What Does Abdul El-Sayed Believe?

The Ezra Klein Show

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed discusses his personal journey from the son of Egyptian immigrants to a Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan. He refle

Key takeaways

• El-Sayed views American identity as a set of shared ideals rather than ethnic or religious markers.
• The 9/11 attacks created a profound sense of 'loss of innocence' and forced Muslim Americans to constantly justify their presence in the US.

Main topics

• Personal Heritage and Immigration
• American Identity and Belonging

Notable quotes

America is not what you look like or what you sound like when you speak English. America is a set of ideals.

Conclusion

The episode offers a profound look at how personal history and systemi

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) I'm John Caramonica, a critic at The New Speaker 6 (0:02) York Times. And I'm Joe Cascarelli, a culture reporter at The Speaker 5 (0:04) Times. Together we host PopCast, a weekly pop culture chat show where we speak to the biggest musicians, actors, internet celebrities, and more. We've had Bad Bunny, Olivia Rodrigo, and Anne Hathaway. We've also hosted live performances with Andre 3000 and Erykah Badu. Plus, we end every conversation with a snack. Catch new episodes of PopCast every week on YouTube. And Speaker 1 (0:25) anywhere you get your podcasts. Speaker 6 (0:53) The Michigan Senate race has emerged as perhaps the most important proving ground for some of the key fights in the Democratic Party right now. How will left populism perform in a Rust Belt state? What should the next Democratic idea for health care reform be? Is it time to rebuild Obamacare? Or is it time finally for Medicare for all or Medicare for more or many? And what should the Democratic Party's relationship to Israel and to the Palestinians be? What should America's role in that conflict be? Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is a Democrat's nominee in Michigan. He's running against Republican Mike Rogers, up by a few points in most polls. Very few candidates this cycle have been argued over as much or clipped around the internet as often as him. But I wanted to talk to him myself to hear who he is and what he would actually do in the U.S. Senate. He joins me now. Speaker 6 (1:51) Abdul-Azad, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So I want to start a bit in your family story. Your parents are Egyptian. Your stepmother is a distant relative of Abigail Adams. Tell me about them. Speaker 3 (2:03) So my parents had me and got divorced, but stepping all the way back, my dad, his mother is still to this day, the smartest, wisest person I've ever met in my life. Never got to go to school. She had eight babies. Two of them died before their first birthday. So my father was her eldest. He actually watched two of his siblings pass before he turned five. And I never really appreciated this. I actually interviewed him for my own podcast. And it was an episode about infant mortality. And I asked him about his own experience. I've seen my dad cry twice, once when his mom passed and once when he was recounting the passing of his second sibling. My dad really wanted to be an automotive engineer. His dad sold vegetables in a fish market, had an eighth grade education. Speaker 3 (2:50) You know, he would literally study on the rooftop of their building in Alexandria, overlooking the fish market by the light of a lamp across the street. I'd spent a lot of my childhood summers there. My dad comes to America, 1978, six years later, I'm born, but that was after the passing of the Immigration Act in 1965. And it undid the quota system, right? So it enabled a kid like him to actually come here. Goes to Wayne State University. becomes an automotive engineer and builds the, you know, the opportunity set that, you know, I get to live in. My mother comes over a couple years later. She was in Alexandria, trained as a physician, and then realized they had some very serious creative differences after they'd created the one thing they created together, which was me. And so they got divorced, both remarried. How old were you? I was three. And my dad... Marries my stepmom, Jackie, who's a daughter of the American Revolution. Like you said, traces her lineage back to Abigail Adams from the middle of the state of Michigan. Her father was an engineer who trained at GMI, now Kettering University. And her mom was a nurse who was raised in Flint and trained as a nurse in Flint. So I was raised in the house built by Mohammed and Jackie. And I grew up in a house where we talk about code switching. I was code translating my whole life, right? Between my dad and his understanding of things as an immigrant from Egypt, who always sort of told himself like it was only temporary. He was going to go back at some point. And my stepmom, who was born and raised in mid-Michigan. Speaker 6 (4:29) You've talked a bit about the political work your father