Pramila Jayapal never actually wanted to be an elected official, but the freshman congresswoman from Washington felt compelled to run in order to keep effecting real change. An award-winning activist long before becoming the first South Asian-American ever elected to the Washington state Senate (and, two years later, the first Indian-American elected to the U.S. House), Rep. Jayapal has spent most of this century fighting for immigrant and women’s rights. She even got arrested for it earlier this year.
It’s no surprise, then, that she was asked to share her wide-reaching wisdom at the first-ever She the People Summit in San Francisco. Designed to connect, empower, and inform the women of color now running for office in record numbers, the STP Summit gave Jayapal a chance to not only share her experiences with bigotry and sexism in the political sphere, but also prove to those coming up behind—and alongside—her that fighting back is worth it. It just takes the proper perspective.
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