1586 Atima Omara "How Black Women Instigate for Democracy"
Stand Up! with Pete Dominick
Pete Dominick
4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2026
⏱️ 56 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Hey Friends
I am still fighting a rare but tough cold and so I was not able to produce a news segment today but I do have a GREAT conversation with a brilliant first time guest that I think you will love
I hope you had a great weekend and I am happy we made to to May together
Named to Ebony Magazine's "Power 100" list of emerging leaders and Jet Magazine's "40 Under 40" list, Atima Omara works and leads at the intersection of electoral politics and issue advocacy in the progressive movement. She is a political strategist, advocate, trainer, leader, and speaker with significant political, government, and non-profit experience, and she is a sought-after commentator and strategist.
As the President & Chief Strategist of Omara Strategy Group, she provides strategic consulting to progressive candidates and organizations centering women and people of color in their mission and work. She strategizes with candidates and political organizations to win victories for a more reflective progressive democracy.
An American-born child of Black immigrants, Atima realized early the importance of catalyzing social and electoral change from both the grassroots and leadership levels—especially among underrepresented communities. She has worked as Special Assistant to then-Virginia Governor Mark Warner, and then went to work as an organizer in multiple states with a union and community organizations on voter registration, ballot initiatives, and get-out-the-vote operations in low-income communities of color and immigrant communities.
She is also a former candidate for public and political party office herself, and draws from her lived and professional experience to train activists to organize and candidates from historically marginalized communities to run for office for many organizations including: Emerge America, Higher Heights for America, Vote Run Lead, Running Start, New American Leaders, and National Council for Independent Living.
Prior to that, Atima built her executive leadership experience from serving as Vice President of Reproductive Health Technologies Project, a research based advocacy organization; a Director on the political project #VOTEPROCHOICE (VPC) where she managed successful voter engagement campaigns on behalf of VPC for progressive state and local candidates; and as a nationally elected leader of the Young Democrats of America (YDA), the nation's largest partisan youth organization from 2013-15. She was the first Black president and only the fifth woman to lead the organization in its 80+ year history.
During her tenure as YDA President, she grew national membership and led an independent expenditure to targeted states in 2014 that increased the youth vote turnout for Democrats in critical races. She is an original board member for Emerge Virginia and a founding board member of Virginia's List PAC, two organizations helping to elect more Democratic women. She previously served as Board Chair and Vice Chair of the Planned Parenthood Metro Washington Action Fund. The seasoned political leader is currently an elected member of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) since 2016 and elected vice chair of the DNC's Women's Caucus since 2017.
Atima has published articles in American Prospect, The Root, Salon, Politico, Ms., Ebony, and The Lily (a Washington Post publication) among other notable publications and provided commentary to CNN, MSNBC/NBC, PBS, BBC, Fox News, Fox Business, NPR, Sirius XM, and other national TV & radio outlets. She has also been quoted in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, TIME, USA TODAY, Politico, Mother Jones, Newsweek, MTV News, and Refinery 29.
She received her BA from the University of Virginia and MPA from George Mason University. Atima is also a graduate of the Women's Campaign School at Yale, EMILY'S List and Re:Power campaign trainings.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Stand up. |
| 0:02.5 | Hello, my friends. |
| 0:03.5 | It is Monday, and it is the 4th of May. |
| 0:07.4 | May the 4th be with you, Star Wars Nerds. |
| 0:10.6 | I hope you had a good weekend, and I am happy that you are here because I have a great |
| 0:15.0 | conversation with an excellent first-time guest who is just so brilliant. |
| 0:20.0 | I've already learned so much from preparing |
| 0:22.4 | to talk to her and reading her book. Atima Omarah is my guest today. She was one of Ebony Magazine, |
| 0:29.3 | Power 100. She's the president and chief strategist of Omar's strategy group. She is first generation |
| 0:36.1 | American to Ugandan mom and dad, who sound amazing. She talks |
| 0:42.4 | about them in our conversation today, and she's written a new book. It's called The Instigators, |
| 0:48.1 | how black women have been essential to American democracy and what we can learn from them. |
| 0:53.4 | Really excited to share this conversation with you today. |
| 0:56.3 | Unfortunately, I don't have your normal daily news headlines and clips, but I do plan to |
| 1:01.7 | be back on the normal schedule tomorrow. |
| 1:04.2 | That's Tuesday, the 5th, with your news and clips and a full show. |
| 1:08.6 | I also will be sharing a couple of other interviews that I've racked up over the past few days, including with comedians, Mike Kaplan and J.L. Covan. I'll drop those later on today. But right now, my conversation with Atima Omarah, which I really enjoyed, I hope that she'll be joining us again here on the show. I learned so much from her. And there might be a few moments during this interview where I kind of virtue signal. It's a little weird and cringy. But I do it so that you don't have to so that I can get the answers to the questions that I truly have in this case for this brilliant black woman. And when we talk about race and being a white man, this is just a really important conversation for the non-melanated, as she says, and it's a great book for us, too. I learned a lot. I think you will too. I hope you'll go reach out to her and let her know that you enjoyed this because this is her first time on. She also has her own podcast, which somehow I didn't learn in my prep to talk to her. It's called Embracing Your Voice, Embracing Your Voice Pod.com. |
| 2:04.1 | She's on her fourth season, I believe, and I've just subscribed to it on Apple and Spotify. |
| 2:09.0 | You Can too. |
| 2:10.1 | Here is my conversation with Asimah Omarah just hours after the Supreme Court decided to gut the rest of the Voting Rights Act. |
| 2:19.1 | Tough timing, but important nonetheless. |
| 2:21.5 | Here we go. |
... |
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