In an ABC News interview, Abdul El-Sayed says a man named Abdul Rahman Mohamed Sayed was "accepted and empowered" by a state where most people "don't look like me, don't pray like me." He says the win speaks to anybody who's been told they don't belong, after watching the president "engage in the same kind of behavior of bullies all over the country."
The receipt
- Who
- Abdul El-Sayed
- Where
- TV interview with ABC News' Linsey Davis, after election night, Michigan
- Original footage
- ABC News · watch the full video from this moment
- Length
- 56 seconds, unedited within the cut
- Plays
- 79 on Instagram
Read the transcript
I don't take any of this lightly. And the idea that a guy named Abdul Rahman Mohamed Sayed can run for US Senate, let alone win, and be accepted and empowered by a state where most people don't look like me, don't pray like me, don't have a name like mine. That's America. What a gift. And I think it's just important for us to sometimes step back and realize that the normal that we assume, where we get to choose our leaders, where we get to have free and open conversation about who we are and who we wanna be, that that normal isn't normal for a lot of people in the world. And we owe it to our democracy to participate in it. And so I don't think I've had any time since to really step back and see what that means. But I have been experiencing it in, you know, my friends and their kids are sending videos. And it's not just Muslim Americans. You know, it's anybody who's been told that they don't belong, who watched that race and watched the president engage in the same kind of behavior of bullies all over the country telling people that they don't belong.
Machine transcript of the clip's audio; names are checked, small words may differ.