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.
Every time a young girl comes in and asks me for advice, if you start your conversation with, 'How hard is it as a black woman,' or, 'How hard is it as a woman,' I turn you around. Because I cannot - we cannot look at the roadblocks and see the road at the same time.
The pioneers of a warless world are the young men (and women) who refuse military service.
Fear is, I believe, a most effective tool in destroying the soul of an individual - and the soul of a people.
I went to Boston fully expecting to be arrested - arrested by a polizia created by a government that my ancestors rebelled to establish.
My mother was this White woman from Texas, from a racist town raised to believe in the inferiority of others by her community, not necessarily by her parents, but certainly by the community around her. And she fled it.
I could not bear the deep freeze settling around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.
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