U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley slammed the inflammatory remarks made by former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, in which the Republican frontrunner pushed baseless claims about Haitian migrants eating pets.
“What Donald Trump said on that debate stage, and what JD Vance continues to double down on, straight up, is a racist lie,” said Pressley, who co-chairs the House Haiti Caucus. “And it’s a dangerous one that dehumanizes and jeopardizes Haitians and Black Americans. And he said it on purpose.”
Pressley, whose district includes one of the largest Haitian diaspora communities in the United States, said her constituents are used to being targeted by racist rhetoric.
“But it’s emboldened in this moment of white nationalism, racism and bigotry that is spewed by Donald J. Trump and JD Vance every day,” Pressley said. “So today, my colleagues and I, my fellow co-chairs of the House Haiti Caucus, actually introduced a resolution to condemn the racism and the bigotry that the Haitian community is experiencing and to call it out for what it is: lies.”
Pressley also addressed two other pieces of legislation she’s introduced, both of which she tied back to equal treatment for Black people in the United States.
A new report from the Government Accountability Office showed significant racial and gender inequities in school disciplinary policies. According to the GAO’s findings, Black girls are subjected to harsher punishments and punitive outcomes for the same behavior.
Pressley has been pushing for her bill, the Ending PUSHOUT Act, since 2019 to urge states to ban suspensions for the youngest students and eliminate discriminatory school discipline practices.
“This damning new report affirms what we’ve known all along: that Black girls continue to face a crisis of criminalization, adultification,” she said. “This report is providing us powerful new data to push back on the harmful narrative that different groups are disciplined differently because they behave differently. It’s just not true.”
Outside of Worcester, two Black sisters at Millbury Memorial Junior/Senior High School were allegedly subjected to vile slurs last school year. The civil rights complaint filed last week against the school alleges the girls were also body-shamed, and one of the students was suspended for her hairstyle.
The complaint calls back to a civil rights case in Malden, in 2017, where the Cook sisters were kept from playing on their sports teams for wearing extensions to school. That incident kicked off years of debate on Beacon Hill that ultimately led state lawmakers to ban discrimination on the basis of hairstyle.
“Our schools should be spaces for learning and growth,” Pressley said. “The only way we can address this crisis, which is happening in every public school in this country, is through intentional trauma-informed policies, and that’s why Congress must act.”
Pressley shared another legislative effort against a rising trend in schools nationwide: book bans. The Books Save Lives Act, introduced in December, aims to combat censorship in school libraries by protecting books — especially ones written by marginalized authors — from being restricted. It would affirm that bans that prevent students from accessing representative literature is a “violation of your federal civil rights,” as Pressley explained it.
At the annual Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Conference last week, the Congresswoman spoke with local bookstore owners and authors to discuss the impact of book bans on the community — particularly on the Black community. She emphasized the “chilling effect” it has had on Black literature.
“It’s so important that you have representative literature that you can access in your neighborhood, in your community, in your school library,” she said. “Having that diverse and affirmative representation of different lived experiences, of different sexual identities, of different cultures and ethnicities, different family models — all of those things foster empathy in society and a greater understanding.”
Pressley has been open about difficulties in her own childhood, as she experienced childhood sexual abuse and her father battled substance use disorder.
“I know books save lives. I know it to be true because a book saved my own,” Pressley told GBH News. “When I read Maya Angelou’s ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,’ it was the first time in my life that I knew I was not alone.”
