The Ex-Politician: 'The Easy Route Is To Blame Faith'
In 2009, Rashida Tlaib became the first Muslim-American woman to serve in the Michigan Legislature and only the second in history to be elected to any state legislature in the country. In 2014, she unsuccessfully ran for state Senate and candidly expressed the skepticism and downright racism she felt during that bid. “I ran for state Senate and people at the doors would tell me, ‘I don’t like your name.’ That’s code for ‘I don’t like your ethnicity.’” Once she received hate mail with the message, “A good Muslim is a dead one.”
Islamophobia, Tlaib says, has gotten worse. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, “I remember being in law school and there was a tremendous amount of fear, but there were a lot of people saying, ‘This is not about Islam.’ There was a message of unification,” she said. “Now after the Iraq War and post-Afghanistan and ISIS and all that is happening at the same time with someone like Donald Trump running for office, suspicion based on faith is so heightened right now. I feel like it’s gotten 10 times as worse. … The easy route is to blame faith, and I think that’s what a lot of Americans are doing.”
Tlaib (who plans on running for public office again one day) has two sons, age 5 and 11. Raising children as Muslims in America has been particularly challenging. She recounted her oldest son recently coming home from summer school. “The kids were saying that Trump is trying to take over the world and that he wants to get rid of Muslims. Mama, where are we going to go?” he asked. Tlaib told him, “We don’t have to go anywhere. This is our country.”