A Muslim Woman Also Got Elected Last Week - The New Yorker
At the same time Donald Trump was watching the Presidential-election returns from Trump Tower, in New York, Ilhan Omar was in the Courtyard Marriott in Minneapolis, watching the returns and learning that she had also been elected, as a Minnesota House Representative for the city’s 60B District. Like Trump, Omar represented a change. Like Trump, Omar won on a platform promising to serve a community whose needs had been forgotten. But Omar represents many of the things that Trump has belittled: she’s a Muslim, an immigrant, a woman.
Omar’s family moved to Virginia from Kenya when she was twelve years old, after her family, refugees from the civil war in Somalia, had been granted a chance to apply for citizenship in the United States. Omar spoke almost no English when she landed in Arlington, but that was not the only barrier. “This is the first time I realized the stigma that I carried as an immigrant and a refugee, and a Muslim person who was visibly Muslim, with a head scarf,” she said in an interview earlier this year. “And that my blackness was a source of tension.” By the time she was fourteen, the family had settled in Minnesota, where the federal government helped to resettle a large Somali-refugee population in the nineteen-nineties.
Omar, thirty-four, has a long history of civic service, starting with translating for her grandfather during Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party meetings when she was fourteen. She went on to work as a community health-care educator, as a policy aide, and, recently, as the director of policy initiative at Women Organizing Women, a group that encourages women from the East African diaspora to take on leadership roles in their communities. She was the unlikely winner in the D.F.L. primaries, in August, beating out two candidates, including the incumbent, Phyllis Kahn, who had served for forty-four years. Omar won decisively that night. “I was in tears,” she told me over the phone. “I nearly collapsed when I saw the numbers.”
The borders of District 60B form a jagged triangle in the northeastern part of Minneapolis, which is divided by the Mississippi River. East of the river lies the University of Minnesota; to its west is the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, one of the most culturally diverse places in the state. Omar will represent more than forty thousand constituents, made up largely of long-time residents, East African immigrants, and students. The district is “extremely progressive,” she told me.
When Trump visited Minnesota the weekend before the elections, he saw a different state. Tailoring his usual campaign points for a local audience, Trump drew analogies between terrorists and Somalis, who number more than thirty-three thousand in the state, most of whom live in Minneapolis. “Here in Minnesota, you’ve seen firsthand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state without your knowledge, without your support or approval, and with some of them joining ISIS and spreading their extremist views,” he told the crowd, adding, “You’ve suffered enough in Minnesota.” Earlier this summer, three young Somali men were convicted of conspiracy to commit murder abroad in a long-standing federal investigation that led to other guilty pleas. Minnesota has voted Democratic in every Presidential election for the past four decades, and this year, too, Hillary Clinton won the state by 1.5 per cent. But her strength was in Minneapolis and urban areas. Most counties went to Trump—including nineteen that President Obama won in 2012.
Last week’s election gave both the Minnesota House and Senate a Republican majority, and Omar’s progressive platform—what she describes as about “justice and the common good”—is unlikely to be popular. Her priorities include affordable education, investment in mental health, and criminal-justice-system reform. “My challenge will be figuring out a way to have a conversation with my colleagues about what people elected us to do,” she told me.
Omar’s tenure will also inevitably be marked by Trump’s Presidency. In his immigration speech this fall, Trump vowed to “block funding for sanctuary cities”—cities where law-enforcement agencies are prohibited from targeting people based on their immigration status. The mayor of Minneapolis, which is a sanctuary city, has said she would work to protect immigrants. The plan to defund sanctuary cities is part of the President-elect’s agenda to enforce strong law and order, a sentiment that runs counter to Omar’s support of police reform. In July, a police officer shot and killed Philando Castile, a black man, during a traffic stop outside of St. Paul. On Omar’s Web site, she calls for “police car dash cams be used to assign tickets objectively. If such a law were in place, Philando Castile would still be alive.” The spate of police violence across the country, and subsequent protests and demands for accountability, led the Justice Department to announce that it would begin collecting data on the use of police force. But these efforts seem less certain to continue now. Trump has said that the “federal government should not be in the habit of demanding data from local or state law-enforcement organizations.”
Beyond policies, Trump’s win signals another challenge for Minnesota, which has seen a rise in hate crimes since the campaign season started. According to a report by California State University, hate crimes against Muslims increased by nearly eighty per cent in 2015 in twenty states, including Minnesota, where such crimes rose by almost forty per cent. Omar says the community is on edge. The spate of crimes across the country since last Tuesday indicates that people have become emboldened to use aggression against minorities. “My district is one of the most diverse in the nation. People are afraid,” Omar told me. “There is an air of sadness and anxiety. As leaders, all we can do is reassure people that we are not going to waver in our fight for them, in our advocacy for progressive values.
Last Tuesday’s elections were an acute reminder of the disconnect between local politics and the national pulse. Though she celebrated her win, Omar still “felt betrayed by the people of this nation” when she found out Trump had won. “I’m still in dismay that a message of hate and divisiveness is going to be the leading voice of our nation.” She took some solace as other women of color were elected in places like California and Nevada. “For some people, they saw Trump as a part of change, too,” Omar said. “We have to do the work of reminding people what it is they are invested in, and draw a clear picture of what it means for people to elect people like me and Kamala Harris, and elect someone like Donald Trump.”
I saw her mentioned in a few threads last week, but why not have a full thread about her. In the midst of one of the worst election results in recent memory, there were a few shining victories.
