concerns as a Black mother and how she has given her children "The Talk."
Zulfat Suara will be a featured guest on the International Human Rights Day celebration on Thursday, Dec. 9, at 5 p.m. CST Register to watch the program here: https://tnuhr.org/register-for-human-rights-day/
Op-Ed by Zulfat Suara: Why naming a street isn't enough in teaching Nashville's Black history
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About Tennessee Voices
The Tennessee Voices videocast is a 20-minute program, which started in March 2020 and invites leaders, thinkers and innovators who have written guest columns for a USA TODAY Network Tennessee publication to share their insights and wisdom with me and our viewers.
Please email your ideas for future guests to me at dplazas@tennessean.com. Thank you for watching.
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David Plazas is the director of opinion and engagement for the USA TODAY Network Tennessee and an editorial board member of The Tennessean. Tweet to him at @davidplazas.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Affordable housing, human rights and just policing with Zulfat Suara