did in Egypt. the role that had in bringing him to America. Tell Speaker 3 (4:36) me about that. He was a student activist. And, you know, what he was agitating for was democracy. Egypt has been, post the king, it has basically been a military dictatorship for all but a year, post Arab Spring. And he was not only just a prominent student, right? So in Egypt, anybody knows the Egyptian education system, you take these exams and they rank on the exams. And the top students either go to engineering or medicine every year. And then way down the list are the folks who go to the army now. Egypt's a military dictatorship. So you literally have your worst students who are funneled into the leadership of the country. And for a lot of reasons, my dad found this absurd. But then, you know, when it came to any sort of advocacy or freedom of speech, they didn't have that. And because he was a prominent student, he was basically the equivalent of a TA. And because he was an activist, the authorities at the, both at the university and then generally, um, were kind of hounding him. And so when he got the opportunity to leave, he was like, all right, I'm out. Uh, and for him, it was always this sort of notion of, uh, why can't I say what I think? He's still that way. I love him for it. And America to him was always just this, this place where you would have real freedom. And. There are not that many things that my dad beams with pride when he talks about, but having rights and voting and the ability to be a part of democracy is one of those things. I don't think he ever thought I would end up running for office, but you know, this idea that you could go to a place and it didn't matter the color of your skin or how you prayed that you could be American. He took that very seriously. And I remember watching him naturalize. I was quite young and I remember my mom, stepmom, Jackie telling me, you know, Bubba's going to become American tomorrow. And I'm like, so he's going to be blonde and blue eyed? How's that going to work? No more accent. And so I'm watching him get naturalized. And she's like, no, Bubba's an American now. America is not what you look like or what you sound like when you speak English. America is a set of ideals. It's beliefs. He just wore an oath to the country that we have democracy. And, you know, it... It was a moment I thought about quite a bit because he became American and nothing about him changed, but everything about him changed and everything about his opportunities had changed. And that's still the beautiful thing about this country. I remember watching my father get naturalized. My father's from Brazil. Speaker 6 (7:10) And it's a very moving. And as you say, very unusual to think, you know, on one side of this, you're American, on the other side of it, you're not. We're actually in this moment, of course, where there's so many fights over what it means to be American and such an effort to renegotiate the question of what it means to be an American. So I'm curious what it means to you. Speaker 3 (7:31) This is a country where there is no ethnic identity. There's no religious identity. There is just a national identity. And I didn't appreciate it as much. Speaker 3 (7:49) until I went to grad school in the UK where I'd meet third generation, like Pakistani kids. And I'd be like, you're British. They're like, I'm not British. I'm Pakistani. I was like, yes, but you're British. Like you, you have a British citizenship. Like, yes, I'm a citizen of the United Kingdom, but I'm not British. They're British. I'm Pakistani. And the amazing thing about America is that we not only have the civics that enable us to become fully and foundationally American, but we also have a culture of that where, yes, there are some people who want to define America as being smaller than, that it can include certain groups of people, whoever the out group is that they want to point to. But we are constantly in this process of negotiating a bigger America. And so America to me is the notion that we can come together around our differences to build something that's greater than the sum of its parts because we believe in the process by which we do that thing. It's funny, you know, my dad, I don't think he's been to Egypt in like 20 years and he still has an accent. He still looks the way he looks. And you watch him watch the lions on Sunday and you're like, that's a full-blooded American. Speaker 3 (9:06) Or, you know, we were teasing him, and he was like, well, you know, if I went back to Egypt, I was like, you would leave in like three weeks because you got opinions, and in Egypt you can't share them, and here you can, whatever they are. Speaker 3 (9:21) That to me is America. Speaker 6 (9:23) You talk very movingly in your memoir about a trip you took back to Egypt, I think when you were an adolescent, and seeing the difference in how your life worked and how the lives of your cousins worked. And it seems like it was quite formative for you. So tell me a bit about