I'm excited about the Green Party's VP Candidate!

AMY GOODMAN: Rosa Clemente, it’s great to have you with us. Can you talk about what it means to be the Green Party’s vice-presidential candidate, to be a vice-presidential candidate here in the United States?

ROSA CLEMENTE: I mean, thank you for having me, Amy. It’s a humbling experience, first and foremost. But, I mean, I’m a South Bronx Puerto Rican-born girl, 1972. I was in the South Bronx when hip hop, which is still now the voice of multi-racial young people all over the world, began. So I’m humbled, but I’m ready for the work. I’ve been in a great tradition of student activists coming from the State University of New York at Albany in the early ’90s to getting my Master’s at Cornell University under the mentorship of Dr. James Turner and being a community organizer with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, but again under mentorship of the great late Richie Perez.

So I’m humbled, but I’m also excited, because I feel that many African American, indigenous, Asian, Latino youth in this country, mostly working class, are completely disenfranchised and marginalized from a two-party system. There’s over 40 percent of young people that still have not registered to vote, which shows their dissatisfaction with both the Republicans and Democrats. And I really want to bring the face of what hip hop has always been for me, a voice of the voiceless, the mic that speaks truth to power but also uses these elements to act against the status quo or the powers that be.