Isra speaking at First Universalist Church in Minneapolis.
She quickly made up for lost time, determined to build an environmental justice movement in which young people of color could see themselves. Raised in the city for most of her life, Isra doesn’t care all that much for nature. She’s not into hiking, though she did go camping once (mainly because it was a free trip). Her advocacy has nothing to do with a deep love for the outdoors and everything to do with the communities disproportionately hurt by climate change—not because their favorite rafting river is drying up, but because their drinking water is poisoned and the air they breathe is killing them. To her, this is the only climate advocacy that makes sense.“[They’re] talking about how much they love grass and their lakes—I can't connect with you on that.”
To the average 16-year-old, the experience might have been devastating, and Isra admits that the comments from her classmates—who she described as usually pretty “woke”—caught her off-guard. But after recounting the story, she quickly shrugs it off. For better or worse, she is accustomed to public harassment.Plus, Isra is remarkably self-assured and logic-driven for a teen, something her mother has noticed too. “I’m constantly inspired by her drive and tenacity—and how she unapologetically shows up in the world,” said Omar in a statement about Isra. “She has poise and wisdom that is beyond her years, and it makes me feel blessed every single day that she was gifted to me as my first-born.”Since joining Congress, Omar has been the target of relentless defamation campaigns, which rely on anti-Black Islamophobia, and often come for Isra, too, flooding her DMs despite the fact that she’s a minor. When she checks her phone between classes, in addition to national organizers blowing up her notifications, she expects to find messages from strangers telling her to “go back” to a country in which she’s never lived.“She has poise and wisdom that is beyond her years."
The word that Isra uses over and over again to describe this time in her life is “weird.” It was weird when people at school approached her to see how she was coping; it was weird when her principal told her to tell her mother that the school stands with her; “It’s kind of weird when you're getting text messages like, ‘Are you okay, is your family safe?’ and, in reality, I'm completely fine,” she said.“I didn’t want to be known as Ilhan Omar’s daughter, I wanted to be known as myself.”
“They would invite us to events just so we could be the tokens,” she said, explaining how she and other people of color were treated in these supposedly progressive activist spaces. “They would compliment us on our speaking, just so that we would want to do it again.”Isra is used to being paraded because of her identity. It seems that because of that experience, she’s developed a clear sense of how she’s perceived and the labels that both propel her forward and hold her back, often at the same time. “I don't get to walk into a room and call myself a climate activist without being a Black activist, a Muslim activist, a feminist,” she said, her tone indifferent and matter-of-fact. “My identity has kind of forced me into this box. You're that one intersectional person and it's like, Oh look at Isra, this Black, Muslim, climate activist talking about Black people, just because I happen to exude those identities when you look at me.”On top of that, she’s been hyper-aware of being seen only through the context of her mother. “I have to prove to the world that I'm not doing what I'm doing because of her,” she said. That can be frustrating, given that Omar is hardly involved in Isra’s organizing. “A simple retweet that I don't ask for, but that's all. I started doing these things without even telling her,” she said. Proving to others that her advocacy work was of her own prerogative became a task in itself.“I live 2 lives- that of a climate justice organizer and that of a politician’s daughter,” Isra wrote in her August Medium post.Perhaps this double life is part of why Isra seems adamant about not preoccupying herself with the promise of representation. She understands that her mother can exist as a Congresswoman who will be written into American history books, and at the same time, that her visibility alone could never be enough to cure a country whose inner workings are inherently racist. Plus, in her own experiences, the line between representation and tokenization has been worn so thin that it’s hard to know if it exists at all.Despite the eyes on her back and people’s preoccupation with how to label her, Isra has been laser-focused on pragmatic organizing efforts that have paid off. At the end of April, she got presidential candidates Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Andrew Yang to agree to a climate debate by confronting them face-to-face, but the Democratic National Committee disappointingly refused to host the debate for which she and her co-organizers at U.S. Youth Climate Strike had been pushing. In September, however, the efforts of their grassroots work were realized when a debate on climate change featuring Democratic presidential candidates aired on CNN.In yet another performance of premature wisdom, Isra ends her Medium essay with a realization: that her proximity to the most polarizing woman in Congress is, in fact, a privilege that she’s taken for granted. “I want to find ways to recognize this new privilege as a net positive in the spaces that I exist in,” she wrote, “while at the same time learning when it’s my time to step back and pass on the mic.”This summer, Isra got to reap the benefits of that privilege, spending two weeks in Congress with her mom. When we’d spoken at the beginning of summer, she told me she was interested in going into politics one day—maybe even running for president—potentially after law school. Today, that aspiration has been tempered. If she absolutely had to go into politics, she said, she’d definitely stop at the local level. Her impression of Congress?“Really, really childish.”Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.“My identity has kind of forced me into this box. You're that one intersectional person and it's like, Oh look at Isra, this Black, Muslim, climate activist talking about Black people, just because I happen to exude those identities when you look at me.”
