Saida Dahir, junior in high school and refugee from Somalia who electrified the crowd with her spoken word performance.Mother Jones/Al Kamalizad
Seventeen-year-old Saida Dahir’s blistering spoken word performance about her fear of school shootings and the political hypocrisy that follows electrified the crowd at Salt Lake City’s March for Our Lives on Saturday afternoon. A refugee from Somalia and current junior in high school, Dahir tells Mother Jones that she wants to to address intersectionality in the gun safety movement that has spread throughout the country in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, massacre that left 14 students and three adults dead. She tackled everything from the racial bias that shows up in discussions of mass shooters—”If all Muslims are terrorists, what is this white boy?”—to the morally bankrupt political class: “We all know who is Congress’ real benefactor.”
“I’m a black Muslim woman, and I fear for my life when I am at school, and I fear for my life when a cop pulls us over,” she says. As school shootings continue to happen, and as she and her friends worry about what to do if a gunman enters their school, she is left with a question that serves as the opening of her poem: “How much longer do we have to deal with this shit?”
Mother Jones caught up with her after the rally, and she agreed to recite the poem for us again. Watch the video here:
