Rana Abdelhamid has something to say about the Met Gala. It’s beginning to get dark where the 28-year-old candidate for Congress has joined me on a bench in Central Park. The nearest lampposts have just been lit, and what remains of the early-evening October light has illuminated just enough of her face to glean that she’s excited to have this particular conversation.
The Queens native is running against longtime representative Carolyn Maloney to represent New York’s 12th Congressional District on a pro–Medicare for All; pro–Green New Deal; and Housing, Economic and Gender Justice platform. For reasons thought to be due to redistricting, the date of the primary election has yet to be announced. With a background in nonprofit leadership, Abdelhamid says she was inspired to run by what she witnessed within her community during the pandemic; it was people around her—not politicians—who organized to fill the gaps, from mutual aid to grocery delivery.
“It was a deep level of frustration knowing that we deserve better leadership, counterbalanced by a deep love that I have for my community and the fact that I’m not doing this alone,” she explains of what jump-started her candidacy.
But it’ll take a lot to surpass Maloney, who has served since 2013—a fact of which Abdelhamid is well aware. As of now, the district includes the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, western Queens, Roosevelt Island, and several neighborhoods in the East Side of Manhattan, which is exactly where we’ve chosen to meet. Its per capita income, in excess of $75,000, is the highest among all congressional districts in the country, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the locale of the Met Gala, is located within its lines.
Just weeks earlier and mere blocks from where we sit, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attended the event, going where few self-proclaimed progressives had gone before: “fashion’s biggest night out.” Among the throngs of Hollywood elite, TikTok tastemakers, and a host of who’s who across fashion, art, sports, and technology, Ocasio-Cortez made her debut at the event in that statement-making dress by Aurora James, the designer behind Brother Vellies. Scrawled across the back in sizable red letters was the phrase, tax the rich—a message many took as toothless considering the exclusive event is attended by some of America’s wealthiest. Chatter about its effectiveness was loud enough to distract from Abdelhamid’s opponent’s own declaration.
Jamie McCarthy/MG21
Taylor Hill
Maloney, who is perhaps most infamous for donning a burka on the House floor in 2001 in advocacy of the invasion of Afghanistan just weeks post-9/11, was also in attendance at the fashionable event and chose a similarly emphatic gown. Emblazoned with the colors of the suffrage movement, it featured several sashes embroidered with the phrase, equal rights for women.
Abdelhamid thinks there’s a difference, though, between the sartorial moments of Ocasio-Cortez and Maloney, mostly that Maloney has become a master in performance art rather than an equitable, effectual policymaker. But more on that later. As Abdelhamid points out, the most important politically divisive moment from the night had nothing to do with fashion at all.
“On that day at the Met Gala, what was most important for me was the organizers experiencing police violence and brutality right outside,” Abdelhamid says in reference to the Black Lives Matter activists who were arrested for protesting the event just paces from the famed steps of the Met. “That’s all I need to see,” she says. “How many people elevated that? Where was our focus on that?”
Abdelhamid herself is a longtime organizer. Born and raised by Egyptian immigrants who arrived in the United States in the early ’90s and built their life in Astoria, Queens, Abdelhamid and her family fell victim to rising rent, poor housing conditions, and the eventual shuttering of their family business, a deli and grocery in Little Egypt that had been operating for seven years. Over the course of her childhood, they were forced to move around the borough six times, and in the process, Abdelhamid bore witness to all the ways in which her community seemed to rally around those in need. In particular, women grappling with domestic violence, housing instability, maintaining healthy businesses, and the kinds of real-life issues no elected official seemed to personally understand. Following 9/11, the concerns of her community were magnified and amplified due to rising anti-Muslim violence and harmful policy change like the introduction of The Patriot Act, which gave way for racial profiling, warrantless wiretapping, illegal detentions, and secret deportations.
