Despite being the Democratic Party’s most loyal voter demographic, black women rarely emerge as a significant constituency when political parties draft their platforms. Instead, we are often treated as though reforms that help all women or all African Americans will automatically benefit us too. Far less attention is paid to the ways that reforms that aim to help women or African Americans frequently exclude black women, whose lives exist at the intersection of these two identities. This intersectional conundrum also affects other women of color who struggle with poverty or citizenship status in addition to being women. As Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump prepare for their first presidential debate Monday evening, they should be prepared to make the case to women of color in general, and black women in particular, for their support. Here are 10 issues that are of concern to women of color in the 2016 election.

1. Protecting reproductive rights. Donald Trump promised earlier this month that he would wage a full-scale assault on women’s right to choose whether to keep or terminate a pregnancy. In addition to defunding Planned Parenthood, Trump intends to nominate pro-life Supreme Court justices, and to make the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for abortion, permanent. The harrowing case of Purvi Patel in Indiana, who was initially convicted for feticide after taking abortion-inducing drugs, reaffirms the importance of reproductive justice for women of color. The expansion of laws that criminalize pregnant women like Patel are part of a larger assault on reproductive rights that includes fervent attempts by those on the right to impede women’s right to abortion services. Though Patel’s conviction was overturned and she was released from jail, Trump’s policies would further criminalize abortion, putting women of color who disproportionately need and use abortion services at high risk for harassment by authorities and jail time. Black women are five times as likely to have abortions as white women, and Latina women are twice as likely as white women to have them. Reproductive rights matter to women of color. The right to make decisions about reproductive health should continue to lie with a woman and her doctor.

2. Combating wage inequality. A new report out this month suggests that even though wages for white and black families rose respectively at rates of 4.4 percent and 4.1 percent in 2015, there has been an extreme widening of the wage gap among whites and blacks, that impacts black women’s prospects most severely. In particular, black women who have recently entered the workforce have seen their wages fall the most over the last 15 years as compared with their peers. It is not enough to try to narrow the gap between white women and white men. These candidates must address the severe deficits that exist between women. For Hillary Clinton in particular, who enjoys a large swath of support from black women, a targeted plan to raise black women’s wages would do much to galvanize a key demographic of her supporters. If Trump cares about having black women’s support, he too should offer a set of policies that will address the wage gap. Another way to support black women in the workforce is to support policies and appoint judges that won’t make it legal to fire black women based on the way they wear their hair.

3. Significantly reducing deportations. President Barack Obama has deported more people than any other president in history. Though many of us are horrified by Donald Trump’s claims that he would ban Muslims from entering the country and build a wall on our Southern border, it is the current Democratic president who has been presiding over an alarming increase in deportations that do great harm to families of color, including not only Latino families but black families as well. Rather than offering bluster to voters about banning immigrants from our shores as Trump has done, these candidates need to offer a solid, detailed plan for a pathway to citizenship and an end to breaking up families out of a sense of fear or political expediency. For instance, Hillary Clinton should commit to reducing the number of deportations by the current administration, a move that would put her on solid footing with women of color voters, and mark an important and critical departure from President Obama. Trump’s incendiary rhetoric about immigrants means he’s pretty hopeless on this point, but it is not enough for Clinton to run merely as the anti-Trump on this issue.

4. Ending mass incarceration. Black and Latina women are officially the fastest-growing incarcerated population. While the current conversation about ending mass incarceration has started to lead to a reduction in the number of men behind bars, no such decreases are detectable among the women’s prison population. Most women who enter jails are there for nonviolent crimes and have past histories of sexual violence, mental illness, and addiction. They become even more vulnerable to sexual assault in prison. Sending men back home to their families is an important first step in reversing the damage done under Bill Clinton’s tough-on-crime policies in the 1990s. But figuring out ways to reduce sexual violence and to treat addiction in black and brown communities as a public health crisis in the same way it is treated in white communities would necessarily reduce the prison population. These candidates should commit to supporting the Justice Department’s recent policy of not using private prisons, which create a financial incentive for local communities to keep a steady stream of prisoners incarcerated. Ending the use of the money bail system and additional fees for failure to pay fines on time would also significantly reduce the amount of contact that black women (and black communities) more broadly have with courts and jails.

