Alaska, a bears and ballot, little bit later arizona senator discusses her book, dare to fly. Representative ilhan omar, democrat of minnesota has a new book out, heres what it looks like and its called this is what america looks like, congresswoman thank you for joining us on book tv, there are two characters in your book, baba and abe, who are they . My grandfather and father, abe is the word that we use for data into molly, and baba is a traditional word that is used in the middle east for father, since i was born in his house, that is what his children called him and we continue to call him that as well, they were both father figures to me, i continue to call them that. What were the first eight or so years of your life like . Peaceful, i had a really enjoyable childhood, i grew up in a household where we had not just my siblings and my father but my extended family with my uncles and aunties and grandfather, my greatgrandmother was always around, and so it was a very loving environment, i was raised by educators education was a huge part of our life and we Love Learning and we were very curious kids, my grandfather and father encouraged discussions and debates and curiosity, i was known as the whit kid sweat a lt intimate time with my father and grandfather because i was always around them asking questions and as a mother now i know how annoying that can be at times but they never let on, it was a very protective environment to grow up in. And that was in the somalia area correct . In the capital city, the show was very different place at that time and it is now, very culturally enriched environment and they were of arts, part of the Education System was that you learn poetry, some called somalia a nation of poets, its a way of expressing yourself and words and way in which this originally culture passed down information, not much of somalias history, everything was done through song and dance and as part of our Education System we would have times in which throughout the day we would sing and dance and my onset uncles brought that home so they would have my siblings and i tear out and do duets so we were often busy writing songs that we could memorize because none of us wanted to be outperformed by the other. You did not mention your mother, what happened . My mother passed away when i was very little, i have no memory and i really did not have much of a mixed experience with her not being around because there were so many adults who provided and fill that space for me, when i became a mother myself for the first time its when i understood the concept of what it wouldve meant for her to be in my life, i remember being very young and president going through that experience and wanting to lean on my father and him falling short, it was the first time where he could not really give me proper advice and could not really have adequate empathy and sympathy for the things that i was experiencing, i remember i really wanted to be in the room with me and my friends thought that was really odd, he knew i was really nervous and i had friends who had csections and so i was very paranoid going through that process, so he wanted to provide comfort for me and eventually my First Experience at giving birth was a communal experience it away in which i came into the world i suppose, although my family was there, the nurses and the doctors really did not know what to do with the room filled with 20 plus people who had come to experience it with me. You talk about that and your book, this is what america looks like, you talk about the quote unquote eyes of somalia that have followed you around, what does that mean . When youre growing up in a family that is as big as mine was, it is obvious you were growing up in a small town where Everybody Knows what another, not only was my family huge but almost everybody knew my family, that kinda followed us when we came to american to move to minnesota so i kind of always grew up living in a fishbowl in a way in which i am now where everybody had an opinion about how i was being raised, what i was learning and where i was spending my days but i was wearing and we are very expressive community, people arent really shy to share their opinion, it was hard being a teenager in that environment because youre not only accountable to your parents, your accountable to a whole set of communities that often does not fully have a comprehension of what values they are speaking of, and so there was always a push and pull in many contradictions and hypocrisies that showed up, luckily i was growing up in a family that had an open dialogue, i could question authority, i could ask questions, i could challenge their assumption, i grew up being balance away their opinions it does not make it fact and that is okay, and you take what fits into the set of facts that you have and allow it to shape you as youre willing to. The fact that you grew up in a relatively boisterous fishbowl, did that help you prepare you for your work today . The thing that you have to learn growing up in an environment like that is that your sense of self, and rapidly develops, you become acutely aware of who you are and what you are about because there is constant voices around you trying to shape you, so i grew up really feeling comfortable in my own skin developing my own identity and feeling proud at times to extend myself, the opinion and i think it now exist in an environment where i am equally as unique as i was to my family, that people and had ideas of me, they dont really matter as long as i know who i am and what narrative i want to shake myself. Congresswoman omar you also write from your book that you were known for defending yourself as well. Yeah, again i grew up with a big family where it was really important not to only learn how to extend yourself or believe, and when you are a very small person in the schooling environment, a lot of people will pray on you, i had a time with my fathers father who did not help raise me but was very influential in my earlier years who really made me believe that the physical can always be overwritten by the internal, internally if i felt confident in range and courageous, externally if i look meek and small, it did not matter to the shock and surprise of many of the bullies that i would encounter throughout my life, i am much stronger. Congresswoman, you write in your book as well that your relatively a private person, this book is pretty relevant tory, was that tough to put down and put out