A groundbreaking study out of UIC’s Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy finds that Chicagoland Arab American communities face widespread racism and a lack of support and resources from government agencies. Co-author Dr. Nadine Naber of “Beyond Erasure and Profiling: Cultivating Strong and Vibrant Arab American Communities in Chicagoland” joins the stream to talk about the findings with our Brad Edwards. Click here to view the full video.
Ten parents (nine mothers and one father) make up Mothers of the Kidnapped (MOK), the feminist abolitionist collective partnering with the United Nations to demand Illinois officials pardon all survivors of police torture and wrongful convictions.
Their sons are 10 of more than 500 people whose cases have piled up on the desks of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s desk, after being investigated under the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission Act, a 2009 statute meant to provide redress for victims of police torture.
To be a mother to one of them is to be a mother to all 500, the mothers agree. This work extends beyond the biological; they are mothers to those inside and mothers to one another. As they offer mental and financial support to their children and those inside—sending gifts and adding money to their commissaries—the mothers also bear each other up while they endure the stressors and physical toll of survivorship and take on advocacy and activism as political forms of caregiving.
“It’s enough to make you want to just keep on fighting and not give it up,” Armanda Shackelford said. To many, she is known as “Mama Justice,” but to her son Gerald Reed, she is just “Mama.”
In 1990, police arrested Reed in connection with two Chicago murders. Two detectives working under then-Police Commander Jon Burge brutally beat Reed, dislodging a metal rod in his thigh, until he confessed to the murders. Reed was sentenced to life without parole, and, in the years to follow, Burge was fired and put on trial amid numerous allegations from Black men in Chicago of torture.
Reed was nearly 30 years into serving a life sentence when a Chicago judge vacated his conviction. But, a devastating decision by the judge’s successor, Judge Thomas Hennelly, sent Reed back to prison to serve his life sentence in 2020.
A year later, Gov. Pritzker pardoned Reed. Shackelford wept; the other mothers celebrated.
In July 2022, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Joanne Rosado vacated the convictions of Juan and Rosendo Hernandez, two brothers who spent 25 years in police custody after notoriously corrupt Chicago police detective Reynaldo Guevara framed them for murder. Esther Hernandez, their mother and a member of MOK, wept. The other mothers celebrated.
Pressuring for change
Their earned distrust of Chicago police, like the officer responsible for Reed’s arrest and the officer who framed the Hernandez brothers, and faith in one another propels MOK members in the relentless fight to decarcerate Chicago today.
This year marks the second year MOK will work with the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Racial Discrimination. Together, they’ll draft a report to strengthen their case for pardoning people who’ve been framed or tortured into confessions.
In 2020, the mothers drafted a similar document containing the names of four Chicago police officers involved in the framing and torture of at least 196 people.
“We, the mothers of survivors of police torture and frame-ups, are calling on Governor Pritzker to pardon these individuals and to hold those who violated their rights accountable,” the report read, followed by extensive research conducted by the mothers themselves.
They hoped their prior victories and Foxx’s vocal support for Black Lives Matter would endear people to their pleas for justice. And it did, for a few months.
After several fruitless meetings with the governor and meetings with the state’s attorney that came to a dead end, they felt the need to apply more pressure.
“It’s so hard to get the meetings, and when we do get the meetings, we feel like it’s the same old responses, and nothing’s happening,” MOK and MAMAS founder Nadine Suleiman Naber said.
Making room for mothering in social movements
Naber, mother, scholar, and professor, has been working at the intersection of mothering and abolition since 2011, when she witnessed firsthand the critical role women played in the Arab Spring revolutions. While in Egypt, she saw the mothers of martyrs resisting state violence through protests but also through arranging and participating in child care, an invaluable act of mothering that requires time and physical labor and challenges ideas about who gets to partake in “the revolution” and how.
Naber returned to the U.S. and found community among other Chicago activists, mothers who felt excluded from and exploited by social movements in their community.
“The exclusion of mothers and the way that mothers of color are often used by social movements for their tears to put an emotional face to the struggles—that’s a patriarchal structure in a lot of activist movements,” Naber said.
Guided by the work of Black feminist abolitionists like Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, she began carving out a new space for the mothers of survivors of police torture to organize with a few simple abolitionist principles in mind: the system does not work and was never designed to. The system itself has to go.