Courtesy of Rana for Congress
As Abdelhamid recalled in a recent NY Daily News op-ed, men in her community were targeted, interrogated, and deported. Many lost their jobs, homes, and friends as a byproduct of systemic villainization, as women fell prey to the binary—and often false—narrative that they were oppressed wives and daughters in need of intervention and protection. Abdelhamid was just eight years old when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred, and like many, she’d feel its racist repercussions for many years to follow; when she was 16, a stranger on the street in Queens tried to forcibly remove her hijab.
“I just remember someone just grabbing at the back of my hijab and trying to take it off of my head. My automatic response was to turn around, and when I did, I saw a tall, broad-shouldered man hovering over my body, hate and anger in his eyes for me,” Abdelhamid recalls. “I just remember the question that stayed with me was, Why does he hate me?”
Abdelhamid, who was on her way to the gender-based violence center where she was volunteering at the time of the attack, didn’t tell her parents about it for days. When she finally found the words, it was her mother’s counsel, the advice of the women at the organization where she volunteered, and a similar story from a friend that inspired an idea to do something productive with the trauma.
“I have a black belt in Shotokan karate, and I had been doing karate since I was seven, so I thought, I’m going to train girls in my neighborhood,” Abdelhamid reveals. “It was me and five of my friends in the basement of the center where I volunteered, then it became 13 of my friends. I would do a couple of karate techniques, and they’d follow, then we would talk about our experiences. It became a healing space for us.”
By the age of 17, that healing space would become known as (IM)WISE and, now, Malikah, a nonprofit organization and grassroots movement founded by Abdelhamid to foster and support empowerment among Muslim women, femmes, and nonbinary people through self-defense and skills-based training. She continued organizing while at Middlebury College, where she graduated in 2015 with a degree in international politics and economics, and, later, while in a graduate program at the Harvard Kennedy School. By 2016, Malikah had already expanded internationally, running programs everywhere from Texas, New Jersey, and D.C. to cities in Scotland, Ireland, and Spain. For her impressive work, she was named a Truman Scholar and a Running Start Rising Political Star; she was also the recipient of both an NYC Council Proclamation and an International Youth Advocate award by the United Nations Association of the United States of America Foundation in 2014.
Deena Hadhoud, Malikah’s community manager and director of strategy and operations, says Abdelhamid’s stewardship has inspired her own career. “Because of her encouragement and mentorship, in the past two years, I went from not having the courage to lead a single event to being a full-time event facilitator, community organizer, and managing a nonprofit,” Hadhoud notes. “Rana truly believes that people and communities can do anything if they put their minds to it, and it’s contagious.”
Though she’s still as active in Malikah’s development, for the last two and a half years, Abdelhamid has financially supported herself and her family via her day job as a global marketing and partnerships lead at Google. There, she runs a program called Women Techmakers, dedicated to improving the tech industry for women of color. Through Techmakers, Rana builds on her experience with Malikah to promote online safety and empowerment for a community of 200,000 women across 190 countries.
Those who know Abdelhamid personally weren’t surprised when she revealed her desire to venture into politics. But some weren’t exactly convinced she could win. Before she decided to run in April, Abdelhamid did as she often does before making a massive commitment and sought the counsel of her elders, family, friends, and partner. As in many communities across the country, they expressed some skepticism of the political process. Abdelhamid recalls the reactions of community elders when she told them she wanted to major in political science in college—one in particular critiqued her choice, because they felt it was synonymous with compromising her values.
“I was premed for three years, because this man’s message resonated so deeply,” she says, laughing. “He was like, ‘There’s no way you’re ever going to be elected in this country.’”
Abdelhamid didn’t take offense, seeing his warning only as an indicator of the disconnect between politics and the people closest to her. A divide that, she optimistically believes, is lessening.
“I feel really lucky because now, when I go around my district, the pathway is a bit easier, because others have done it,” she explains. “I tell them I’m running for Congress and they’re like, ‘What’s that?’ And I’m like, ‘Like Ilhan Omar.’ Then they get it.”
Courtesy of Rana for Congress
Abdelhamid understands she still has a long way to go. She hasn’t thought about winning or losing, nor is she afraid of addressing the skeptics in her backyard and beyond. For now, she’s just taking it one day at a time and remembering what prompted her to run in the first place. Abdelhamid specifically recalls working with women who were forced to live at home with their abusers during the pandemic because they didn’t have money to leave with or a place to go. It’s experiences like this, along with the more than 10 years of community organizing under her belt, that reassure her she’s the person to most accurately represent the district.
