When I was a young girl, my mother Sandra – the person most responsible for making me who I am today – made tremendous sacrifices to send me to a good school near Lincoln Park on Chicago’s North Side. It was my first real experience outside of the neighborhood in which I was born and raised, and I learned quickly that my daily life was very different from that of my classmates. Their neighborhoods had banks. We had check cashers. They had supermarkets. We had corner stores.[1] It opened my eyes to the fact that communities separated by mere miles can, in many ways, be worlds apart.

Today, when you board the MBTA’s number 1 bus in Cambridge, it’s less than three miles to Dudley Station in Roxbury, but by the time you’ve made the 30-minute trip, the median household income in the neighborhoods around you have dropped by nearly $50,000 a year.[2]/[3] As the bus rolls through Back Bay, the average person around you might expect to live until he or she is 92 years old, but when it arrives in Roxbury, the average life expectancy has fallen by as much as 30 years.[4] A student riding the bus home to Dudley is, on average, nearly 20 percent less likely to graduate from high school in four years than a peer living just across the Charles.[5]

These types of disparities exist across the 7th District, and they are not naturally occurring; they are the legacy of decades of policies that have hardened systemic racism, increased income inequality, and advantaged the affluent. We have seen moments of progress, but we are now, once again, confronted by an administration in Washington that is working to roll back the clock – implementing cruel, draconian policies that strip away critical rights and sow further division in our communities.

The job description of our representatives in Congress has changed. Now, more than ever, we need representatives who will be proactive partners with our communities, and who will not shy away from difficult political fights. My career has been defined by tackling the issues that are important to the communities I represent, even when they are not popular or easy. That is part of my mother’s legacy, making sure that I understood not just my rights, but my responsibilities – my responsibility to speak up and lead, especially for those who have heard their own voices silenced too often before. Those closest to the pain should be closest to the power – that is the mantle I will carry with me to Congress.