that. Speaker 3 (9:41) So I was sent off to Egypt with another family. You know, my folks really wanted me to have an understanding of just what it meant that I had the opportunities I had in America. And they wanted me to, you know, speak the language, et cetera. And so there was another family going and they sent me off. And I remember being greeted by like all of my aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, everyone at the airport. You know, and when you go to visit whatever the... the nation of your family's ancestry is, you always take gifts, right? So I had two suitcases, one with my stuff for the summer and one with all those gifts. And, you know, pulling up and meeting all these folks who are my flesh and blood. And had you been, had you met them before? I had been, this was the first time I had gone since I was a toddler. You're how old? 13. 13. And... just sort of taking in all of this and marveling at the fact that like I, my whole experience growing up, I always was very aware of my differences. I was very aware of my name and very aware of my skin color and very aware that I had to explain myself. But I had thought that like when I was going to go back to Egypt, that I would be in a place where I didn't have to explain myself only to find myself constantly explaining myself sometimes to myself, which is like, what are these, what are the differences? How is life lived here? And it wasn't just differences in the material lives that people led, but differences in the way that people process life. You know, how do you value different things? What is important, right? I remember after I... gave out all these gifts, my grandmother pulls me aside. And, you know, my grandparents had come to the United States before. So I had a pretty good relationship with them. I knew them really well. It wasn't like the first time I was spending time with them. And, you know, I was feeling big about myself. I just brought all these gifts. I was like the, you know, adolescent version of an American Santa Claus. And my grandmother pulls me aside and she points to one of my cousins, that one's smarter than you. Points to the next one, I don't even have to tell you, he's taller and better looking. That one, she works harder than you. That one, she's nicer than you. He, he's more athletic than you. And by the end of this, I'm like, okay, so Teta, what do I have going for me? She's like, you're the best thing of all. I was like, okay. She's like, you get to go back to America at the end of the summer. The rest of your cousins stay here. Speaker 3 (12:13) And it was that moment that I actually thought a lot about as we spent the summer, that summer, you know, when I saw all the sights. But most of the time I was just spending time with my cousins, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, living life like I would have lived before the accident of history that allows me to be born here. And thinking a lot about what it meant. And I remember going back at the end of the summer, you know, getting caught up in all like the latest music and all the stuff. But also as I... What is it that I'm supposed to learn about myself from that four months that I spent there? And more than anything else, it was just the appreciation for not everybody gets this. And I think my dad had been trying to explain that to me. And look, I got in trouble when I was in high school and whatever, but the appreciation that like I can put in work and my work turns into something. And so at some point there's two questions that you ask is like, you don't actually get the privilege of just coasting. When you know that there are a lot of people who are going to work a lot harder than you and not get where they need to go. And then two, what are you doing it for? Because growing up, people are like, oh, you're smart and you work hard. I was like, my grandmother was smart and worked hard. and never got anything out of it. So what's the point of this? And I think a lot of the way I've sort of come to public service, and I think about my responsibility set is to say, look, the responsibility is to take whatever opportunity you had, put all the chips back in the middle of the table to make sure you're building opportunity for the folks who don't have it. I think in the end, all of our output builds something for somebody, right? There is always output. And the question is, do you build it for you or other people around you or other people who already have capacity? Or are you trying to build it for folks who don't? And that to me is the sort of great moral divide of the specific ethical or moral choices we make in our lives about how we spend our time. I Speaker 6 (14:05) always think one of the most foundational questions in a person's politics is how much of a role do you think luck and circumstance play in success and in failure, right? And in struggle. But I think so much of where people end up. on the political divide, just comes down to, at a very fundamental level, do