Because many mothers came to MOK through the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, they were already familiar with the concept of a world without police or prisons. “The Alliance,” they call it, was born in 1973 from the movement to free political prisoners like famed abolitionist Angela Davis. Now, it was time to put those principles into action.
“When I used to tell people my son is imprisoned, my next comment was, ‘But he’s innocent,’” Denice Bronis said. But MOK has revealed how rebuttals such as this reinforce the idea that there are people who do deserve the harsh punishments doled out by the state.
“Why do I even have to say that? I care about others that are in there, too,” Bronis said.
Bronis deposits $150 into Echevarria’s commissary account monthly. She calls it “child support,” referencing court-ordered payments parents make when they don’t have custody of their children, but for her, it’s a simple motherly act of caring. If she hears someone else inside is struggling, she’ll send additional money.
As Bronis and her husband prepare to move out of the home where they raised Matthew, she is grateful to have a network of other mothers to lean on.
“Otherwise, I would be doing exactly what the state of Illinois wants me to do: shut up and accept it. It makes a big difference when you walk into a room with other mothers that are going through the same exact thing you are,” she said.
Strategies for survival
Several months ago, April Ward, the most recent mother to join MOK, mailed a gold chain to her son, Mickiael Ward, as a token of her love. April thinks of Mickiael fondly and often. She said he was obsessed with keeping things tidy and organized, and at 13, he spent hours cleaning and rearranging the furniture in their home to impress her.
“I said, ‘You should become a designer,’ but they took his life away,” Ward said.
Around the same age, she said, Mickiael began having run-ins with the police.
At 18, Mickiael confessed to the 2013 killing of Hadiya Pendelton, and in 2019 a judge sentenced him to 84 years in prison. His confession was the result of the Reid Technique, a questionable method of interrogation that draws its namesake from the Chicago cop who popularized it in the ’50s. The nine-step process involves an intense line of questioning that assumes the alleged’s guilt from step one. It was renounced by one of the nation’s largest police consulting firms in 2017.
Mickiael’s case garnered attention from the Obamas and sparked a national conversation about gun violence, overshadowing talk of torture and racial profiling. MOK has been a lifeline for Ward as she works on bringing awareness to this. In many of the ways that their sons are survivors of the violent system of policing and incarceration, the mothers of MOK consider themselves survivors, perpetually enduring the ripple effects of the carceral system.
“Mothers of the kidnapped already are living the alternative [to the policing and prisons] because they’ve been forced to create strategies for surviving and living when they’ve had everything taken away from them,” Naber said.
They’ve exhausted their financial resources on lawyers, visitations, phone calls, and commissary payments. These acts of caring carry their own emotional weight. And according to Naber, the physical toll is “extremely profound,” with illnesses among MOK ranging from stress and anxiety to kidney failure and cancer.
At 80, Shackelford isn’t able to march on the front lines the way she used to, she said, but she can still pick up the phone. Nearly all of the mothers have established a rapport with someone incarcerated in Cook County, offering advice and words of support.
“That’s something that we all do as moms, we encourage each other.” Shackelford said. “When one is going through, we all are going through together.”
What will your conversation heart say this Valentine’s Day?
Will it replicate the possessive politics of modern heteronormative love — summed up by phrases like “be mine” — or will it communicate the idea that love is always political, and that the greatest act of love is to work toward collective liberation?
Cornel West famously said that “justice is what love looks like in public,” yet most public versions of Valentine’s Day eschew this collectivist, politicized understanding, instead constructing love as a supremely individualistic and capitalist enterprise. That red, white and pink aisle full of heart-shaped products at the local retail store is brought to you by a process of commercialization that started in the late 1700s, when printed cards began to be circulated. The tradition that would eventually lead to purchasing cards was accelerated in the 19th century thanks to industrialization and the rise of the printing press, and catapulted into a festival of mass consumerism in the 20th century, thanks to Hallmark. Since inaugurating the Valentine’s Day card commercial tradition in 1916, the company still benefits handsomely from its share of the roughly 145 million Valentine’s cards sold each year. In fact, Valentine’s Day displays crowd out (Gregorian) Christmas displays practically before the new year has even begun, not only because of timing — the holiday is also the second-most lucrative, just behind Christmas, in U.S. greeting cards sales.
