Deja Foxx Is Running for Congress Because ‘Girls Like Me Deserve a Fighter’

Glamour: You’re running for Congress in the district where you were born and raised. How would you describe your background?

Deja Foxx: I was raised by a single mom. She and I relied on Section 8 housing, SNAP benefits, which some folks know as food stamps, and Medicaid. I was a free lunch kid in our public schools here. So, that was my introduction to politics, the things I needed to survive and just get by being decided by people in elected office who more than often felt really far away from families like mine.

Programs like SNAP change based on elections and who’s in charge. How did you come to realize that these things you relied on were, in actuality, political?

As a kid, you only understand things the way that they are in front of you. You don’t have a comparison of what’s going on in other people’s houses. So there wasn’t this “aha” moment of, “Oh, it’s elections deciding this stuff.” It was the lived experience of there being years where our food stamps would get cut. There would be harder months or Section 8 visits where they would come and inspect our house, and that might look like picking up extra chores to make sure the house was ready. So, it was a lived and day-to-day experience. There were moments of comparison being a free lunch kid at public school when other kids’ parents might pack them Uncrustables and all of the name-brand snacks. But it was clear to me that our family was affected by the things going on in the news and in Washington.

I was raised in the era of Obama, which was a very different political understanding. When Obama got elected, I was eight years old. I was so filled with hope. It felt like things were bending towards justice, things were going the right way. And then by the time I was 15, Donald Trump was running for president, which I think blows some people’s minds—that for the last decade and for most of my political understanding, Donald Trump and his chaos and cruelty have defined the political landscape.

You were involved in political advocacy starting as a teenager. How did you have the moxie to jump into it at such a young age?

For me, politics was always about survival. My very first organizing memory was seeing my mom and my neighbors make enough together. Everybody had a deficit in their house: Somebody was short on bills, somebody’s car was broken down, somebody needed a babysitter, but my neighbors knew each other. We talked, we spent time together, and we made enough together.

I think about the ways that when my mom was between jobs, and I mean she worked every odd job you could imagine. She delivered flowers, she worked at a post office, she cleaned houses. She was a caregiver for the elderly, and when she was between work, she would step up to babysit so one of our neighbors could take on an extra shift and because they took on that extra shift, they might have gas in their car to drive me to school when we didn’t have a car. And so, I really watched as my neighbors came together to overcome the ways that they were made to not have enough in one of the richest countries in the world.