She’s AOC from the block … but not too much.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she was warned against wearing hoop earrings when she was younger in order to avoid looking “ghetto.”

“We were taught that dressing a certain way is ghetto, and once you have like hoop earrings, it’s like a very subtle. It’s not outward, but, you know, you don’t show up to a job interview in a nameplate and hoop earrings,” Ocasio-Cortez says during a Facebook live video from 2017.

“I’m Puerto Rican. I kind of grew up with this kind of subtle message that if you dress like that, you will not be taken seriously,” she adds in her pre-Congress confessional. “Why is it that when I wear hoop earrings, it’s like sassy? But when … I don’t know, when Jessica Biel wears hoop earrings, it’s elegant.”

AOC made the remarks during a pre-dawn car-ride with her friend Joshua Pereira. The pair were on the road documenting the 2017 oil pipeline protests at Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota.

Additional reporting by Hannah Milic 

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