Can you believe we are going to be members of Congress?
—Rep. Sharice Davids (D-KS) to Rep. Deb Haaland (D-NM)
On an overcast day in April, a dozen high school girls gathered in a recreation room in Juniper Gardens, the oldest and largest public housing complex in Kansas City, Kansas. It was their weekly meeting with the Learning Club, an after-school program that offers tutoring and mentoring to some of the most marginalized students in this postindustrial city. As an intoxicated denizen stumbled past the probing gaze of a security guard, Sharice Davids finished up a call on the portico of the building, then walked in to join the girls waiting to meet her. Casual in dark trousers and a light-colored shirt, her face free of makeup, her long hair swinging behind her, the Native American congresswoman carried herself with an unstudied, casual pleasantness, and plopped herself among them.
Most Congress members adjust their outfits, their demeanor, their vernacular—even their accents—to conform to their audience, be it at a campaign stop, a committee hearing, a dinner with donors, or a town hall meeting in their districts. For months, I followed Davids to water treatment projects; to meetings with mayors and job seekers; to a confab with designer-accessorized members of the Wing, a high-end coworking space for women in Georgetown; and to see these high school students from families with an average household income of $8,184 per year. In each environment, she always seemed to be just Sharice.
“So, what’s it like to be a role model?” Davids casually asked the girls, who were working with smaller kids at the center as part of a training workshop in childcare. What did they like to study? What did they want to do after high school? Did any of them want to run for office at some point? (Her advice if they did: take naps.) She didn’t do so well in school all the time, she told them, especially the year her mother was stationed overseas for the army. Other times, high school went better.
They had questions for her, too: What was hard about her job?
Making big decisions, Davids said, like whether or not to ground airplanes involved in a series of crashes, even if the grounding would have an enormous impact on the airline business. “I get emotional and overwhelmed,” she admitted.
She told them about how carpenters make furniture in one of the House office buildings, about how all of her meetings last approximately fifteen minutes, about people who come to her office to get issues with their social security payments unraveled.
One young black girl, her voice slightly shaking, quietly asked Davids, a former mixed martial artist, community college and law school graduate, lesbian, Ho-Chunk Nation member, and the only Democrat in the Kansas congressional delegation, if she faced discrimination in Washington.
Davids sipped from her water bottle, sipped again, and then jokingly went to take another sip, feigning avoidance of the question. There had been a local publication during her campaign that often targeted her with racist taunts, she told them. “I asked my staff to stop including their clips in my daily media binder,” she said.
In Congress, she went on, things had been better, but not always. “Guys will grab me in one way or another. That stuff still happens. People say things that are unintentional and also overt,” she said. “I have a go-to phrase: ‘That’s an interesting thing for you to say to me!’ ”
The girls, riveted by her candor, laughed.
“Now that I am a member of Congress, I have more authority,” she added. “I depend on people to be good allies. It depends, though, because I don’t like to escalate things. You know what that’s like?”
The girl who had asked the discrimination question nodded.
Davids looked at her. “What do you do?” she asked the young woman, who looked back shyly. “You don’t have to say.”
I sat back in my chair at the edge of the room and closed my eyes, thinking of every male member of Congress I had ever followed around a district, from Rotary Club meetings to small-business forums to hospital centers to 4-H clubs, and tried to recall a similar moment, the kind that will never go in a campaign video or become part of the Congressional Record. There were no voters in this nondescript recreation room in Kansas City, no potential donors, no officials who needed Davids’s assistance or could provide her help. It was a major chunk of time for a member of Congress to give up in the middle of an overscheduled day.
That moment, and scores of other unseen ones like it over that initial year, illustrated how the new women of Congress, many of them firsts from their racial or ethnic group to serve in their district (or, as in Davids’s case, the nation) undertook their roles beyond lawmaking. They know that they are not just “representatives” in the constitutional sense; they also represent real inspiration for others, and they take that role seriously.
As she took her leave, disappointed to be pulled back into her car and the trappings of the adult world again, Davids had a reminder for her new young friends, whatever their paths were, whether college student, member of Congress, journeyman plumber: “You get to decide what success means.”