you believe that everybody deserved it? Or not? Speaker 3 (14:31) And I think the great gift that I had was to get a front row seat to the life that I, but for an accident of history, would have led. Meeting cousins who were just as smart, just as capable. I had a cousin who died in an auto accident when he was 27 in a cab. Driving it. That's not my life. And so it's just a reminder that you're like, hey, you know, that question of does everybody deserve it? I mean, no. And I sometimes wonder, it's like, if my grandmother had my opportunities, what should we do? I mean, when I think about like, am I doing the right thing? The question I always ask is like, if I asked my grandmother, what is the right thing? She'd have a very clear answer. And what's amazing about it is, you know, we spend all these times in these institutions and we don't really quite appreciate the way that those institutions bend your morals around them, around their needs. In some respects, living and working in institutions is allowing them to dictate. what shiny objects you're supposed to pursue. And my grandmother never spent a day in an institution at all. Like we don't appreciate the day you walked into preschool, there was an institution you were part of. It had its own incentive sets. It was trying to engage you about what you ought to be doing, what the right thing to do was. And if you deviate from that right thing to do, then you, you know, that you'd get in some, some kind of trouble. Usually you expect the leaders of the institutions to connect the right thing to do with what the moral right thing to do is. And preschool, that's not that difficult. But then you start looking at the universities now. right? These places that are supposed to be these moral arbiters. And you look at their collapse in the face of all this pressure and you're like, so what is this institution supposed to maximize? Donor engagement. the biggest possible endowment? Is that the goal? What is it supposed to do? And I think the questions that matter most for us right now are not, where do you follow the incentive of the institution? It's when do you challenge the incentives of the institutions? When do you ask them why we're doing what we're doing and whether or not we're actually aligned to the things we think we're doing? Because a lot of us get off saying, well, if the institution said I did a good thing, then I did a good thing. And I think sometimes it takes courage, especially in moments like this. to force us to ask. And if Donald Trump has done something for our civics, he's like the mirror opposite. He could give a damn about whether or not institutions are doing the right thing, which force us then to ask, well, if we know that he sort of sets this North Star for the sort of convergence of narcissistic self-serving behavior, and these institutions are powerless in front of them, is following the institutional incentive actually the right thing? And I think we all ought to be asking those questions. You and I are about Speaker 6 (17:04) the same age. So you were in high school, as was I, 25 years ago when 9-11 happened. And you've written a lot about how that changed your space in your high school, the way people treated you after that, the way that led to some amount of political awakening for you. So given that we're kind of in this anniversary period of it right now, talk Speaker 3 (17:25) me through that. I have a little brother whose name is Osama. It's funny because, you know, I told you my parents, they were thinking about going back to Egypt. And so they gave me, in the Muslim tradition, there are three names that are, you know, the most beloved, right? One of them is Muhammad, for obvious reasons, name of the prophet. The second one is Abdullah and Abdurrahman. So my name is Abdurrahman. And so they were thinking they're giving me this beautiful, beloved name. And then, you know, they got divorced and I lived my life out in the United States. So Abdurrahman, tough name, you know? And I remember very specifically this conversation about, I was about to start kindergarten. And in pre-K, we kind of got away with it, right? Because most of the time, people give you a little nickname in pre-K. But I had to go introduce myself to people in kindergarten. And they're like, what are we going to call them? And I remember my mom very gingerly raising this with my father. She'd be like, honey, I think we got to talk about his name. And, you know, they had spelled it A-B-D-U-L-R-A-H-M-N. And at this point, Paula Abdul was Speaker 6 (18:32) - Speaker 3 (18:32) And this is Jackie here. This is Jackie, right? I refer to both my moms as mom, but because I was raised by Jackie since I was three. And so Paula Abdul was topping the charts that summer, was straight up. And Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had just retired. So I became Abdul, right? And fast forward to 1992. And my parents very wisely are like, we have to give this next child a name that's pronounceable. So