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California professor and Black Lives Matter activist Milena Abdullah — announced Wednesday as independent presidential candidate Cornel West’s VP pick — has regularly pushed defunding police departments and is on record claiming “virtually everything is racist” — even being a Taylor Swift fan.
Abdullah, 51, is the co-founder of the Los Angeles BLM chapter and the former chair of the department of Pan-African Studies at California State University.
She, like West, has been outspoken about racial relations in the US.
In February, Abdullah said she felt like it was “slightly racist to be a Taylor Swift fan” as the music star appeared at Super Bowl Sunday to support boyfriend Travis Kelce.
The academic followed that up by saying she felt like the Kansas City Chiefs winning the game in overtime over the San Francisco 49ers “was some right-wing, white-supremacist conspiracy.”
Abdullah has also endorsed rioting in predominantly white neighborhoods, telling LAist in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in May 2020.
“We want to prosecute the police who kill our people. And we also want to defund police.”
“We’ve been very deliberate in saying that the violence and pain and hurt that’s experienced on a daily basis by black folks at the hands of a repressive system should also be visited upon, to a degree, to those who think that they can just retreat to white affluence,” she added.
West announced his choice of Abdullah on the Tavis Smiley radio show, telling the host: “I wanted someone whose heart, mind and soul is committed to the empowerment of poor and working people.
“[Abdullah] has a record of deep commitment and investment in ensuring poor and working people are at the center of her vision,” added West, a professor at Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary.
“My soul and my spirit and it felt as though God was speaking to me and said ‘yes’ immediately,” Abdullah said of her response to West’s offer.
Abdullah and her breakaway civil rights group, BLM Grassroots, previously filed a $10 million lawsuit against Shalomyah Bowers and his national Black Lives Matters Global Network Foundation, accusing Bowers of enriching himself and not giving her LA chapter their proper funding.
A California judge tossed out the suit in July of 2023, arguing she didn’t have enough evidence and that the case was “frivolous.”
West has run on a left-wing platform advocating for a $27 minimum wage, declaring a climate emergency, issuing reparations to black Americans, abolishing ICE and demilitarizing the border, dismantling the “US empire” and disbanding NATO, among other issues.
He has been critical of President Biden, calling him a “war criminal” for supporting Israel in its war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and suggesting the 81-year-old incumbent may not make it to the general election because he’s “running out of gas.”
West has struggled to pick up steam as a third-party candidate and is averaging 1.7% support in matchups with Biden, former president Donald Trump, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, according to RealClearPolitics.
The former Harvard professor is also facing an uphill battle getting on the ballot in all 50 states as an independent. So far, his campaign has claimed to have enough signatures to be on the ballot in South Carolina, Oregon, Utah and Alaska.
West is the second third-party presidential candidate to announce a VP pick, after Kennedy picked entrepreneur and attorney Nicole Shanahan to be his No. 2 last month.
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