There is a new current flowing through this diverse Congress that helps to redefine success as well. Along with experiencing the pure joy of once-silent voices being heard, the Firsts also want to build and maintain their power; to keep the momentum of diversity going. Taking the time, as Davids was doing, to be a role model, may not have been traditional politics, but politics in its own way, it surely is.
Political scientists have a term: “descriptive representation.” It usually refers to elected officials whose gender, ethnicity, or racial identity resembles that of his or her constituents. In general, the term describes officials who are elected in minority-majority areas, in terms of race or ethnicity, but it can also extend to gender or sexual orientation, even occupation. Descriptive representation is seen as a thing of value to the community, in terms of the advocacy and policy making that comes with it. Ample academic evidence, for instance, points to Latino lawmakers from majority Latino districts proving more able to block legislation that is harmful to their communities than non-Latino representatives.
Clearly, though, a less quantifiable value of descriptive representation is the creation of role models, especially for younger voters and those too young to vote. It is all the more interesting where women of color are elected to represent majority-white districts. It is the political equivalent, if you will, of some of the more notable photographs that emerged during the Obama administration, like the iconic photo of a little black boy, the son of a staff member, touching President Barack Obama’s head during an Oval Office visit, or of two-year-old Parker Curry standing in awe before the large-scale painting of first lady Michelle Obama at the National Portrait Gallery. It is the unpolled, unspoken, maybe even unconscious calculation, of a constituent realizing: “If her, why not me?”
“There is something symbolic in being the first Native American elected to Congress,” Christian Grose, an associate professor of political science and public policy at the University of Southern California, told me. When he heard my description of Davids in the rec center that day, he noted, “She was not necessarily delivering something for those girls, but inspiring them.”
Davids, thirty-nine, never really considered a career in politics before 2016. Although she was a White House Fellow under President Obama—a one-year program, begun in 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, to give high-achieving young men and women a chance to try their hand in public service—she had spent much of her adult life as a professional mixed martial artist and lawyer. She neither overtly touts nor hides the fact that she is the first out lesbian to win a seat in Kansas. Several people who worked on her campaign or work beside her in Congress laud her for being a quick policy study, and for her deliberateness as she evaluates legislation.
Her political instincts are impressive. “Call every person you’ve ever met in your entire life, even if you don’t like them, and ask them for money,” she advised the group of women at the Wing about how to raise money for campaigns. “Just say, ‘It’s not about you and me—it’s about democracy!”
Davids tends to keep a low profile on the Hill, drilling down on legislation to help her newly Democratic district. She carries the burden, though a welcome one, of representing both her local district and an entire group nationwide. “There was a college student who was in here a little bit ago,” she told me one day during an interview in her office. “She’s Native, she grew up in Wichita, Kansas. But she was saying how important it felt to her that I was here, that Deb [Haaland] was here. I think it’s usually when I’m actually talking to people where I have a moment to take a step back, that sometimes I get a sense of it. Because the day-to-day, it’s so busy. And we’re trying to make structural change, because that’s what big-policy federal legislating is. And so it’s not that often that I stop and think about it, which is probably good, because it feels very big.”
When she feels the need to slow down, step back, and “be present and connect,” Davids said, she goes to the floor to look for fellow Native American congresswoman Haaland. “I just want to sit by her, because I feel a connection and a comfort with Deb. I don’t even need to be talking to her about anything specific.”
The two attorneys, who both traveled through a prestigious program for Native American lawyers, have formed a tight bond, although they, and their congressional districts, are quite distinct from one another. Haaland, fifty-nine, represents a largely liberal district that encompasses most of Albuquerque and its suburbs; the majority of voters in her safe Democratic district share her progressive views.
A single mother who once ran her own salsa-canning business and later did legal work on behalf of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, of which she is a member, she has long been steeped in local and national politics. She ran unsuccessfully for New Mexico lieutenant governor in 2014, and later led the state Democratic Party. Elegant and slightly formal in her midcalf skirts and Native American jewelry, she speaks with the studied cadence of someone who has spent a long time thinking about policy. A climate activist, she is a fan of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.
