Ilhan Omar's autobiography on the way

[lpetrich]

This Is What America Looks Like review: Ilhan Omar inspires – and stays fired up | Ilhan Omar | The Guardian

Few things are more unexpected than a genuinely inspirational memoir by a freshman member of Congress. If you’re looking for the perfect antidote to the perpetual tweetstorm of insanity and hatred from Donald Trump, try this beautiful new book from the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

She had a nice life for a while, until the country started suffering from civil war.

“Bullets flew from one side of the conflict to the other,” Omar writes, “… directly over our house”. The house took direct hits, food became scarce and 350,000 died in the first year of the conflict.

Her father's first choice was the US, though he could have chosen Canada, Norway, or Sweden.

The family’s first stop was Arlington, Virginia, where the combative Ilhan spent most of her time in detention. But then she decided, she writes, “that my education was the one element of my life I had full control over, and given the long hours of studying in detention”, by the time they moved on to Minnesota she “had become a very good student”.

At her new school, “Africans fought African Americans over who was blacker. Muslim kids and white kids fought over US policy in the Middle East. Latinos against African Americans, Africans against Native Americans.”

But Ilhan began to display her talents as a community organizer. She joined a group of students determined to “improve racial and cultural relations” by founding Unity in Diversity, “essentially a training program around diverse leadership”.

She went to North Dakota State University, because it seemed rather desperate to get students.

After she returned, she took up causes like same-sex marriage and rejection of photo ID for voting.

She figured out a winning narrative: both were threats to freedom and civil liberties, a message that worked with communities of color and white rural Minnesotans. No anti-marriage equality initiative had ever been beaten until then – the same year Barack Obama was elected president.

Then to the Minnesota state legislature in 2016 and to the US House in 2018. Then the controversy about how she described the Israeli lobby: "it’s all about the Benjamins baby" She apologized for that.

“I am by nature a starter of fires,” she writes. “My work has been to figure out where I’m going to burn down everything around me by adding the fuel of my religion, skin color, gender, or even my tone. Knowing not just yourself … but also how the world interacts with you … is vital to true and lasting progress.”

She describes how she has some valuable experience:

“Recognizing my psychology as a refugee who has seen her home devolve in to chaos basically overnight,” she writes “… it’s my duty to call out the lack of awareness about the disintegration of civilization that is possible anywhere … it can happen only when nobody is paying attention … or people stop caring.”

 

[lpetrich]

This Is What America Looks Like : NPR

Has an audio file of an interview with her. Despite a centrist being nominated for President, she thinks that her side has some victories in what political issues we talk about, and also in inspiring people to run with similar platforms.

 

[Derec]

This Is What America Looks Like : NPR

Unforunately, thanks to decades of misguided immigration policies, America increasingly looks like her: radicals using their religion and skin color as a justification to "start fires" and "burn down everything around [them]".

That is NOT a good development for the US, as we have seen from the last few days. If she wants to burn shit down, she should go back to Somalia!

 

[ZiprHead]

Unforunately, thanks to decades of misguided immigration policies,

I agree. We should not have let in bigoted, lawbreaking Germans.

That is NOT a good development for the US, as we have seen from the last few days.

Yes, the bigotry displayed by many in the George Floyd thread should have no place in the USA.

 

[Derec]

Yes, the bigotry displayed by many in the George Floyd thread should have no place in the USA.

You mean the bigotry of those who pretend that anything bad that is happening at these "protests" is white people's fault?

 

[ZiprHead]

Yes, the bigotry displayed by many in the George Floyd thread should have no place in the USA.

You mean the bigotry of those who pretend that anything bad that is happening at these "protests" is white people's fault?

Luckily no one did that.

 

[Trausti]

This Is What America Looks Like : NPR

Unforunately, thanks to decades of misguided immigration policies, America increasingly looks like her: radicals using their religion and skin color as a justification to "start fires" and "burn down everything around [them]".

That is NOT a good development for the US, as we have seen from the last few days. If she wants to burn shit down, she should go back to Somalia!

