Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says the nation’s “weird American Dream mythology” needs to change — particularly in the minds of “cisgendered” and poor white citizens.

The rising Democratic Party lawmaker from New York told the Intercept’s “Deconstructed” podcast this week that poor white people need to accept that they “benefit” from their skin color, and more so if they identify as their birth sex.

“I find the solutions for white communities to be very painful because it’s very painful for a community to understand and have to go through this — like, you can be — the idea that you can be poor and benefit from the color of your skin does not compute for a lot of people,” she said Monday. “And going through that realization is very painful or even just economically for people that were born with silver spoons. It’s very painful to admit that you had advantages.”

The lawmaker then pivoted to gender politics and the “really hard” decision for Americans to admit “some privilege … of some type.”

“I’m a cisgendered woman,” she said. “I will never know the trauma of feeling like I’m not born in the right body. And that is a privilege that I have, no matter how poor my family was when I was born. But it’s really hard for some people to admit that they — you know, it’s part of this weird American Dream mythology that we have, that for a lot of — in a lot of circumstances isn’t as true or isn’t as clearly communicated as we’d like for it, or we wish it was.”

.@AOC: I acknowledge my “privilege” in being born “cisgendered”



“I’m a cisgendered woman, I will never know the trauma of feeling like I’m not born in the right body. That is a privilege I have no matter how poor my family was when I was born.” pic.twitter.com/QkviNMtLmv — Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 30, 2019

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