During her childhood in Winslow, Arizona, Haaland had only a vague awareness of her status as a Laguna Pueblo Indian. Her mother was a naval officer, and her father, a Marine Corps officer who had earned a Silver Star in Vietnam. “We were raised on green chili stew, and hot tortillas and fried potatoes and beans and things like that,” Haaland said. “I guess I didn’t really think about being the only Indian in the classroom.”
Her mother did Haaland’s hair every day, putting it into two braids. “Because we always had long hair, me and my sister. That was the only hairstyle I was ever allowed to have,” she said. “I’d get comments about that from my teachers sometimes, about my braids and thinking that that was Indian, but it was just because my mom didn’t want our hair flying around our face.”
She started to reflect more on being the only Native in her classroom only years later—when she was tribal administrator for the Pueblo of San Felipe tribe, when she was state vote director for Native Americans for President Obama, and especially when she ran for Congress. “There was just so much attention being paid to identity during the time I was running my campaign,” she said during one of our interviews in her House office, where a woven God’s eye and posters for renewable energy decorate the walls. “I got accused of playing identity politics because one of our taglines was ‘Congress has never heard a voice like mine.’ I got comments like, ‘[You] play identity politics, and we should just vote for the person and their qualifications.’ It made me feel like, if you’ve always been represented in this country, then, yeah, I understand what you’re saying. But if you’ve never been represented, if you’ve never seen yourself, it’s hard to call it ‘identity politics.’ ”
Sharice Davids, on the other hand, told me she got an “early start” in recognizing that she was the only person like herself in the room. Her single mother served in the army for twenty years and did a stint in Germany when Davids was in elementary school. “I remember coming home and talking to my mom, and I think I said, ‘What am I?’ or something. Because she was like, ‘What do you mean?’ And I said, ‘Well, at school, some people, they were asking ‘What are you?’ And she said, ‘Oh, well, I know what they’re asking about, because you’re a Native American. And you’re Ho-Chunk,’ ” Davids said. “My mom would come and do presentations about Native history and about our tribe and stuff like that. So it was interesting, because I was often the only Native American anybody had ever met. Which is, in some ways, a lot like what my professional life was—just going into a bunch of different spaces and being sometimes the only woman, sometimes the only nonwhite person, sometimes the only person who’s a first-generation college student and coming from a not-wealthy family.”
Davids’s politics are more in line with her district, while also reflecting both her own biography and, in some cases, progressive leanings. Is she for expanding health care and addressing climate change? Yes. Medicare for All and the Green New Deal? Not so much. Unlike Haaland, she voted for an appropriations bill that lacked strong protections for migrant children in overcrowded border shelters, leading Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s then–chief of staff to tweet: “I don’t believe Sharice is a racist person, but her votes are showing her to enable a racist system,” a final harbinger of his demise.
While Davids and Haaland are not politically homogeneous, their identities were central to their campaigns, and later their friendship, and people took notice. “Part of what was so significant is that they ran aggressively as Native Americans,” Kevin Gover, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and a citizen of the Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, told me. “That is not always the case with the Native guys who run for Congress.”
Gover recalled a luncheon event at the museum honoring Native women that both congresswomen attended a month after they were sworn in. “The feeling in the room was hard to describe,” he said. “There was this huge sense of pride among the women who were there. It’s almost like—how would you call it?—a redemption. That finally someone understands the value of Native women who have been devalued in every way you can think of, from the mythology of Pocahontas and Sacagawea. So for all these women [to hear Davids and Haaland] saying ‘We are still here, and we are powerful’ was inspirational.”
The two started to bond during freshman orientation, where at one point Davids grabbed Haaland by the arm and said, “Can you believe we are going to be members of Congress?” While many of the younger women have gravitated to others of their own generation, Davids and Haaland became close quickly despite their age difference, and they often check in with each other over the weekends when back in their districts. They also meet for dinner or walks after long days on the Hill.
