Ayanna Pressley
Role at the time: United States Representative for Massachusetts's 7th district and one of the women named in the remarks
Statement summary
Representative Ayanna Pressley, one of the five Black women Laura Loomer described using the word "ghetto" and a gendered slur, responded by opening with Queen Latifah's line "who you calling a b****?" She said she had not intended to respond but would not accept the disrespect, invoked her daughter and her mother, and said the matter was larger than the women named, describing it as part of a coordinated campaign against Black people, Black families and Black women. She linked it to the end of Roe and rising maternal mortality among Black women, the removal of Black women from the federal workforce, the dismantling of diversity programmes, and Justice Department action against Lisa Cook and Letitia James.
“I wasn't gonna enter the chat to respond to an ignorant and desperate woman who yesterday referred to myself and several of my sister Congresswomen as ghetto black b****. I'm not raising my daughter Cora to accept that kind of disrespect.”
The quoted wording is our transcription of the video audio. The segment carries three voices: Loomer's original remarks, Pressley's response, and a third speaker who refers to Pressley in the third person and is therefore not her. Only passages in which the speaker refers to herself, her daughter Cora and her "sister Congresswomen" are attributed to Pressley here; the third speaker is not identified and nothing is attributed to them.
Archived copy (opens in a new tab)Why we used this label
Pressley rejects the remarks outright as disrespect she will not accept and places them within a broader pattern of racist action, which condemns the conduct under scrutiny. The closest competing label is “Challenged the characterization”, because part of her answer disputes Loomer's claim that the wording describes a real stereotype rather than a racist attack. That loses because she does not argue about the accuracy of the description; she rejects the remarks themselves and the campaign she says they belong to.