Contrary to popular belief, most histories of Valentine’s Day trace the holiday much further back than St. Valentine himself, noting that it seems to be based on an ancient Roman festival traditionally held in mid-February: Lupercalia, a celebration of health and fertility. The moniker of “Valentine’s Day” was later imposed by the Roman Catholic church as a way of appropriating what was seen as a “pagan ritual” that publicly and brazenly celebrated fertility. This rebranding of a “pagan” ritual that still held meaning and value for people represents a form of cultural colonization, ultimately taming and restraining the ritual within Catholic systems of meaning.
This February, we are co-organizing a monthlong series of discussions and art-making activities with the aim of troubling the militarism and consumerism inherent in Valentine’s Day. What we are calling radical love.
And who is this St. Valentine? In popular stories about the origins of the holiday, St. Valentine is widely identified as a martyr for love. Though there is debate about which St. Valentine is the one for whom the holiday is named, one popular legend is that the Valentine’s Day we widely celebrate is named for a St. Valentine who was executed by Roman Emperor Claudius II for secretly marrying couples — a practice that ran afoul of the emperor’s ban on marriage since, he claimed, it would dampen soldiers’ zeal for fighting. Some sources even claim love as a constant thread running through military history.
To be sure, Valentine’s Day can be a time to cherish our individual loving relationships. Yet we do not have to perpetuate its colonialist, military and corporate roots — roots that have actively hindered, constrained and attached oppressive strings to the potential for love and joy for so many Indigenous, Black, and other people of color, as well as women, queer and trans folks, and disabled and working-class people.
This February, as part of the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s 2023 “Feminist Futures” Calendar & Program, we are co-organizing a monthlong series of discussions and art-making activities with the aim of troubling the militarism and consumerism inherent in Valentine’s Day. Through this monthlong programming, we hope to build a deeper grounding in what we are calling radical love. The Palestinian Feminist Collective is an intergenerational collective of Arab and Palestinian women and feminists seeking to achieve Palestinian social and political liberation by confronting systemic gendered, sexual and colonial violence, oppression and dispossession.
True to our belief that radical love is collaborative, we are developing this work in coalition with members of organizations like Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity (MAMAS), the U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. Our aim is to intentionally integrate and affirm how radical love can expand the liberatory possibilities of our social movement ecosystems, especially those committed to dismantling prisons and policing, and freeing Palestine.
To us, this means cultivating interdependence and growing practices of collective care and mutual aid while working to create conditions where compassion, love and connection can be enjoyed not only within individual, heteronormative relationships, but also between every member of our communities.
MAMAS, for example, is employing mutual aid as a strategy for expanding the capacity of incarcerated people and their loved ones to not only survive but thrive — to grow their communities and enjoy loving relationships with each other, despite the state’s attempts to separate mothers and caregivers from their incarcerated children. The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, meanwhile, is actively imagining liberatory futures free of policing by centering and tending to people’s needs in the face of the surveillance state. This work includes creating popular education tools about the harms of policing, skill-building with 4th through 6th graders to foster their collective power, and partnering with the Los Angeles Community Action Network to provide and grow food with and for Skid Row residents; all these activities center the people’s own analysis of what resources they need to enjoy freedom and love.
Our Valentine’s Day agenda grounds in the belief that our movement work toward liberation from all forms of oppression is itself a labor of love. Drawing from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this belief reminds us that “when we reach for each other and make the most access possible, it is a radical act of love.” This belief also draws from Walidah Imarisha’s work on visionary fiction to assert that radical love is an important tool in the “decolonization of the imagination,” because “it is only through imagining the so-called impossible that we can begin to concretely build it.” In this sense, as we build our practices of radical love, we build and strengthen the decolonial, accessible-for-all world imagination that this love requires.
The less-often quoted part of Cornel West’s invitation to practicing justice as public love is the assertion that “tenderness is what love feels like in private.” Beyond expressing love through a one-day affair of gifts of flowers and chocolate, we affirm that tenderness in intimate relationships, the daily commitment to caring for one another’s basic needs and meeting these needs with vulnerability and compassion, is an integral part of love and political struggle. Though West is so often quoted, his ideas about the need for an ethic of love are no doubt inspired by his collaboration with bell hooks, who said that “without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination.”
Indeed, acts of radical vulnerability, care-work and restorative accountability in the face of intimate and community harms are integral to radical love. We reject the privileging of “public over private,” of “reason over emotion” and of “mind over matter” that pervades our cisheteronormative social institutions, and work instead to center acts of care and mutual aid –writing letters to incarcerated communities, uplifting Trans Day of Remembrance, and supporting mothers’ and community members’ health needs — as inspiration for our understanding of radical love as liberation.
