GIVE IT UP FOR MY SISTERS

Started from the bottom, now the whole team’s f**kin’ here.

—Drake, “Started from the Bottom”

It was a homie love that started with a phone call. Boston city councilwoman Ayanna Pressley was on an Amtrak train to New York in June 2018 when she asked her campaign manager to call up the congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to ask her to stop by a fundraiser being held at her friend’s apartment in Manhattan. As Pressley described it to Business Insider, as soon as AOC walked in there was an instant connection. “I was in the middle of my stump [speech] when Alex walked in. She’s diminutive in size, but large in presence. She’s luminous. I felt literally the air shift and I looked to my left and it was her entering the event space.” They conversed in the living room.

“This is not just a blue wave, this is a movement that’s coming to Congress this year,” said AOC to the small audience there.

“Absolutely. We called their bluff. When we had the Women’s March, they thought it was just a moment. We knew we were ushering in a movement,” said Pressley.

The living room was instantly on fire—a sisterhood had immediately taken effect.

AOC tweeted after the event. “Last night I had the honor of meeting @AyannaPressley and our BFF applications are already in.”

They bonded over their shared experience studying at Boston University and working in a Kennedy’s office. Pressley interned with Joe Kennedy II while in college, and AOC with Ted Kennedy. Pressley and AOC had both lost their fathers at a young age. AOC was excited that they were both running successful campaigns without any corporate money and “taking down political machines that don’t service their communities.”

Ayanna said, “You know how there are people who have Instagram relationships? This is not an Instagram relationship. Our relationship is not static, it is not one-dimensional, it is dynamic, it is deep, it is meaningful, it is real, and it grows day by day.”

Ayanna Pressley became the first Black congresswoman from Massachusetts. Before she made history in her congressional election, Pressley was the first Black woman to be elected to the Boston City Council. A fellow sistren of progressive policy, she has spoken about sexual assault and adamantly argues on behalf of survivors and abortion rights. Like AOC she is bold in her legislation and one of her first amendments introduced to the House was to reduce the voting age from eighteen to sixteen.

Pressley, Ocasio-Cortez, and two other new, progressive members of Congress—Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan—have become known as the Squad. Omar and Tlaib are the first two Muslim women elected to Congress. The four women have proven to be ride-or-die BFFs through thick and thin.

Rep. Omar was born in Somalia. Her family fled a civil war and lived in a refugee camp in Kenya for years. She came to the United States as an asylum-seeker when she was ten and became a citizen at seventeen, and now she is a powerful force speaking truth to power in Congress. In another trailblazing moment, she became the first woman to wear a hijab on the House floor, ending the House’s 181-year ban on headwear.

Rashida Tlaib is the first Palestinian-American woman in Congress and, along with AOC, one of the first two women from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to serve as a Congress member. Soon after being sworn in, Tlaib famously said about Trump, “We’re going to impeach the mother***er.” (And do you know what? Less than a year later, the House did just that. Ha!)

Sis, let’s be clear on what has been done to these women by Trump and his conservative loyalists. Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed that Omar had once married her own brother; there have been absurd, unfounded questions about whether she’s really an American citizen, the same jabs that Trump took at Obama. For some oddball, racist reason, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh went on for weeks continuously and purposely overenunciating AOC’s name, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with a mock Spanish accent, elongating each syllable; Trump dismissed her last name “Ocasio-Cortez” as too difficult to pronounce; at a party for the Conservative Political Action Conference people scribbled the word “stupid” on a cardboard cutout of her face.

The women as a group have been called the Jihad Squad by conservatives. Trump’s bogus remarks about how they should “go back to where they came from” if they don’t like this country, caused the House Democrats to join together to condemn the president about what Pelosi said was a racist remark, but only four Republicans joined them; they even responded that Pelosi’s comments, not the discriminatory name-calling, violated House rules.

In turn, Trump called the Squad racist, weak, and anti-American and “not very smart.”

INSANE!

Yet, the Squad remain an inspiring force. They are four women who didn’t enter politics as some token diversity girls, where they’d sit quietly and just serve face. Nope. Voters around the world wanted to have a rep who looked like and understood them and then the nation celebrated what they embody as well. In a CBS interview with Gayle King, Tlaib said, “We are an extension of a movement in our country that wants Medicare for All, that wants us to end mass incarceration, that wants us to push back on the attacks on communities of color.”

Omar said, “We are a disruption to the business as usual that has been Washington.”

Pressley said, “Each of us bring our unique and individual voice to this body. We govern in our own way. What we are are four women who have an alignment of values [and] shared policy priorities.”

These women are America’s response to all the mess that became the Trump election. Enough is enough.

They are fearless and outspoken in their criticism of the Trump administration, and progressives continue to cheer them on, even provide protection for them, such as when one hundred Black women hosted a rally in April 2019 to protect Omar against the attacks and threats on her life that she had been getting. Even Nancy Pelosi, used to facing threats on her life, had to order more Capitol Hill security for Omar.

The good news is that the Squad probably isn’t going anywhere. They are incumbents now. They’re going to continue to fight, to stick together in sisterhood, and no amount of bullying is going to stop them from resisting.