My name is Bilal Z. Raychouni.

 

I was born in Williamsburg, Virginia to an American mother and to a Lebanese Muslim father, both public school teachers and both the first in their families to attend college. I spent my childhood in and around Richmond and Beirut, and I attended high school in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I pursued a career in film and spent years after college working late nights and long weeks on various productions up and down the East and West Coasts, until the Covid-19 Pandemic shuttered a lot of creative work and forced me to change direction. I pivoted into the field of education and immediately found my footing teaching young minds and helping them grow. I am now a Computer Science teacher at Powhatan Middle School, where I also coach the Debate Team.

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Working with students and getting to know my community ultimately inspired me to run for office. Students and adults alike have for years lamented the problems our communities suffer through, and, from what I have gathered speaking to individuals on the street and at their homes, very little has been done to address these issues over the past several years. I seek to actively address the problems that most directly affect our citizens to ensure their elected officials are providing for them the best life possible.

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One of my highest priority issues is to address Infrastructure. In the year 2023, there is no excuse for us to have neighborhoods old and new with electrical grids and power lines that fail when exposed to the slightest gust of wind, or roads and bridges that go weeks or even months without necessary repairs. There is no excuse for us to have densely-populated neighborhoods and major thoroughfares that are, to this day, in the Age of Information, still without access to high-speed internet. There is no excuse for our citizens to have to drive half an hour to an hour out of their way just to get to a grocery store. A significant Infrastructure review is necessary to guarantee our people a comfortable living.

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Another high priority issue is to address Equitability, to ensure that all my citizens feel they are treated with the same amount of dignity and respect as any other human being. I believe that the uterus is the most unnecessarily-policed organ in the human body, and I assert that politicians need to back off and trust people to work with their healthcare providers to make their own decisions about their own bodies without the looming threat of being legally punished for taking charge of their own health. I believe that voters deserve as much freedom and flexibility to exercise their right to vote as possible and that the progress we have made to secure such moves as early voting, no-excuse absentee ballots, and drop boxes must be preserved. I believe, as an educator, that stronger relationships must be formed between our schools and our communities, that we must put an end to the demonization of teachers as “indoctrinators of the youth,” as such attitudes only encourage distrust and hate. Finally, I believe in the validity of identity, that the most wonderful thing about us as human beings is that we are all different and that we grow as people by celebrating our differences, embracing our diversity of existence, and learning to appreciate our neighbors for who they are as they are.