5. Reforming local police forces. Women of color want the continued killing of black and Latino men, women, and children by the police to be stopped. Over-policing makes communities of color unsafe and frequently leads, for example, to the murder of black men like Keith Scott in Charlotte whose wife begged in vain for officers not to shoot her husband. Black women want candidates who will commit to using robust federal oversight to compel local police forces to stop using excessive force and to stop murdering black citizens. To be clear, reforming police forces is not enough. Racial bias is so ingrained that reform is wholly insufficient for reducing the killing of black and Latino citizens in the long run. Federal funding for trainings to counteract implicit bias among police officers is an important step in de-escalating encounters between police and the citizens of color whom they often falsely conclude are a threat. We need candidates who will commit to policies that return the staffing and oversight of local police forces to the community. Police forces should be demilitarized, and the use of heavily armed teams of officers to serve warrants for non-violent crimes should be banned. These practices contributed to the killing of Korryn Gaines and the shooting of her 5-year-old son in Baltimore this summer. Militarized police forces terrorize communities of color like Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charlotte, bringing out tanks and using tear gas on (mostly) peaceful protestors. This is no way for citizens to be treated, and it only increases hostility and distrust that people of color have for police officers. It would also be quite powerful if each candidate affirmed that “Black Lives Matter” during the debate, without any equivocation.

6. Stopping privatization of public education. Though we frequently talk about K-12 schooling and high education as separate issues, ending privatization of schools affects both facets of education. Most children of color are educated in public schools. However, the rise of the charter school movement has diverted funds away from traditional public schools. The charter movement promised to offer better choices to parents of color worried about their children attending bad public schools, but in most cases, these schools have not lived up to the hype —  75 percent of these schools show little to no improvement over existing public schools. This means children of color are not saved by charter schools, and those who remain in traditional public schools are poorly educated but work from even less funds than they had before, because of how charter schools dip into an already meager pot of public funds. Moreover, the continued defunding of public colleges at the state level is the cause of the growing student loan debt problem and a decline in the number of black and Hispanic students who enroll. Access to a free public school education and an affordable college education are critical pathways into the American middle class, and black women enroll in college at higher rates than any other group. But black women also become prey of the for-profit college model, which leaves them strapped with debt and often unable to get jobs. Candidates should commit to providing incentives for state governments to fund higher education, as Hillary Clinton has done, and to federal regulation of for-profit colleges.

7. Ending the school-to-prison pipeline. Last year, a 16-year-old black girl was violently dragged from her desk and thrown across the room by a school resource/police officer for having her cellphone out during class. She and a classmate who stood up for her were both arrested and charged with “disturbing school.” The violent policing and even handcuffing of black children in schools are a result of the increasing presence of police and the decreasing presence of trained mental health and school counselors who are better trained to address children’s learning and behavioral needs. Because black girls are suspended nationally six times more than their white counterparts, candidate’s education plans should provide incentives for schools to ban use of suspensions and expulsions in elementary schools and incentivize more progressive behavioral management techniques; such incentives will go a long way toward reducing black girls’ encounters with the criminal justice system because they are having a bad day at school.

8. Funding affordable child care. Both candidates have plans to curtail the rising costs of child care for families. Trump proposes to let parents write off even more of their child care expenses under the earned income tax credit. Clinton promises to use taxes and government subsidies to reduce the cost of child care to no more than 10 percent of a family’s annual income. But because black and Latina women are often seen as needing too much public assistance, Hillary Clinton’s plan raises the question of whether she is simply handing out more government entitlements, and she will have to address how she would be able to get her plan through a bipartisan Congress. Trump will have to address whether a reduction in tax liability really serves underprivileged communities of color in the long run, since decreasing tax liability (and therefore tax revenue) is used by conservatives as a corrective to the policies of what they call “tax-and-spend liberals,” which typically are designed to aid struggling American families, including families of color.

9. Securing affordable housing. Black women’s struggle to secure affordable housing is well-documented. As the Washington Post reported in 2014, poor black men are locked up, while poor black women are frequently evicted and locked out of affordable housing. In addition to offering federal funding for increased mixed income developments, candidates should also secure affordable housing by regulating banks that give out subprime loans to black families with decent credit. The subprime lending crisis did untold amounts of harm to black women and their families, who were more likely even than black men to be given subprime loans for their housing. The housing crisis helped explode an already burgeoning racial wealth gap. Increasing rates of gentrification in urban areas also push black women at both working-class and middle-class wages and those with large families out of housing that is close to reliable public transit and city services. 

10. Reducing access to guns. In 2014, a black woman was killed by a man once every 21 hours; most frequently, his weapon of choice was a gun. The tragic effects of gun crime in black communities are well documented if you consider a case like Chicago, but less attention is paid to the connections between gun violence and domestic violence. Men frequently terrorize their female intimate partners through access to guns. We can be confident that Donald Trump probably will not offer significant solutions on guns, since he has suggested that “Second Amendment people” might in fact assassinate Hillary Clinton, should she be elected. Though he denied that his comments were meant to refer to an assassination attempt, Trump’s remarks reinforce the vulnerability that women face in a gun culture rife with toxic masculinity. While gun control policies like background checks and the banning of assault weapons would help all Americans, they would help black women in particular who are killed disproportionately in acts of domestic violence and violence at the hands of black men with guns. Rather than seeing this frame as pathologizing black people, candidates should recognize that policies that address the struggles of women and children of color frequently make life better for all Americans.  

Follow Brittney on Twitter.