As members of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, we are Palestinian, Arab and North African feminists living in a U.S. that backs the Israeli colonization of Palestine, that leads militaristic warmongering that continues to target our people, from Iraq to Egypt, Syria to Morocco, Yemen to Sudan. It is these experiences of continual besiege that especially drive our commitments to revolutionary love. For example, we understand survival in the face of airstrikes in Gaza, stun grenades, tear gas, skunk water, rubber bullets and the desecration of Palestinian sacred sites in Jerusalem in May 2021 to be an act of love. Supporting one another in collective mourning and grief for the more than 30 Palestinians killed in 2023 so far is also an act of love. We extend this grief and mourning to join in collective rage against the police-perpetrated killings of Keenan Anderson, Tyre Nichols, and thousands more each year.
In the loudest possible terms, we also uplift queer love as integral to Palestinian liberation. We affirm queer Palestinians as radical agents of transformation in the struggle for a free Palestine, just as we reject Israeli settler-colonialist “pinkwashing,” which refers to the appropriation of the rhetoric of LGBTQ rights to sanitize its public image as the “only gay-friendly country in the Middle East.” This pinkwashing not only erases the daily horrors queer and trans Palestinians suffer under Zionist occupation and plays to racialized stereotypes that essentialize notions of Arab “backwardness;” it also directs international attention away from the oppression of Palestinians and seeks to justify the brutalities of colonization by hiding behind a banner of being queer-friendly.
We believe that caring, nurturing and resisting are inseparable and are essential to joy, well-being and rest, especially for colonized people and people of color. By organizing through radical love, we expand who is included in movement work. When radical love becomes our guiding principle, movement work makes space for grassroots strategies of community care — i.e., aunties caring for niblings; elders sharing movement stories, both triumphant and disappointing; parents prioritizing self-care in order to continue the struggle; and trusting in youth to co-create political education — rather than exclusively highlighting typical political actors.
This Valentine’s Day, let us grow the possibilities for practicing radical love and care together. Let us uplift the idea that love is the collective practice of imagining a future without settler-colonial nation-states, prisons and policing, and working toward this future by creating the conditions for and infrastructures of care.
CHICAGO (CBS) — Arab Americans across Chicagoland experience discrimination and inequities in all areas of life – from the workplace, to schools, to their interactions with police, according to a first of its kind report released Monday.
The report is by the University of Illinois Chicago’s Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy. It asserts its findings are just the latest examples of how agencies and organizations are failing to meet the needs of Arab Americans – one of the area’s largest communities.
The authors worked with community-based organizations to conduct 12 focus groups and administer a survey to nearly 500 Arab Americans in the area. The report says the findings underscore the need for public and private sectors to create a new racial category, Middle Eastern/North African (MENA), which would require data collection on Arab Americans in health, law enforcement, social services and more.
Without their own category, Arab Americans have long been counted as “white” on government forms. It’s a challenge that social service groups, researchers and residents say make it nearly impossible to gather critical data to understand their needs.
This was no more evident than during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. A CBS 2 investigation uncovered Arab Americans were among those dying at high rates, but the government did not have a separate category tracking this information like it does for other groups. With no hard data, community organizations struggled to obtain grants for resources.
“This is part of our continuous struggle for the past 20 years that we’ve started this organization,” said Itedal Shalabi, co-founder of Arab American Family Services. “We continuously have to chase the funding, we continuously have to knock on people’s doors, we continuously have to say, ‘Here’s a community that’s in dire need.'”
According to U.S. Census data, more than 100,000 Arab Americans live in Chicagoland, making up about 90 percent of all Arab Americans in Illinois. Due to the lack of a category and comprehensive data, this number is believed to be an undercount.
The UIC study aims to examine the experiences of this community through a historical lens, tracing the first Arab American immigrants in Chicago to 1899. It discusses how, since then, this community has uniquely experienced both hypervisibility and invisibility. While stereotypes and discrimination make Arab Americans highly visible in many spaces, they are often invisible because their experiences are not counted in official data, the report said.
“The inclusion of Arab Americans in the white racial category has caused them to be historically excluded from mainstream conversations about racism and also makes it very difficult to identify, much less measure quantitatively, the distinct patterns in experiences and outcomes for this group, rendering their lives and needs invisible,” the authors wrote.