there in the world . I would say besides giving birth to children and running for congress, this is probably the hardest thing to do, it was a very painful experience to have intimately walk people through my Life Experiences and to have and really engage in a process where i was analyzing my life and what these moments meant fully in the context of who i am today and i wanted to convey for the readers, i think for someone who is written about in less is known, it felt important to give people the opportunity to get to know me and the ways in which i know myself, and some of my friends had read the book and are surprised, how revealing it is because im not a very revealing person because a given when you grow up in a place where you are always exposed, you want to keep digging for yourself, im always guarded from aspects of my personal life and i do that a little bit here in the book but i wanted to really give people the opportunity to get to know me. How did you get from there to minneapolis in short form. We left there with the middle of the first wave of the civil war and would eventually make it to the refugee camp that we lived in for four years and ultimately got the Golden Ticket to come to the United States, in the early 1995, and started out in Arlington Virginia where i went to middle school for a couple of years in minnesota at the time was number one in the nation for educational outcomes, and my family was interested in having the best opportunity available to us, we were one of the first families to come to minnesota and eventually would find a community of other smalling and who were also making their way here in search of a better life. You recount when you landed in new york city that your father told you, this is not our america, what did he mean by that. An aspect of the refugee journey that people might not know is that that process is very long, one of the last things that happened before you get your Golden Ticket to get on that plane is orientation, and gives you an opportunity to understand of what your new goals will look like and how to adjust once you get there because we dont have a lot of resources for refugees to acclimate to life here in the United States or for many parts around the world, so that orientation process was one, looking back was very revealing about the kind of american exceptionalism that exist in many of us, and i say in many of us because when i travel, people say your american exceptionalism is showing in the ways in which i talk about various different times. Its a different image of america the great, there are videos, scenes and the videos that you watch of white picket fences, families who have not only the opportunity but the resources to be able to see themselves, everything is shiny and beautiful which really fits into our image of how we see ourselves, we are so good at exporting that image to the outside world, what we have not been good at is working really hard to have that here for every person, that american exceptionalism is one that we fight every day to live out. So i did not imagine because it was not presented to me that i would arrive in america and see americans homeless sleeping on the side of the street, i did not imagine that there would be in america that did not have the white picket fences and Beautiful Homes but had a lineup of trash in the street, which i now know that that is life in new york in the system that they have set up, but at the time it was very jarring to go from that image engraved in your brain for a couple of weeks as you go through orientation to come in the next image of the actual country be that and i have had hard times consuming it, and i was known as the why kid, i asked the question of my father, why this was happening and why nothing looked like it did in the videos, to him obviously, he understood that america was a much more complex place than what we see in the video and he said his hope is that we would eventually find our america and to his credit, arlington was much closer, visually to the america we have seen and i think my political work, my organizing work, my efficacy was born out of that moment of wanting the images to match and i did everything i can every single day in showing gratitude for my new home to drive it and to look as beautiful and as resourceful as it did in that video. Congresswoman when she got to minneapolis you got your undergraduate degree at north Dakota State University, what were the circumstances that took you to north dakota from minneapolis . We were as a nation really going through a breakdown in economic crisis, at the time i also was experiencing my own personal breakdown of really living a life that ultimately got tired of pushing against the grain and found a way to stimulate the ideas that everybody had and eventually felt stripped of who i really was and felt drowning in a life that i did not really want for myself so i wanted the opportunity to really start new and find myself and took on a journey to disconnect myself from everything that was familiar and found myself with my two Young Children in interestingly diverse state college, i ended up going to a north dakota and i think the landscape which is very fitting of north dakota was wide enough for me too breathe, reconnect with the image of me that i always had, someone who is passionate, someone who fully understood her purpose in life and self dignified in that and eventually found my purpose in leading a life of advocacy to try to work, not only for the betterment of my life but for my children and future generations. When you return to minneapolis, you wrote some letters or visited people, what did you do on your return . Towards my schooling, i watched a facebook clip of an interview that oprah was doing and in this interview, she was talking about the process that she has gone through and i cannot remember correctly right now but it mightve been a conversation, she said forgiveness is not for the person you are forgiving, it is for yourself, its the ability to let go, everybody that wrongs you often does not remember or has an idea of them wrong a new, it is not that logging that has a chokehold, has a chokehold on you, when you let go, you are freeing yourself, it is not for them and we often think about forgiving others and its a gift for them and a gift for ourselves, that was my moment as oprah says, i knew that i had a lot to forgive in order to free myself of everything that had brought me too that moment and that