Death threats, recalls, and discrimination: Sen. Aisha Wahab isn’t here ‘to waste any time’

Senator Aisha Wahab and her sister have a morbid running joke about not making it to the age of 40.

They were children when they lost both of their parents, two Afghan refugees. Their father was murdered, in what remains a cold case in New York. Their mother died shortly thereafter.

Wahab was about ten when, after time in the foster care system, the sisters were adopted and raised by parents in Fremont. Trouble came again during the recession in 2011, when they lost their retail business and then their home, which forced a move to the more affordable Hayward. Wahab became the breadwinner for her family, but then she lost her job, too.

“It was a struggle,” said Wahab, now in her mid-30s. “It was a ‘when it rains it pours’ kind of a vibe. Literally everything happened at once.”

But tragedy, for the first Muslim woman elected to the California State Senate, manifests itself in an innate sense of urgency. It has propelled Wahab to take enormous swings in her policy proposals while not becoming distracted by her critics — and there are many — in the meantime.

“Having experienced loss in so many different ways, I am not here to waste any time,” she said.

Wahab identifies first and foremost as a proud American. “Uncle Sam raised me,” she likes to say. But she stands out in an institution that has never seen anyone like her.

She is the only Afghan American woman. The only product of the foster care system. The only Muslim in the Senate (Republican Assemblyman Bill Essayli is the only other Muslim in the state legislature). There are many other identifiers for Wahab: renter, survivor, outsider in an establishment institution.

She’s unapologetic about all of this, but also less interested in discussing it than in talking about what she wants to get done with her precious time as a State Senator.

A brief rundown of the five months since she won her District 10 seat is slightly dizzying. A successful early start for a civil rights bill brought more civilians to the Capitol (in both support and opposition) than any other measure so far this session. A lobbying reform proposal sent Sacramento Twitter into a frenzy. There was an uphill battle to amend the 1995 Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, to allow localities to expand the use of rent control, which passed the Senate Judiciary committee in April.

And, most recently, a recall committee that is fomenting in the Bay Area.

“At the end of the day, this recall effort is run by Republicans,” Wahab told The Bee, speaking specifically of its organizer Ritesh Tandon, a Congressional candidate who’s run two campaigns as a Republican against Rep. Ro Khanna, and is launching a third against him as a moderate Democrat.

“This is an effort to distract us and intimate us, especially as a brand new Senator, as a young woman of color,” she said.

Tandon says the recall has nothing to do with politics or color and everything to do with job performance.

He characterized her brief time at the Capitol as filled with “broken promises and failed priorities” and described Wahab as “missing in action.”

Caste discrimination in California

One of Tandon’s biggest objections is to Wahab’s civil rights bill, SB 403, which would ban discrimination on the basis of caste — a person’s assigned position in the social hierarchy based on family “purity and status”. In other words, wealth and skin color. Caste privilege and bias play significant roles in South Asian communities, but Black American civil rights activists like Dr. Cornel West and journalist Isabel Wilkerson have connected caste-based discrimination to anti-Black racism in the United States.

In a message supporting SB 403, West described caste discrimination as the great “moral and spiritual issue of our time.”

Such legislation is unnecessary, Tandon and other critics argue, because caste discrimination doesn’t exist in California or anywhere else the U.S. Moreover, they say it will actively harm Hindu Indian Americans, many of whom fear they’ll be victims of racial profiling if it passes.

There are documented cases of such bias in the state, specifically in the tech industry and academia. SB 403 passed unanimously in the Senate Judiciary Committee at the end of April. Wahab will take it to the Senate floor soon.

She expected a certain level of push back.

“When you try to balance the scales, there are people that have benefited from power and privilege that get upset,” she said. “I always knew that would be the case, the extremes that some people have gone.”

Less predictable were the threats, the vitriol, the harassment of her staff, and what she described as “hatred towards me for what I embody as an Afghan, Muslim woman.”

“Some people lose their mind over it,” she said. “We’ve had actual, physical, violent threats. Some people have even wished my children died ... I don’t have children, so, knock on wood.”

While the bill has particularly vocal and vitriolic critics, its supporters are plentiful.

Amar Shergill, Progressive Caucus Chair, has known Wahab since her time on Hayward City Council. He said she and SB 403 “are on the right side of history.”

“The opposition to SB 403 may truly believe that the bill is not good for their community,” he said, “just as a very small group oppose protections for the LGBTQ community, and folks opposed votes for women and people of color.”