With a goal to gather quantitative data for the first time on this group in Chicagoland, the team of researchers and community organizations administered a survey to 496 Arab Americans between December 2020 and September 2021. Survey respondents reported high levels of stereotyping and prejudice. Some of the findings include:
1 in 4 people said organizations, such as businesses, government offices and schools, are not at all effective in meeting their needs. While mosques and non-profit service agencies were viewed favorably among respondents, 30 percent said the government and their workplaces are not effective in meeting their needs. “These responses help us to understand how the lack or presence of Arab American staff in organizations directly impacts Arab Americans’ experiences as they navigate everyday life,” the authors wrote.
1 in 4 said they experienced stereotyping and prejudice from their boss.
1 in 5 experienced stereotyping and prejudice from the police.
39 percent experienced threatening words or gestures due to being Arab; 38 percent reported experiencing verbal insults or abuse; 20 percent reported experiencing vandalism; 14 percent reported experiencing a physical attack; and 14 percent experiencing loss of employment.
Survey respondents detailed disturbing examples of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism, including being called racial slurs and being harassed by Transportation Security Administration workers.
One woman said she chose to remove her hijab after the 9/11 terror attacks “due to the public reaction … this included people yelling ‘Go back to Afghanistan,’ giving the middle finger, and stares in public that were too much for me to handle at 15,” the report said.
Another woman described an interaction with police where she was pulled over in her minivan for an expired license sticker. The report said the routine traffic stop “escalated to an arrest. She was yelled at, told to get out of her car, and forced to remove her hijab. When she asked for a female officer due to fear, the officer ‘became irate…extremely violent’ and arrested her,” cuffing her wrists so tightly that she had welts.
“I can honestly say it has been traumatizing for me,” the woman said in the survey. “I am a mother of 5, a law-abiding citizen who drives a minivan and I have been treated like a hardened criminal.”
The authors wrote in the report, “In sum, verbal assault, threats, stereotyping, and prejudice are very much a part of everyday life for Arab Americans in Chicagoland.”
The 12 focus groups allowed researchers to dive deeper and gather additional anecdotal information on these experiences. They learned many Arab Americans are victims of physical and verbal bullying in schools, and officials often failed to intervene. This includes the targeting of women wearing the hijab and the targeting of Palestinian Americans specifically.
“Chicagoland participants emphasized that the repression of their political opinions in school often took the form of anti-Palestinian racism, whereby teachers and other school staff policed, monitored, and silenced critical discussions of the Israeli occupation of Palestine,” the report said.
These experiences in school often caused students to hesitate before reporting bullying and harassment.
The focus groups also shared similar experiences with law enforcement. In multiple examples, residents reported incidents to police but said they received little to no response. They also said their interactions with police feel “tense,” “demeaning” and “condescending,” and they “never want to ever call the police.”
In addition, the report discussed the community’s fear of being surveilled by law enforcement since the 9/11 terror attacks – a fear that proved to be true by the government’s use of suspicious activity reports in Chicago and across the country, a CBS 2 investigation previously found.
“We have to watch what we say for fear of being reported to police for something so small, or for every day activities,” said 24-year-old Reema Rustom, member of the Arab American Action Network.
The report said the Oak Lawn police beating of 17-year-old Hadi Abuatelah in July 2022 “exacerbated this sentiment” in the community. The police department said the teen was reaching for something in a bag as officers tried to arrest him, and that they found a loaded gun inside that bag. But a lawsuit filed by his family accuses the police department of excessive force and “extreme and outrageous conduct” by punching him. Viral cell phone video showed officers repeatedly punched Abuatelah while he was pinned to the ground.
“Overall, the survey provides additional local insight on the broad patterns we generally in scholarship on Arab Americans,” the report says, adding that people reported “how their everyday life is framed by fear and threats due to hypervisibility – where they are treated with suspicion and hostility due to being seen through the lens of stereotypes.”
What it means to be counted
The authors found a lack of data and historical understanding about Arab Americans makes it difficult for their communities to have their needs met. This results in a “data desert,” further emphasizing the need for a MENA category across public and private sectors.
Chicago activists, researchers and social service organizations have long been at the forefront of a decades-long fight, pushing the federal government to create a MENA category for the Census. Local governments have pointed to a lack of category on the federal level when asked why they have not created their own MENA category. It would also require a new state law to change government databases and systems at the local level.
