Antonia Okafor is the founder of Empowered and a gun rights activist who began to question her liberal leanings after voting for President Barack Obama twice and realizing being a liberal was not for her anymore.
Okafor, who was raised in a single-parent home, grew up poor but managed to obtain a graduate degree and become successful. At one point in her life, she was a feminist who taught feminism and was pro-choice before challenging some of the movement's ideas on abortion. "Isn’t it men who benefit most from consequence-free sex," she pondered.
In the video, the young woman talks about looking up to President Obama and idealizing First Lady Michelle Obama. She even believed that his eight years in office would fix hundreds of years of racial strife, lynching, and terror.
But when she was a student at the University of Texas at Dallas, the UT Austin Department of African Diaspora Studies released a statement regarding campus safety and guns that made her further question many of her liberal beliefs.
“African Americans are disproportionately affected by the saturation of our society by firearms," the statement said. " … We demand that firearms be banned in all spaces occupied by black people on our campus.”
This led her to think that the campus believed that black people were more dangerous or more unworthy of protection.
"I realized I didn’t have a good answer; I only had more questions – like, why were blacks doing so poorly in cities that had been run by Democrats for decades," she asked, not mentioning that poor whites who vote Republican aren't fairing well either. "Was it racism and sexism that was holding people back, or was it something else?"
"The more questions I asked, the less popular I became. But here’s the funny thing: I started to feel better about myself. I decided that the very definition of empowerment required me to take responsibility for my own life. I wasn’t going to be anyone’s victim. Which meant I had to protect myself. So, I bought a gun. I started to advocate for gun rights. That cost me more friends. I joined the pro-life movement and walked in The March for Life. More friends…gone."
Watch Okafor dive into her political evolution above. Do you agree with some of her ideas about race and conservativism?
