00:00When my son was shot down I stood up and it made me wake up and it made me want
00:05to participate it made me want to do my part and so I'm just simply doing my
00:10part as a parent, as a mom.
00:16I don't know what you say next to that but I think for me a lot of it was
00:20watching what happened as a parent watching what happened with Trayvon and
00:24then getting to Ferguson for me. I could not sleep and after a while I thought I
00:28can't just do nothing and feel bad and for me that was my moment where I
00:33thought I have to start speaking out no matter what.
00:38Trayvon Martin being killed and having a son of my own really brought it home to
00:46me that no one is safe and I need to do as much as I can to ensure that more
00:54young black boys and girls are not taken from their parents.
00:59I don't think there was ever a time where I wasn't woke but a more recent turning
01:03point for me was when Trayvon Martin was killed. That's where Black Lives Matter
01:07came from. So for us to still have to debate that point with so many people who
01:13just don't get it I think is important and I think it definitely was a turning
01:16point for me.
01:17So I'm the daughter of two amazing Nigerian immigrants. I came of age in Phoenix, Arizona.
01:22I witnessed firsthand a lot of attacks on my immigrant community. I witnessed
01:28people being put into immigration detention. I witnessed my best friend's
01:32mom getting deported. There was this law called SB 1070. It was one of the most
01:37draconian anti-immigrant laws of our day and it essentially legalized racial
01:43profiling in Arizona. This chain reaction, this domino effect of attacks on our
01:49communities. I knew that they weren't going to stop and so that's when I
01:53became an organizer because insight without action is vanity.
01:57I got woke late in the game because I was born in Nigeria. Born and raised in
02:02Nigeria, didn't come to the US until I was nine so I didn't even know what being
02:05black was because you don't have to define this because everybody had this.
02:08It was through learning about slavery, the Middle Passage, the fact that this
02:15country was built on the backs of black and brown people.
02:18My mom unfortunately passed away when I was 17 and I moved back to Brooklyn and I
02:22happened to come back to Brooklyn at the time when there was an intense war
02:27against us. Yusef Hawkins murdered in the street, Central Park Five happening. So we
02:33were sort of pushed into wokeness. You had to either be on the side of Reverend
02:37Sharpton or on the side of black death. I'll never forget in high school co-founding
02:42a diversity club but our majority white very affluent high school and my
02:47sophomore year of high school got spit at having to handle those things. That was
02:51the kind of stuff that we prepare for, right? So you have to practice courage in
02:54those little moments so you're ready for those big moments when it's time to stay
02:57woke. I don't know that there was a moment. I think that there are continuous
03:02moments. Just recently working on the Women's March with the disability
03:07community, we continue to just say, as I said, like the disabled community. We still
03:13just sort of box them in as if they are completely separate from also living the
03:19other facets of their lives. So to me, I continue to be woke and to have moments of
03:26awakening. I was blessed with woke parents and so that helped but it became my
03:32movement when my son's father was murdered. When I began to pull back the
03:36layers of like how this happened to him and what were we gonna do, the poverty
03:40question comes up, the question of inequality comes up, and just all the
03:45ills that are happening in communities and to disadvantaged people, marginalized
03:50communities, and then I wasn't embarrassed anymore. I was really more so ashamed of
03:53America. I always knew there was inequality but the day that I was woke, really
03:59woke, was as a young 21 year old immediately after the horrific attacks of
04:039-11 and as I lived in one of the largest Muslim communities in New York City and
04:07watched grown men in my community be hauled off, picked up, businesses raided for
04:13things like name-sharing, just being able to see my community criminalized just for
04:17the faith that we follow or for the countries that our parents came from and I
04:20never thought that I would see that with my own eyes in a place like New York City. So I've
04:25been pretty woke for 16 years right now. For me there's several moments that kind of
04:32have led to me being really really woke. I was a freshman in high school. My boy
04:37Timothy, I played ball, basketball, and he was killed by a white supremacist and he
04:41was African-American. When my brother was hot at gunpoint and it was just
04:45because he fit the profile. And I always talk about when my sister was buried on
04:50my 17th birthday but I think that just kind of fueled who I've become at this
04:55moment. Just the different levels of oppression and injustice that then have
05:01you open your eyes and also open your heart and your mouth.
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