After the last August recess, Davids tweeted a photo of the two of them, both wearing backpacks, making their way down a long tunnel under the Capitol. They are often seen sitting together on the floor, with a Native blanket sometimes draped over Haaland’s seat to save it. “There will only ever be two people in history who have this shared experience that Deb and I have,” Davids told me. “When you go through, like law school, or something intense, you know, like if you get into a car accident with somebody, you have that sense that something really big happened. And you’re both in a very vulnerable place. So that’s the sense of connection that I feel with Deb, and the multiple things that exist. One of them, I think, is that feeling of responsibility about the role that we play in Indian country. And then both being lawyers, who really understand not just the legal implications, but the real-life implications for tribes.”
Reflecting a bit more, Davids added, “We’ve had eleven thousand plus people serve in the United States Congress, and the fact that there’s never been a Native woman here before Deb and I got here is just, it’s mind-blowing.”
Haaland sees other connections with Davids. “It’s interesting,” she said when we talked later in her office. “Her mom was a single mom and raised her. And I was a single mom and raised my daughter. So, too, we understand the family dynamics of how we were raised. And so I just have a tremendous amount of respect and sisterly love for her.” We progressed to other topics, but as I packed up to leave she circled back. “You know, I’m grateful I’m not the only Native woman in Congress. When you’re the only one, I think things are hard.”
Descriptive representation is not all emotional intangibles. Its two central goals are measurable: stimulating voter turnout—think about Barack Obama and the activation of African American voters—and passing legislation that benefits the represented community, or at least stopping bills that harm it. In that sense, it is not so much descriptive as substantive.
There is early evidence that the Firsts have chipped away at this goal, at least on House-passed bills. The Violence Against Women Act has for years been mired in controversy as lawmakers have tried to address the crimes perpetrated against Native women on tribal land by non-Indians. Because non–Native Americans accused of crimes have questioned whether they are subject to Native law, they have often escaped justice.
“Haaland has made a point of saying that Native Americans were never fully represented,” Georgetown University government professor Michele Swers told me. The law, for decades, has extended important protection to survivors of domestic and sexual violence, and such violence impacts Native American women at far higher rates than the general population.
“She has actually worked in that area as a lawyer, and the way that she spoke about it was so personally important to her,” Swers said. “You can see how personal background influences how you spend your time and political capital.”
In her short time on the Hill, Haaland has made sure to have tribal leaders at hearings concerning national parks; secured an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that required any military construction projects to have tribal consultation; helped organize a hearing on missing and murdered indigenous women, with a witness panel composed entirely of indigenous women; and requested a review of how Native Americans are portrayed in artwork and statues around the Capitol, which could potentially change how millions of tourists in Washington see Native people.
Haaland is fully aware of the importance of her role to tribe members. “They don’t have to explain things to me. They can just come in and talk about their issue,” she told me, knowing that they have “a congressperson who understands what tribal sovereignty is, and understands what the three foundational cases of the Supreme Court are, and understands what the difference between an executive order and a treaty is.”
Ayanna Pressley has taken a similar tack with some of her work on behalf of African Americans, from championing legislation that would ban facial-recognition technology in public housing to securing funding for school-based health centers; she was a “frequent flyer” at the school nurse as a child, she said, but rather than become annoyed by her near-constant presence, the nurse was able to detect Pressley’s experience as a victim of sexual abuse.
“Women are very effective coalition builders, very effective truth and storytellers,” Pressley told me. “Ultimately, that makes for more effective lawmaking.” She points to the example of Katie Porter, a survivor of domestic violence. “During the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization debate, she introduced an amendment to cite economic abuse as a form of violence against women. Now, we all know anecdotally that victims will stay with abusers out of economic codependence. But by my quick read and study, this is the first time that amendment had been authored, and that it passed speaks to the power of lived experience, of identity, of representation.” The idea also stemmed from Porter’s work on bankruptcy issues, specifically a project that gathered data from bankruptcy filers who were abused.
