Damon Green is an electrical engineer and father of two in Dallas, Texas. He and I attended a small college in Minnesota, and briefly lived together in Minneapolis in 2002. He is one of the funniest and cleverest people I’ve ever met. He’s also a great camping buddy.

Texas has been considered a deeply conservative state for a long time. National political scientists have been eyeing a possible electoral shift due to an increasingly enfranchised Latino population.  As someone living in Dallas for a solid decade, have you noticed Texas politics trending more moderate over the years, or does it still seem firmly right-of-center?

Yes there is a political shift, and I call it the “the tipping point.” There’s a reason Texas has the strictest voter ID laws in the nation and I believe that it is in preparation for what conservative fear the most which is for Texas to become a purple/ slightly blue state. It’s not just the growing Latino population, you also have to look at the makeup of the large number of people who are relocating from other states to live in Texas- and that’s an average of 11 hundred people a month!

This has been a truly remarkable year for presidential primaries. What are your hopes as we move forward in the 2016 election season?

I am truly interested in the voice of the people coming together in this election and deciding which direction we are going as a nation. I feel like the United States is going through an identity crisis and 2016 will be the year we find out who truly are in this moment in time!

Black Lives Matter has been making its presence felt over the last two summers. Do you see the movement making progress? How have the police shootings in Dallas affected the movement in your area?

I think the goal of Black Lives Matter is to get to the point where progress does not have to continue being made in making US realize that Black people do care what happens to them and their communities! The mistake that some White police make when policing Black communities is that they don’t believe that we care and that we have control of what happens in our communities, so we all become the same in their eyes… tragic mistake!

Most people in Dallas understood the protest to be peaceful, and that the real story is that those cops that died and were injured were putting their lives on the line to protect the protesters. This tragic event made BLM go on the defense, but it was an important test for the movement to show the city of Dallas that the BLM is a peaceful and political movement!

As a dad who maintains a high consciousness of the modern civil rights movement, what are your hopes for your own children as they grow up in the USA? 

I hope my son and daughter grow up and understand what it means to be Americans and at the same time be proud of the their Black heritage. My worst fear for my children is adopting self-hate and low self-esteem because of the color of their skin, so as a parent I will always teach them to be proud of who they are and to learn, embrace, and experience other cultures while they are out there in the world making and spending their own money (LOL!) .

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