was forgiving my siblings for not being what i wanted them to be for me, forgiving my father of not showing up in the ways that i wanted him to show up, forgiving my mother for not living long enough for me too know her, forgiving the country i was born in for engulfing itself in war that i was robbed of a continued childhood, forgiving my aunt for not having the strength to survive malaria and continue to be part of my life in the refugee camp, i had a lot to forgive so i can let go and that was a very healing process that was expedited by my visit back to somalia and kenya in aiding other refugees who were in a similar position that i was, 20 years prior in the early 20 years prior to that and reliving that experience also gave me an understanding of the choices that my family has to make, i did not fully understand for a long time, when youre a kid you want to be around your friends and your family and you dont really understand why people are making the decision from everything that is famili familiar that put into conflicts for me and allows me too continue in that process of healing and ultimately i think made me a person that doesnt live in a black and white space but really lives in the extreme gray and understanding the context of things and how we might not get everything, we might not understand the decision points that bring people to different places and we should actually be entitled to that, that we should work really hard and find ourselves there so we can at least have some empathy for what they must have experienced in order to make a particular decision in life. You mentioned that you took some your children up to north Dakota State University with you, who is ahmed. I took my oldest daughter and my son, their father would continue to be part of their lives and visit and i think to me it was an important thing for me too separate and disconnect the entitlement that i felt people had to my life in my life decision but i did not want to run my children of that connection and the ability to have the continuing of having the presence of both of their parents. Congresswoman, one of the themes that i found in your book was the importance of plans in the somali culture but also the paternalism, when you first got married you were even present your first wedding. That is not a somali concept, thats an islamic concept, some countries obviously have different cultures and traditions in the somali culture when we essentially have the formal ceremony here where you are getting by a priest or rabbi, but you would have the groom you would have a representative of the female and that is often tradition for somebody first marriage, womans first marriage. So luckily, my father is alive and so he in those cases plays the primary and its almost exclusively male and there are no female present you have a power of attorney that you turnover, some people who dont have a father or brother would have a distant relative and that becomes essential to have that power attorney in your fathers and your brothers will have your best interest i have not too many worries that my father would not be a good represented person for me. Unfortunately we are running short on time, two final questions congresswoman, you have a chapter in your new book called walkin like a white man what does that mean. There is in essence of the spaces in which we exist where there is an expectation of how you show up in the environment and those expectations exist for every Single Person except for the dominant cultural presence of a white man, this was a concept that i would ultimately learn as people have had discomfort in the way in which i show up in places without permission or invitation. Finally congresswoman, your district is where the tragedy in minneapolis is happening, what is next . We are going through a really painful moment, not just here in minneapolis, minnesota but across the country and it is important to remember that there have been many movements that brought us to this moment and many tragedies that have brought us to this moment and so we have an opportunity really to not listen to the traditional voices that have told us to go slow and search of proper or told us incremental changes but to really be bold and not only dealing with the issues of police brutality, systematic racism but also dealing with the social and economic lack that has created a condition that have le led to the unrest that e have in our country right now and i dont believe that we can use this moment to produce anything less than great and were not only dealing with a pandemic that has brought a Public Health crisis but is produced an economic crisis and were also dealing with the pin dominic that weve had with a really longtime with racism in this country and its opportunity to use all of that that is really combusted at this moment to allow for transformative change to take place where we address the deep roots of the problems that we have and really hone in on what proper in equal investments for all of our society should look like. This is what america looks like is the name of the book, the author is represented ilhan omar of democrat of minnesota and she also talked about her time in congress, her views on President Trump, her relationship with nancy pelosi. We averaged entered appreciate sharing your back story with our viewers on the tv. Thank you so much for the opportunity. You are watching book tv on cspan2, every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors, cspan2, created by americas Television Company as a public service, and brought to you today by your television provider. This afternoon, President Trump will deliver remarks in yuma, arizona on immigration, border security, watch live coverage beginning at 515 on cspan2 and also online at cspan. Org or you can listen with the free cspan radio app. The live coverage of the Democratic NationalConvention Continues tonight with congresswoman alexandria ocasiocortez, former president bill clinton and former second lady joe biden, live coverage of the Democratic National convention tonight at nine eastern on cspan, Live Streaming and ondemand as cspan. Org dmc or listen with the free cspan radio app, cspan, your unfiltered view of politics. Hello and welcome to the Atlanta History Center talk featuring heather in conversation with jessica, im kate whitman, the Vice President of the community engagement, im really glad that you are here, thank you for being with us. This talk will also be broadcast