“And I was really terrified of what was going to happen to my husband, who was only a green card holder at the time.”
A 2018 interview resurfaced this week in which Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., revealed that she reacted to the tragic events of Sept. 11 by becoming “angry” and “really afraid” of her fellow Americans.
“I was probably in my second year in law school when 9/11 happened. And I was really terrified of what was going to happen to my husband, who was only a green card holder at the time,” Tlaib said in an interview with Makers, an activist outlet that promotes the women’s movement. “I immediately called my brothers and told them to be very careful who you hang out with, telling my sisters, ‘you know, just be real careful out there,’ and being really afraid of my fellow Americans.”
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“It really pushed me to be more involved, and I got really curious and really angry,” Tlaib added. “And I think that combination got me, you know, in front of a number of issues in the city of Detroit.”
Tlaib is part of an upstart wing of young radical progressives – which includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass. – attempting to shake up the Democratic party.
But their efforts have had a mixed reception, even among members of their own party. Democratic Party mainstay Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., made waves earlier this month when she downplayed the influence of the progressive faction led by Ocasio-Cortez by saying it consisted of “like five people.”
Nor has Tlaib been shy about taking jabs at the Democratic establishment. In mid-April she complained that party leaders hadn’t done enough to defend Omar from backlash over comments her fellow Muslim congresswoman made about the Sept. 11 attacks.
Tlaib, who in January joined Omar as the first two Muslim congresswomen, accused their party of using them as tokens of diversity but otherwise trying to keep them quiet.
“To truly honor our diversity is to never silence us,” she said.
They put us in photos when they want to show our party is diverse. However, when we ask to be at the table, or speak up about issues that impact who we are, what we fight for & why we ran in the first place, we are ignored. To truly honor our diversity is to never silence us. https://t.co/7T1OlwS1YG
— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) April 13, 2019
Omar came under fire, mostly by conservatives, after a video surfaced on Twitter earlier this month of her characterizing 9/11 as “some people did something” at a Council on American-Islamic Relations banquet in California on March 23.
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