According to NBC News, Mack made history in 2020, becoming the first openly LGBTQ+ Black person elected to the Rhode Island state Senate.

“I’m going to be unapologetically Black, I’m going to be unapologetically queer, and I’m going to be unapologetically young, and I’m going to push back against the system that tells us we don’t deserve justice now,” the senator told NBC News at the time.

The 28-year-old, who graduated from Brown University in 2016, previously served as the Youth Organizing Specialist at Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, the New York Daily News reports.

Mack also sponsored legislation to amend the state’s sex-education law and require schools to implement courses that include discussions of gender and sexual orientation, The Providence Journal reports.

As a gay woman who grew up in the conservative Christian South, spending parts of her childhood in Georgia and South Carolina, Mack said “there was no conversation about what it meant to be gay.”

“Sex education is about learning about gender and gender roles, about what it’s like to grow up in a single-parent family. It’s about all the things I wish I had gotten. It’s about knowing I wasn’t alone,” Mack told The Providence Journal.

Tiara Mack

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