For immigrant women, fighting for some of the standard platforms of the women's movement may feel unthinkable when deportation is staring you in the face every day.
Interpretation
The struggles of immigrant women can overshadow broader women's rights issues when they face the immediate threat of deportation.
This quote by Pramila Jayapal highlights the unique challenges that immigrant women face, emphasizing that their most urgent concerns about safety and stability can often eclipse discussions surrounding women's rights and movements. It calls attention to the intersection of immigration issues and gender equality, suggesting that for many, the fight for rights may seem distant or impossible under the pressure of daily fears of deportation.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of including immigrant women's voices in feminist movements.
Having a strong race lens means you understand racism is threaded through and institutionalized in all of our systems and our very perceptions, threaded through how someone looks at you, treats you, thinks about you and your potential.
If there is one thing that resonates for women, it is that regardless of where we come from or what we look like, we want to be fully recognized for the breadth of our contributions.
I am not a woman on Monday, an immigrant on Tuesday, a worker on Wednesday, and a mom on Thursday, I am all of those things all of the time, and I am going to fight for all of those things all of the time.
Every hour that goes by with family separation policies in effect is another hour that mothers weep thinking of their children, another hour that kids are fearfully wondering where their parents have been taken, another hour that trauma deepens.
Just as so many rivers, so many showers of rain from above, so many medicinal springs do not alter the taste of the sea, so the pressure of adversity does not affect the mind of the brave man. For it maintains its balance, and over all that happens it throws its own complexion, because it is more powerful than external circumstances.
And alone and without his nest shall the Eagle fly across the sun.
I have been holding a dialogue with myself and girding myself to stand fast without running.
I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo.
...the workers aren't going to stop struggling. They're going to struggle to have a union and they have the right to have it. The police repression and the grower indifference to the workers' demands for recognition cannot go unheard so we're going to keep on struggling until we get that recognition.
Be brave and celebrate with us your 'perceived flaws,' as society tells us. May we make our flaws famous, and thus redefine the heinous.
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