DEJA FOXX
The Gen Z activist and social media maestro is fighting for a pro-choice world
deja foxx was unpacking in her dorm room to start her sophomore year at Columbia University when Meena Harris DM’d her about working on her Aunt Kamala’s presidential campaign. “I just started repacking,” Foxx says, laughing. “I wasn’t going to sit in a classroom and talk about Plato and Aristotle when I had skills that could make a difference.”
The youngest staffer on Kamala Harris’ campaign, Foxx, at 19, was already a seasoned activist, driven by her own experience with homelessness and her struggle to access birth control growing up in Tuscon, Arizona. By the time she graduated high school, she had helped launch a teen-led program that provides reproductive-health resources to young people, helmed a successful movement for comprehensive sex-ed classes at her school, and gone viral for confronting then-Sen. Jeff Flake at an Arizona town hall about his stance on Planned Parenthood.
On the Harris campaign, her role as influencer and surrogate strategist didn’t even exist before she arrived. “I got to step in as the expert because there is no one getting a Ph.D. in TikToks and influencer strategy,” she says. Foxx is part of a new generation of activists adept at harnessing the power of social media, blending their personal and professional personas to boost causes they care about. Foxx posts about everything from sponsored vibrator giveaways to videos encouraging women to run for office. “I am a very full, wholly me, authentic person,” she said. “And I think that’s what people resonate with now. . . . Don’t try to fake it. Don’t try to front.”
Foxx is now back in school at Columbia, and also working on GenZ Girl Gang, her online organization promoting sisterhood and community. She makes no secret of her ultimate goal: the presidency, even including it in her email signature, “Activist, Organizer, Badass, Future President.”
Her interests — and ambitions — have expanded from reproductive rights, but fighting for a prochoice world is still at the heart of her activism. “The world that I work toward is defined and characterized by choice,” she said. “And I don’t just mean the choice of if and when to have children, but the choice to raise those children in communities that are free of gun violence, that are free of police brutality, or family separation. The choice to be able to access healthy foods . . . I want communities to have all the resources they need to reach their full potential.”