Hi, my name is Rashida Tlaib, I am a daughter of Palestinian immigrants, a mother of two boys and a Detroiter. I think my influence is very much being a child of Palestinian immigrants, but also being in a community that's predominately Black and Latino and White. We were very much a family that fit in, but not really because we were of Muslim faith, we were Arab. I mean, I grew up in as an Arab in one of the Blackest cities in the United States. And some of the struggles that I see my Black neighbors going through now is very much, kind of feeding into this activism work. I think Detroit raises you to be that way to constantly speak up, to constantly speak out when there's injustice. Being silent in Detroit is not an option. 

I mean, the key attributes of so much of my community is strength. People say so many things about my city and they try to box it in and a certain type of city or to certain areas. But one of the things that is the biggest, I think asset and the thing that people don't understand is we have incredible people. You will never find any person around this country that doesn't have this much strength and resilience. You knock us down, we get back up, over and over again. 

I mean, I think in 10 years I want my residents in Detroit that I serve to feel like their self-worth is so much stronger, even though we have resilience and strength. Sometimes we feel like we don't deserve better and we feel like, well that's just the way it is. But I hope that with my service and saying, OK, we deserve better than what we have now, instead of settling and saying, well, that's just the way it is. 

One of the really critical moments in my life, I think it was when I was seven years old and my mother, I think brought the sixth child home. And I remember at that moment understanding my role because, my mother still didn't speak or write English very well and I became very much the parentified child, the child that was the third parent in the house that translated everything that took care of my brothers and sisters... and so much of that has shaped the kind of person that I am now. I don't care where I'm at, if I see something going on in the neighborhood or in Detroit anywhere, I stop and say, can I help you? Is there something I can do to help you?