But the report said the creation of a category would only be the first step. Once Arab Americans are counted, agencies must increase access to resources to ensure equity, especially since this community has a higher rate of poverty, lower household median income and higher rates of unemployment compared to Chicagoland residents overall.
Ultimately, the report said the research “reaffirms the limitations of existing data on Arab American experiences with racism” and underscores the harm of not having a MENA category.
“Without being counted, community organizations find it challenging to access adequate funding or advocate for specific services and opportunities to address the very real challenges that impact Arab American communities such as poverty, discrimination, and access to housing, education, and healthcare,” the authors wrote. “Without being counted, community members experience harms that go unnoticed by the larger public.”
The report is authored by Nadine Naber, Nicole Nguyen, Chris D. Poulos, Iván Arenas, Louise Cainkar, Nazek Sankari, Amanda E. Lewis, Nina Shoman-Dajani, and Zeina Zaatari. The authors partnered with the Arab American Action Network, the Arab American Family Services, the Middle Eastern Immigrant and Refugee Alliance, Sanad Social Services and the Syrian Community Network.
Dr. Naber was recently featured on iHeartRadio as part of the podcast Rep. The podcast episode can be found here on Spotify. Please fast-forward to 33:30 where Dr. Naber’s part begins.
“Feminism failed to show up for voting rights and feminism failed to show up for candidates of color who talked about reproduction, so now here we are with mainstream feminism facing its worst fears because it wasn’t showing up for any of the other fights that might have prevented this,” said Mikki Kendall, author of “Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot” — a book that centers feminism in a community-based activism lens.
On Mother’s Day weekend, we talked with Nadine Naber and Souzan Naser, co-directors of MAMAS (Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity), a Chicago-based collective that works with mothers/caretakers of color impacted by violence, surveillance and deportation by law enforcement.
Rosemary Cade, 67, joined MAMAS for the camaraderie. The Roseland resident is mother to Antonio Porter, who is serving a 71-year sentence for a 2002 murder conviction stemming from a dice game slaying. Cade spoke about her son’s story at a rally Mother’s Day weekend. She said being in community with other mothers offers comfort.
“There’s other mothers suffering and struggling with the same situation that I’m going through with my son — that’s a lot of stress,” Cade said. “The fight is the struggle. We got to keep fighting. We can’t give up.”
Established in 2019, the collective sees police violence as a feminist issue, where prisons are impacting their children and by extension impacting them. MAMAS seeks to integrate mothers’ voices into social movements. Naber, University of Illinois at Chicago professor of gender and women’s studies and global Asian studies and faculty founder of UIC’s Arab American Cultural Center, and Naser, licensed clinical social worker, counselor and assistant professor at Moraine Valley Community College and Arab American Action Network president, spoke about the intersectionality of feminism, reproductive justice (reproductive rights, access and social justice) and the upcoming decision on Roe v. Wade.
“For women of color, the fight for Roe vs. Wade has to be accompanied by the fight for all women to have access to health care and for all women to have the capacity to have or not have kids and to mother in safety and dignity,” Naber said. “Our issue is that no matter what argument you make for the right to choose, it’s still not going to be enough if people don’t have health care and people aren’t protected from state violence.”
Naber said MAMAS wants to make sure that mothers of color have a seat at the table in movements of change.
“We’re working with mamas who are resisting immigration bans, mothers who are surviving war and colonization,” Naser said. “We need to take seriously the ways prisons impact people of color, not just in the U.S., but colonized people across the globe, including Palestine. We need to talk about how prison, colonization, immigration bans and detention devastates mothers and caretakers economically. It impacts their physical and mental health. It interferes with their ability to survive, and to thrive with dignity. Mothers and caretakers bear all of these burdens when they are supporting their incarcerated family members, when they’re resisting war and colonization.”
The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q: What are the collective’s thoughts about the draft decision news?
Naber: Fighting for the right to choose — it couldn’t be more urgent. We’re very critical of how society is grappling with this moment, that our society is grappling with it in white, middle-class, feminist terms. Those terms exclude the realities that women of color face and how they would be impacted. Reproductive justice is about the human right to parent your child. If you were to have a child and then the state forcibly separates mothers from their children, which very much disproportionately affects women of color, who, whether they’re immigrants, undocumented refugees, that trauma is reproduced generationally. For us, it’s the police violence issue of the Chicago Police Department, either killing children and forcibly separating mothers from their children and Chicago police incarcerating Black and brown men en masse, as well as the Chicago Police Department forcing confessions en masse. The question is: Who’s going to address these communities and these mothers who are facing a massively urgent reproductive justice issue that’s beyond a right under the law to choose whether to have a child or not? It’s about a state taking away your capacity to be a mother to your child.