At the end of the day, however, Congress is about power. And with every child who gazes upon the new freshmen in awe, with every elderly woman who had never seen a representative of her race or gender in her town, who grabs a female Congress member by the elbow in excitement, that power is amassing and accruing. The congresswomen may not have craved power in the traditional sense of how we think about electoral politics, but they certainly fought for it and intend to keep it.
Sometimes simply being there changes the way people in newly represented groups see themselves, and opens the notion of possibilities. On a morning in Minneapolis that was so cold I had to take shelter in a bus station after walking only a block, I watched as Ilhan Omar tried to move through a large banquet hall at a celebration for Martin Luther King Jr. She could not move more than a foot before a fan, often a girl in braces and a hijab, stopped her and begged for a selfie. Months later in the same city, a group of Muslim women gathered to meet with Omar, and listened raptly as she described her life in Washington. Some of them were inspired to ponder their own runs for office.
“Since 9/11 in our country, the heavy media focus, unfortunately, has been on the bad actors, whether it’s been Al Qaeda, and then obviously the Iraq War, and just framing Muslims as the enemy,” Farhana Khera, the executive director of Muslim Advocates, told me. “And now we have two high-profile Muslims in this country, who, if you even remotely follow politics now, you’ve probably heard of. And so they are actually helping to shape a more positive view of who Muslims in America are, and that we are people who care deeply about the future of our country, we care deeply about justice for all people. And I think, fundamentally, that’s what I find so exciting.”
Both Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib have also provoked more than their share of negativity, but they try to emphasize the positive. In a video interview right after winning the election, Tlaib spoke of the impact she felt she was already having on young women. “I love when a Muslim father comes up to me and says to his daughter, ‘She is a Muslim.’ And I almost want to cry,” she said. “We’re constantly looking for permission to be in leadership roles. And we need to shake that out of our young girls and, in the meantime, keep asking women to run.”
There is scholarly evidence that role-model representation yields results. “As younger people are still in the process of learning about the political world and developing political interests and habits, their behavior may be more susceptible to the impact of role models,” wrote Christina Wolbrecht and David E. Campbell in a 2017 article “Role Models Revisited: Youth, Novelty, and the Impact of Female Candidates” in the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities. They found that “the presence of new female candidates” impacted women ages eighteen to twenty-nine, who could see themselves in those roles, and that could lead to greater political participation including voting and running for office.
That impact is not confined merely to the young and impressionable. It can overwhelm even the most storied of politicians. John Lewis, the legendary civil rights leader and congressman from Atlanta, recalled the first time he saw Deb Haaland sit in the Speaker’s chair to preside over the House. That might sound glamorous, but it is a mundane task, time-consuming and procedural, mostly involving watching other members as they come to the floor to talk or debate a bill. It is thus often left to freshmen. But in this case, Lewis said, it was historic.
Rep. Rodney Davis of Illinois, the top Republican on the House Administration Committee, paused before beginning what would be a contentious debate over voting rights and campaign finance to note the moment. “Madam Chair,” he said, “before I get started, could I ask for a point of personal privilege to have the members of this institution in the gallery recognize you as the first Native American woman to ever chair the House proceedings?” Congress members from both sides of the aisle rose and applauded madly.
“I shed a tear,” Lewis said to me much later. “It reminded me of what we have had to go through as African Americans, bringing down the old ways, and creating new ways. It should inspire young girls, that they can do it, too.”
Descriptive representation does not erase institutional obstacles for women or people of color, and it does not blunt the original sins of racism. But it does open the aperture of possibility.
As Sharice Davids and I wrapped up one of our interviews, an intense and, at times, wandering conversation in her always-five-degrees-too-cold office, she remembered the first time she considered being a lawyer. “There are some very serious, real barriers for people to get into those spaces,” she said. “But in addition to those real barriers, there’s the one of our people not even thinking about that as an option.”
“This is the thing, why it matters to have so many different people serving in office,” she concluded. “It is not just because of the policy changes, which are huge. This class of people won’t even see the real long-term impacts, because we’ll all be dead and gone. But how many people will have had their paradigm shifted because of the current times that we’re living in now?”