Hold on. We are assured that Americans 2.0 are more vibrant than the stale Americans 1.0.

 

[Derec]

Luckily no one did that.

No? That;'s all I hear about on here. How it's all white people's fault, that they are causing all the looting and arson, etc.

 

[ZiprHead]

Luckily no one did that.

No? That;'s all I hear about on here. How it's all white people's fault, that they are causing all the looting and arson, etc.

Everyone knows it's not all white people doing it. Your statement above is simply a straw man for you to burn down. (pun intended)

 

[Bomb#20]

Luckily no one did that.

No? That;'s all I hear about on here. How it's all white people's fault, that they are causing all the looting and arson, etc.

Everyone knows it's not all white people doing it. Your statement above is simply a straw man for you to burn down. (pun intended)

Um, I'm pretty sure Derec meant "How (it's all) white people's fault", and not "How it's (all white people)'s fault".

 

[lpetrich]

Most Politicians’ Memoirs Are Terrible. Luckily, Ilhan Omar’s Isn’t.

The problem was, I’m a fan. I admire Omar’s courage, and I’m glad someone as tough and visionary as she is fights for our side, the side of the working class. And I can’t help but notice that, like her fellow “Squad” member, Queens congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Omar is gifted with such good looks that it’s nearly impossible for her enemies to deploy the misogynist’s favorite nonviolent weapon: the unflattering photo. Omar gives me hope for the future.

Reviewer Lisa Featherstone was worried that it would be as horrible as so many other politicians' memoirs.

But this story has a happy ending: This Is What America Looks Like is a pretty good book. It is indeed a political memoir, as feared, but Omar and her coauthor, Rebecca Paley, have a straightforward, highly readable storytelling style, and the congresswoman has a compelling story.

“You Walk in Here Like a Man”

A tomboy from an early age, climbing trees with the boys, Omar grew up in an upper-middle-class family of civil servants in Mogadishu, Somalia in a compound that included not only her father and siblings (Omar’s mother died when she was young), but also aunts, uncles, cousins, and a grandfather. Her grandfather, “Baba,” raised his children and grandchildren with strongly anti-patriarchal attitudes, often in defiance of the society around him.

Her happy childhood came to a devastating end when civil war broke out in Somalia in 1989. Three years later, the family had to flee the country, as their particular clan was targeted for genocide and they would have been killed. Omar and her family then spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya before coming to the United States, where many people died, most devastatingly an aunt who had been like a mother to her. Omar describes this time powerfully and unsentimentally: of her fellow refugees in the camp, she writes, “They buried loved ones in makeshift graves and went to play soccer.”

 

[lpetrich]

What Ilhan Omar Survived Before Congress | PEOPLE.com

In her memoir — subtitled "My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman" — one of the first Muslim women in Congress, and the the first Somali-American, describes her family's daring escape in the early '90s from Somalia in cattle trucks, which were attacked by gunmen.

Omar writes that she and some of her relatives managed to reach their first destination only to be told that her father and brothers had been murdered — and her sister raped. The next day, 9-year-old Omar saw her father and learned the horrific rumors weren't true. But their journey as refugees was just beginning.

She and her family would end up spending three years in a refugee camp in Kenya, where many people died of starvation and various diseases. In one of the most agonizing scenes in her book, she remembers the day her pregnant aunt Fos, who had been her mother in all of the ways that counted, died of malaria not long after they arrived at the camp. (Omar's biological mother had died when she was a preschooler.)

IO described dredging up those old memories as "torture".

With her autobiography, the congresswoman and mother of three traces her trajectory from her 1995 arrival in the United States (when she quickly realized the disparity between daily life and the idyllic videos shown to new arrivals), to her struggles as an immigrant and woman of color that would motivate her to enter politics.

...
While she's willing to open up now, that wasn't always the case. The congresswoman admits that even her kids — Isra, Adnan and Ilwad — weren't aware of the trauma she's experienced.