At the same time Donald Trump was watching the Presidential-election returns from Trump Tower, in New York, Ilhan Omar was in the Courtyard Marriott in Minneapolis, watching the returns and learning that she had also been elected, as a Minnesota House Representative for the city’s 60B District. Like Trump, Omar represented a change. Like Trump, Omar won on a platform promising to serve a community whose needs had been forgotten. But Omar represents many of the things that Trump has belittled: she’s a Muslim, an immigrant, a woman.
Omar’s family moved to Virginia from Kenya when she was twelve years old, after her family, refugees from the civil war in Somalia, had been granted a chance to apply for citizenship in the United States. Omar spoke almost no English when she landed in Arlington, but that was not the only barrier. “This is the first time I realized the stigma that I carried as an immigrant and a refugee, and a Muslim person who was visibly Muslim, with a head scarf,” she said in an interview earlier this year. “And that my blackness was a source of tension.” By the time she was fourteen, the family had settled in Minnesota, where the federal government helped to resettle a large Somali-refugee population in the nineteen-nineties.
Omar, thirty-four, has a long history of civic service, starting with translating for her grandfather during Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party meetings when she was fourteen. She went on to work as a community health-care educator, as a policy aide, and, recently, as the director of policy initiative at Women Organizing Women, a group that encourages women from the East African diaspora to take on leadership roles in their communities. She was the unlikely winner in the D.F.L. primaries, in August, beating out two candidates, including the incumbent, Phyllis Kahn, who had served for forty-four years. Omar won decisively that night. “I was in tears,” she told me over the phone. “I nearly collapsed when I saw the numbers.”
The borders of District 60B form a jagged triangle in the northeastern part of Minneapolis, which is divided by the Mississippi River. East of the river lies the University of Minnesota; to its west is the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, one of the most culturally diverse places in the state. Omar will represent more than forty thousand constituents, made up largely of long-time residents, East African immigrants, and students. The district is “extremely progressive,” she told me.
When Trump visited Minnesota the weekend before the elections, he saw a different state. Tailoring his usual campaign points for a local audience, Trump drew analogies between terrorists and Somalis, who number more than thirty-three thousand in the state, most of whom live in Minneapolis. “Here in Minnesota, you’ve seen firsthand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state without your knowledge, without your support or approval, and with some of them joining ISIS and spreading their extremist views,” he told the crowd, adding, “You’ve suffered enough in Minnesota.” Earlier this summer, three young Somali men were convicted of conspiracy to commit murder abroad in a long-standing federal investigation that led to other guilty pleas. Minnesota has voted Democratic in every Presidential election for the past four decades, and this year, too, Hillary Clinton won the state by 1.5 per cent. But her strength was in Minneapolis and urban areas. Most counties went to Trump—including nineteen that President Obama won in 2012.
Last week’s election gave both the Minnesota House and Senate a Republican majority, and Omar’s progressive platform—what she describes as about “justice and the common good”—is unlikely to be popular. Her priorities include affordable education, investment in mental health, and criminal-justice-system reform. “My challenge will be figuring out a way to have a conversation with my colleagues about what people elected us to do,” she told me.
Omar’s tenure will also inevitably be marked by Trump’s Presidency. In his immigration speech this fall, Trump vowed to “block funding for sanctuary cities”—cities where law-enforcement agencies are prohibited from targeting people based on their immigration status. The mayor of Minneapolis, which is a sanctuary city, has said she would work to protect immigrants. The plan to defund sanctuary cities is part of the President-elect’s agenda to enforce strong law and order, a sentiment that runs counter to Omar’s support of police reform. In July, a police officer shot and killed Philando Castile, a black man, during a traffic stop outside of St. Paul. On Omar’s Web site, she calls for “police car dash cams be used to assign tickets objectively. If such a law were in place, Philando Castile would still be alive.” The spate of police violence across the country, and subsequent protests and demands for accountability, led the Justice Department to announce that it would begin collecting data on the use of police force. But these efforts seem less certain to continue now. Trump has said that the “federal government should not be in the habit of demanding data from local or state law-enforcement organizations.”
Beyond policies, Trump’s win signals another challenge for Minnesota, which has seen a rise in hate crimes since the campaign season started. According to a report by California State University, hate crimes against Muslims increased by nearly eighty per cent in 2015 in twenty states, including Minnesota, where such crimes rose by almost forty per cent. Omar says the community is on edge. The spate of crimes across the country since last Tuesday indicates that people have become emboldened to use aggression against minorities. “My district is one of the most diverse in the nation. People are afraid,” Omar told me. “There is an air of sadness and anxiety. As leaders, all we can do is reassure people that we are not going to waver in our fight for them, in our advocacy for progressive values.
Last Tuesday’s elections were an acute reminder of the disconnect between local politics and the national pulse. Though she celebrated her win, Omar still “felt betrayed by the people of this nation” when she found out Trump had won. “I’m still in dismay that a message of hate and divisiveness is going to be the leading voice of our nation.” She took some solace as other women of color were elected in places like California and Nevada. “For some people, they saw Trump as a part of change, too,” Omar said. “We have to do the work of reminding people what it is they are invested in, and draw a clear picture of what it means for people to elect people like me and Kamala Harris, and elect someone like Donald Trump.”
I saw her mentioned in a few threads last week, but why not have a full thread about her. In the midst of one of the worst election results in recent memory, there were a few shining victories.
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