“When I say NY-12, people only think of the Upper East Side,” Abdelhamid explains. “This district is socioeconomically, racially, and linguistically diverse. When you go to different parts and speak to people, housing is a huge challenge.” She continues, “This district is home to the largest public housing unit in all of North America, Queensbridge, and it’s severely underfunded. We’re dealing with real challenges: gentrification, gun violence, a lack of climate resiliency and infrastructure. People literally didn’t have gas in their homes in the middle of the pandemic and winter, and were cooking their food outside.”
And this is where we return to Maloney. While the elder congresswoman has long positioned herself as a progressive fighting for women, often touting her longtime support of Medicare for All and standing in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, to many, Maloney represents a feminism of a bygone era, one of pantsuits and pink pussy hats. Gen-Z and millennial activists have noted her full-throated support of aggressive policing tactics and tough-on-crime legislation, as well as her opposition to the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. Maloney is also a millionaire and has accepted money from a range of corporate interests. But perhaps most personally upsetting to Abdelhamid remains Maloney’s choice to wear a burka to speak before Congress in support of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan—a move the representative defends to this day. Maloney maintains it was to raise awareness about the ways in which the Taliban were oppressing women, yet in the same argument, she also commended the Bush administration for dropping “food, as well as bombs” on thousands of innocent people, including the same women Maloney claimed to be advocating for.
In August, as a photograph of the incident resurfaced, she said she was “making a point,” but Abdelhamid argues it was one that only further perpetuated an inaccurate and sweeping narrative about Muslim women.
“I was 9 years old when I watched my Congresswoman wear a burqa in Congress to justify the invasion of Afghanistan,” Abdelhamid tweeted. “For the rest of my life, I knew that as a Muslim woman my identity would be weaponized to justify American wars.”
“I think it’s very important for us to have leadership that understands intersectionality, that understands that the climate crisis is going to impact Black and Brown and poor and working-class women the most, and the urgency of the housing crisis,” Abdelhamid expounds. “If you care about gender justice, you have to center those who are most impacted. There is no other way. That’s how we’re writing our policies, that’s who I’m having conversations with, and that is the team we’re building. It’s going to be the through line in every single thing that we do, because it’s a perspective I have to offer that current leadership just doesn’t.”
It’s examples like this that not only place Maloney and Abdelhamid in stark contrast to one another but may negatively impact Maloney in the long run. That, and New York’s imminent redistricting. While new maps are still being drawn and decided upon, one of the current proposals would see all Manhattan voters cut out of the district, which instead would move deeper into Queens, covering most of Astoria and Long Island City, and deeper into Brooklyn, where Maloney has historically underperformed. In 2020, Maloney won seven of the eight Manhattan assembly districts within her congressional district but didn’t take a single assembly district in either Queens or Brooklyn.
For now, Abdelhamid is staying hopeful, shifting all her focus on centering those in the district who haven’t been under Maloney’s leadership. In the last few months, she’s joined strikers from the United Metro Energy Corp. and the Taxi Workers Alliance, all while executing impressive fundraising efforts—her campaign recently announced that it raised $623,977 in just six months. And in a moment when anyone can be associated with progressivism, Abdelhamid is also making known what it truly looks like to embody it.
“If you’re taking money from corporations, you should not be calling yourself a progressive. If you’re centering carceral feminism in your politics, you should not be calling yourself a progressive. If you’re not willing to hold the line on the reconciliation bill, you should not be calling yourself a progressive,” Abdelhamid says. “When I see myself in this space, coming into electoral politics from a movement, the question is always, Who am I accountable to? I’m always going to be accountable to the people who I am connected to—those who have oftentimes been forgotten by electoral politics.”
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Congressional Candidate Rana Abdelhamid Knows the Importance of Intersectional Leadership
Source: Filipino Journal Articles
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