Naser: It goes back to who has access and who is this ban going to impact the most. It’s going to impact minority individuals and marginalized communities because the white middle-class folk are still going to be able to carry on as normal. They have the money, they have the ability to get their health care needs.
Naber: Controlling women’s bodies has always been essential to white supremacy — we know that from the history of enslavement and Native American genocide. The hetero-patriarchal family, conservative concepts of women’s respectability, the white middle-class family must maintain itself if white supremacy, white privilege and capitalism are to remain, which is what the U.S. is based on.
Q: If the mainstream is single-issue feminism, do people of color have to create their own form of feminism to be included?
Naber: Movements are often single issue. In our case, it’s about sexism and racism. It’s intersectional and that’s why we have to create our own because we need a space that can work on both at the same time — it’s gender and race together. It’s the mothering and the police violence. There are many movements like ours, but all of those groups are similarly on the margins … other groups of people doing the intersectional framing but maybe they’re just not as known.
Naser: When we think about the women’s rights movement, it was initially led by middle-class white women who didn’t include, prioritize or vocalize, or stand up for the needs of women of color and other marginalized women who have historically and continue to have limited access to health care, who have a lack of choices for effective birth control. Just think about the different ways that reproductive injustices are maintained — BIPOC mothers and caregivers continue to be dehumanized for social problems. One of our mothers talked about how she’s treated when she used to be able to go in person and visit her incarcerated son, how racist and sexist that process is during prison visits for her or in the courtroom and how corporate media blames mothers of color for their children’s death, or for their incarceration. Reproductive injustices include all of this.
Q: Is there a way to make more people drink the inclusive feminism Kool-Aid?
Naber: Mainstream discussion says that if we really want women to have autonomy over their bodies, then they should get these rights under the law. We’re saying that’s not enough. If we really want women of color to be included in this, we need to say that women should get to choose to have or to not have a child. Some people don’t even get the choice to have and after you have, you should be able to parent, to mother your child in safety and dignity. That’s a women of color framework on it; to be able to raise your kids in sustainable communities with dignity and safety and to not have to fear that your child is going to die or be taken from you. To drink the Kool-Aid, we need to couple the fight for Roe v. Wade with multiple fights at the same time — that’s what makes it a women of color perspective, that it always has multiple asks and multiple struggles. That’s what’s hard for the mainstream to understand, they want the one thing, but women of color feminism is never one thing, because if we’re talking about housing, we need housing and child care.
Naser: If they continue to chip away at people’s “rights” what’s to say that they’re not going to restrict individuals from being able to go out of state to get medication that they need, the health care that they need, the abortion that they need?
Originally published in TruthOut here, this article was written by Nadine Naber and Atef Said.
Incarcerated for most of the last 10 years, renowned Egyptian activist, voice of the Arab Spring revolutions and political prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah began a hunger strike on April 2. He is 40 years old. With the most recent charge of spreading “fake news” — a phrase borrowed from former President Donald Trump — Egyptian authorities extended his sentence by five more years.
Abd El-Fattah’s activism began in the early 2000s. With his partner Manal Bahey El-Din Hassan, he spearheaded the blogging movement in Egypt, elevating the communication format to a powerful tool for campaigns demanding freedom of speech, democracy and an end to torture.
In 2006, Egyptian bloggers, with Abd El-Fattah, took their activism to the streets and organized a national protest in solidarity with judges who were prosecuted by former President Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorial regime for advocating judicial independence. Trained as a software developer, he provided technological support, including hosting the work of many activist bloggers and protecting them from targeting by the regime’s security apparatus. Abd El-Fattah was briefly detained.
During the Egyptian revolution of 2011, Abd El-Fattah labored on the front lines of Tahrir Square. After the ousting of President Mubarak, Abd El-Fattah launched two initiatives, “Tweet Nadwa” and “Let us write our Constitution,” to continue the mobilizations for the revolution and ensure the realization of its demands for freedom.
