Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar was scrolling through social media when a video of George Floyd’s killing appeared on her feed. “It was like watching a horror movie,” the freshman congresswoman tells Bustle. “You just keep yelling, and you know they can’t hear you.” The video shows former police officer Derek Chauvin, who served Omar’s Minneapolis district, with his knee on Floyd’s neck. “It was like watching a public lynching.”
In late May, Omar had planned on promoting her memoir, This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey From Refugee to Congresswoman, which chronicles her path from Somalia to a Kenyan refugee camp and ultimately to resettlement in Minnesota at age 12. Instead, she’s joined local protests to demand change in law enforcement. Her city has reignited the Black Lives Matter conversation, and activists in more than 750 American cities have joined the call to action. “For too long, Black and marginalized communities have faced violence from the Minneapolis Police Department [MPD],” Omar says. “Our chief himself has sued the department for racism before.”
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“For my son, he's 14 and will often just blurt out, ‘Mom, that could be me,’” she says. “That's hard, because for him to show up as a Black man [to protests], interactions with the police can be deadly."
Regardless, her children know the power of her platform as a congresswoman. “For them, it's like, ‘Mom, you gotta do something.’”
