TomDispatch
—Erika
On January 3, Cori Bush was sworn in as the first Black woman to represent Missouri in Congress. On January 6, thousands of white election deniers breached the U.S. Capitol building at the encouragement of President Donald Trump. As the mob, which included some police officers and military veterans, swarmed the building, Bush and her new colleagues were ushered away from the House floor, where they had convened to certify Joe Biden’s election as president, to shelter in place.
In her first full week on the job, Bush was already under siege. But she wasted no time. Her first act as a congresswoman was announcing a resolution to investigate and expel the Republican members of Congress who supported the attempts to overturn the election results. Since then, she’s been everywhere: coleading the resolution to impeach Trump (again), giving viral interviews about her GOP colleagues’ refusal to follow the same rules as everyone else (“Have they ever had a job before?”), and denouncing the “white supremacist insurrection” at the Capitol.
Bush’s first House floor speech, well, floored the public. “Madam Speaker, St. Louis and I rise in support of the article of impeachment against Donald J. Trump. If we fail to remove a white supremacist president who incited a white supremacist insurrection, it’s communities like Missouri’s First District that suffer the most. The 117th Congress must understand that we have a mandate to legislate in defense of Black lives. The first step in that process is to root out white supremacy, starting with impeaching the white supremacist in chief.” Republicans booed immediately. But Bush is not there for them; she is there to represent the district of the late Maya Angelou, the poet who penned, “Still I Rise."
“Where did you go to high school?”
When I begin recording my conversation with Cori Bush, this question sits in bold above my notes. The question is charming yet clichéd, but I’m supposed to ask because we are both from St. Louis. Our hometown is so segregated along race and class that based on her answer, I can guess whether she lived in the city or the county; if she woke up at 4:00 a.m. to catch a bus to a school an hour away as part of our court-ordered desegregation program; and most harrowing, her chances of being killed by a lover, neighbor, stranger, or a cop.
“I went to Cardinal Ritter,” Bush says. But I know that already because I cheated and checked her Facebook before I asked.
“Actually, that was the second school,” she continues. “My first semester of freshman year, I went to a predominantly white school. I was told that I was the number one ranked incoming freshman, and tested to that fact. [They] came to me and said, ‘Oh, you tested number one. We're going to have you retest because we don't believe that's your score. We think that you cheated.’ I think I was still 13 at the time. But I went back into this huge auditorium and retested and ended up scoring even higher. And so they said, ‘Okay, well we believe you now.’ But the way that I was treated when I entered the school, it was so bad I couldn't stay. And that's how I ended up at Cardinal Ritter.”
Cardinal Ritter is a predominantly Black Catholic school in the city of St. Louis. Bush grew up in Northwoods, a tiny, Ferguson-like municipality in St. Louis County. Bush recalls as a child witnessing police racially profile her friends and family, including her father, Errol Bush. He was the mayor of Northwoods in the ‘90s, and made the local paper for allegedly telling the police chief that the force had enough white cops and to hire Black cops who lived in the community. I wonder whether he believed that diversity would help avert the violent police encounters that contributed to his daughter’s prominent rise decades later, including her protests of the police killings of Michael Brown and Anthony Lamar Smith.
During our phone interview, aides interject with questions and Bush rushes around the Capitol preparing to cast votes. She sounds so in awe of her win that, in jest, I ask if she is still campaigning, still trying to convince me of her potential as a politician.
But her vigor and joy come from elsewhere. Bush, a pastor and nurse, shifts her tone to the gospel whisper I recognize from testimony time during church revivals and says, “I don't want anybody to have to feel hunger the way that I felt hunger. I don't want anybody else to have to live out of their vehicle with their babies.”
“Well, I won't even go into all of that," she continues. "They'll probably try to take me to jail. But my son was a baby [and] my daughter was a baby when we were living out of a car. Something happens to you when you feel like you can't provide for your kids, when you're cold and there's nothing, there's no amount of blankets you can put on yourself to be warm when you're sleeping in a car. You can't keep the car running because you're running down the gas. You can't keep the lights on [or] people know that you're in a car.”
I’ve slept in that cold too: the inwarmable bitter of homelessness. In St. Louis, Black people are almost four times as likely as white people to be unhoused; about 40,000 students in public schools in Missouri experience homelessness during one academic year.
But Bush’s plight didn’t stop there. She was almost killed by an abusive partner, involved in a serious car accident during her first congressional run, and was hospitalized after she likely contracted COVID-19 last year. Bush has overcome nearly impossible odds to secure her seat, which is not merely a story of individual triumph, but one that requires us to examine the social conditions that create those odds in the first place.
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