Less highlighted in the press coverage of SB 403, Wahab said, is the gratitude that so many of her constituents have expressed since she wrote it.

“I see grown men shed tears,” she said. “There are plenty of other people from across the world, let alone in my district, literally crying because they never thought that they would one day be free of the caste system.”

Her staff received one particularly moving message.

“Our hands were literally shaking speaking in front of all those powerful people,” a constituent said.

“Why would they listen to me when I don’t even speak English well? All I’ve known is how to cook for my family, and family politics. I did not know I could be part of a movement. Do you think they will remember us in history? Now that we know we can do this, why would we ever go back? Thank you for showing us we could know this feeling, this power, this everything.”

“When people say, ‘Is this needed?’ Wahab said, “I think that clearly shows it is.”

From IT to City Council

Wahab’s entry into politics also sets her apart from many of her colleagues. After graduating from San Jose State with a BA in political science and an MBA from Cal State-East Bay, she was headed toward a career in IT.

But her work with the Afghan Coalition, a Fremont nonprofit that supports Afghan refugees, and her own experience renting in the expensive East Bay, produced a drive to be more civically active. After Wahab and her family moved to Hayward, she was drawn to local politics.

“I was watching city council meetings, seeing how I could get involved,” she said. “When President Trump got elected, the vitriol toward so many different communities really spurred me into getting more deeply involved.”

Frustrated with inaction on Hayward City Council, she ran for a seat in 2018. It was an outsider campaign, with no support from big local players like the Chamber of Commerce and fire and police departments.

“People look at you think, ‘You’re young, you’re a different ethnicity, your name is weird,’ ... but people want to see positive change, and people supported my message.”

She became the first Afghan-American woman ever elected to public office the United States.

Conflict at the Capitol

Not all of Wahab’s policies have drawn push back, or such a vocal response. The same week that SB 403 passed the Senate Judiciary Committee, two other victim’s rights bills also advanced.

The Safe Minors Act, which cleared the Public Safety Committee with broad bipartisan support, would make it a crime to arrange or officiate marriage between a minor and an adult.

The Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights, co-sponsored by Sen. Susan Rubio, D-Los Angeles, is meant to provide survivors with more support in navigating the legal system. It also received unanimous approval from Public Safety. The bill would require a state audit of untested rape kits, ensure that information about an arrest or prosecution is shared in a timely manner, and give survivors the option of an additional legal expert to support them.

“Survivors who do engage with the justice system are often left with little knowledge and communication regarding their cases,” Wahab said at a press conference in April.

At the same time, another measure she sponsored placed her at odds with women who advocate for an end to workplace sexual harassment.

SB 573 would bar some legislative staffers from taking jobs as lobbyists for one year after they leave the Capitol. It brought founders of We Said Enough, a group formed in response to the MeToo movement, to the bill’s April 18 hearing in the Senate Elections and Constitutional Amendments Committee.

They said the measure could trap lower paid staff in “hostile or abusive work places by preventing them from holding meaningful, well-compensated employment elsewhere.”

Wahab took issue with the two lobbyists who founded the group, Samantha Corbin and Alicia Benavidez, for “using victims as a prop to not have lobbying reform in the state of California.”

“It also cheapens the experience of survivors of sexual assault and discrimination. This bill is not how or where they will get made whole, which they deserve,” Wahab said .“And to be using victims as a prop to not have lobbying reform in the state of California is disgusting and not fair to them.”

As her comments made the rounds on Twitter, Sacramento lobbyists, staffers, and legislators responded with outrage and frustration. Corbin and Benavidez tweeted from the We Said Enough Twitter account that they were “exploring legal options.” Assemblywoman Tina McKinner, D-Los Angeles, called on Wahab to apologize.

Wahab tabled SB 573, but has not apologized. She said last month that the bill is “a critical component” of protecting the integrity of the legislative process and that she has “always been and will always be a supporter of victims and survivors of sexual assault, harassment, and abuse.”

Outrage about those specific comments resulted in other critiques of Wahab — more specifically, greasing the gossip wheels about her reputation as a difficult boss, fueled in part by the abrupt departure of her chief-of-staff.

“If you know anyone in the building you already know Wahab’s history of terrorizing staff,” one former Capitol staffer Tweeted that same day.

Five months may not be long enough to have an established “history” of anything in the Capitol. But outside its doors, Wahab knows her approach to legislating is unorthodox.

“The way that I do things is not the traditional way,” she said bluntly.

“That makes me a target, but also allows me to do things that have been talked about before, but never done.”