they're like, how about Sam with O on the front and A on the back? It's easy. Speaker 6 (19:03) And then that Speaker 3 (19:04) asshole in Saudi Arabia went and ruined it. But I remember, you know, the planes hitting the Twin Towers and just being horrified by what I was seeing, like literally what I was seeing. the loss of life. I remember it was wall-to-wall coverage and it was what was on in our house. But I remember that day, my mom swinging by to pick up Osama from school. And they were horrified. And they asked, do you want to get picked up? I was like, no. And they asked why I was like, well, you know, there's a couple of, you know, there's not that many Muslim kids in my school, but there are some, and you know, I'm a junior at this point. So I'm just going to stay back and just make sure everybody's okay. Um, I go home, uh, as usual that day, uh, Speaker 6 (19:49) And see you that quickly felt that the energies would turn. Immediately. I remember Speaker 3 (19:54) a kid walking up and just be like, well, your people did this. Speaker 6 (19:57) I Speaker 3 (19:57) was like, why my people? He's like, your people did this. Right. And in some respects, The overwhelming experience of it was just this loss of innocence about everything, that somebody could attack our country like this using airplanes that are supposed to get you to where you need to go. this sense that the things that happen thousands of miles away can impact your life. And this sense of kind of always having to answer for myself and to explain. And for better or worse, it was always the experience of like, hey, when you do something, you don't just represent you. You represent everybody who looks like you and everybody who prays like you. And I think in some respects, like that became a fixture. I was also just really proud of my little brother. I mean, I remember they were like, you know, we could just change your name to Sam. It'll be okay. He's like, no, my name's Osama. I didn't do anything wrong. And I like my name and I'm going to go by Osama. And he still to this day goes by Osama. And at this point, you know, he was in elementary school. And so I think there was also this sense of this broader testing of like, who are we and who do we want to be? Speaker 6 (21:06) One thing Speaker 3 (21:06) that Speaker 6 (21:07) struck me reading your memoir is you have this very unusual. Speaker 6 (21:13) insider-outsider experience of the American institutions. You talk about having to change your name when you're young, starting preschool, or I guess kindergarten. You talk about the very direct racism you experienced right after 9-11. There's sort of more stories of that in the book. You're also captain of three different sports teams at your high school. So, good athlete. You're commencement speaker at University of Speaker 3 (21:34) Michigan. Speaker 6 (21:34) I Speaker 3 (21:34) worked Speaker 6 (21:34) hard at it. I wouldn't say Speaker 3 (21:35) I was a good athlete, but yeah. Speaker 6 (21:36) People who are good athletes always say they worked hard at it. I worked hard at it, but I was not a good athlete. I wasn't captain. President Clinton singles you out for this extraordinary praise after your commencement speech at the University of Michigan. He tells you privately that you should run for office. Speaker 1 (21:51) I don't want to embarrass your senior speaker. Speaker 1 (21:58) But I wish every person in the world who believes that we are fated to have a clash of civilizations and cannot reach across the religious divides could have heard you speak today. I just wish every person in the world could have heard you speak today. Speaker 6 (22:16) You become a Rhodes Scholar, which is how you end up studying in the UK. So tell me a bit about this kind of dual experience of both, you know, somebody who can move through these institutions sort of on the constant verge of either being at the very center, right? Captain, Rhodes Scholar, commencement speaker, or, you know, other being, you know, called slurs on the football field, you know, all the things that you experienced on the other side of that. Speaker 3 (22:42) First, I just loved sports. I mean, they're the thing that got me through childhood and school. For most of my life, I only got good grades because my dad was very clear. It's like, if you slip below an A, you don't play. So I was like, I got to get A's because that's Speaker 6 (22:57) the Speaker 3 (22:57) only way I get to play. And sports were, for me, one of those places where there was a real meritocracy. And so there were always a place for me where I could, where the rules felt, Speaker 3 (23:13) You're a wrestler, right? I was a wrestler. Speaker 6 (23:15) I, Speaker 3 (23:16) to this day, I think I've never done a pure thing. Speaker 2 (23:18) Yeah, Speaker 3 (23:19) exactly. It's you and the other individual. And you, you, you've got the same equipment, which is nothing, right? And, and, you know, you're, you're bounded by weights. So can you pin that