Hussein reflected a bit on human rights as that which we owe one another but “from a faith perspective, human dignity is vouchsafed by the divine, it is something is inherent and promised to us, over which we have no agency except to forget that we have it. And that’s an important way to think through, ‘How do we assure dignity?'”
Appreciating the expertise that farmworkers brought to creating the Fair Food Program’s human rights solution and how important it is to resist challenges to such expertise Hussein continued, “People say ‘who are you to say what it is that you need? How do you know what you need when you haven’t studied it?’ These are questions of performance that take away from human dignity. As a child of immigrants, as a person of color, as a Muslim in this country, I know that these goal posts are always moving. I have got a bachelor’s degree and three graduate degrees from Harvard and it’s not good enough.”