All along, Abd El-Fattah was organizing youth to continue mobilizing while ensuring their voices were heard and taken seriously in process like the writing of the new constitution. He is especially known for resisting government plans to cover up the “Maspero massacre” of Coptic Christian demonstrators of October 2011 when the military killed 24 protesters, injured more than 200 and sought to bury their bodies without forensic examinations. The Egyptian regime detained Abd El-Fattah on October 30, 2011, after he, with his activist comrades, documented this massacre and in response to his role as a leading voice of the revolution, especially his resistance against military tribunals for Egyptian civilians.
After her visitation on May 1, 2022, Abd El-Fattah’s sister Mona Abd El-Fattah posted on Twitter that he is physically deteriorating and banned from communicating with anyone. He told her that he may not ever see her again. On May 18, she wrote, “We need to make sure he is well and cared for and not terrorized and assaulted more.” To be sure, Abd El-Fattah’s life is at risk. Yet we also need to recognize how the Egyptian regime uses him, as one of the most outspoken revolutionaries, to repress all Egyptian society.
And it’s not just Egypt’s current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Before el-Sisi, every autocratic leader including United States-backed President Mubarak (in power for 30 years), followed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and President Mohamed Morsi, all detained Abd El-Fattah. These same rulers have incarcerated more than 65,000 political prisoners, many of whose cases were never tried in court.
Egyptian rulers made Abd El-Fattah’s family, all leading voices in the struggle against torture and for democracy and human rights, symbols of what could happen to anyone who attempts to challenge them. His other sister, Sanaa Seif, was arrested and incarcerated three times between 2014 and 2021 and beaten several times. The authoritarian regime was also behind the beatings of Abd El-Fattah’s mother Laila Souief and his sister Mona when they were protesting for his release. Abd El-Fattah’s father Ahmed Seif, recognized as the leading light of Egyptian human rights, was arrested for providing protesters with legal support during the Egyptian revolution of 2011 before he passed away in 2014.
Beyond military aid, the U.S. administration continued sending tear gas, repression and surveillance technology to Egypt despite U.S. government and media rhetoric that celebrated Egyptian people’s revolution for democracy
The U.S. is complicit. Since President Jimmy Carter’s administration, the U.S. has provided billions in simultaneous military aid to Egypt and Israel resulting from the Camp David Accords. The human rights situation for Egyptians and occupied Palestinians has only deteriorated since then.
Indeed, the U.S. supports dictators across the globe whose policies align with U.S. imperialism. In the name of combatting “communism” and “terrorism,” the U.S. also provides direct funding to sponsor coups against democratically elected regimes (i.e. Venezuela, 2002-03) while the CIA has orchestrated military coups in places like Iran (1953) and Chile (1973).
Egypt receives $1.3 billion in military aid per year while the U.S. fails to hold Egypt accountable for upholding basic human rights, particularly after the fall of Mubarak. In the context of the Arab Spring, the U.S. backed the authoritarian Mubarak regime up until the very last minute before coordinating with the military to oust Mubarak in order to ensure a contained and limited transfer of power while maintaining U.S. interests in the region.
The U.S. supported all regimes that came after Mubarak, as well as the military coup of 2013, which ousted the democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi. Beyond military aid, the U.S. administration continued sending tear gas, repression and surveillance technology to Egypt despite U.S. government and media rhetoric that celebrated Egyptian people’s revolution for democracy and calls from international human rights groups against such support.
To the U.S., Egypt is a “strategic ally” and host of U.S. naval medical research. The Egyptian government provides the U.S. with expedited naval access through the Suez Canal, and the U.S. government continuously expresses its admiration for Egypt’s role in what global superpowers call the “peace process” between Israelis and Palestinians, and what Palestinians experience as the normalization of Israeli colonization.
Across the Arab region, the Arab Gulf countries, especially the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, have played one of the most critical roles in supporting the counterrevolution in response to the Arab Spring revolutions and their aftermath in Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Bahrain and more recently, Sudan. They fuel and fund religious sectarianism and support conservative and autocratic regimes spreading repression and fear. The U.S. also stood back and watched as Saudi Arabia supported jihadis in Syria, who formed the core of what is now known as ISIS, only because the U.S. perceived Assad’s as a rogue regime.
Despite the U.S. intelligence finding that the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the murder of exiled Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, the U.S. continued to praise the crown prince for apparently promoting reforms related to free speech and women’s rights. All the while, the Saudi state continues to arrest journalists and feminists for striving for change.
Now, the life of Abd El-Fattah, one of the most iconic figures of the Arab Spring revolutions that were celebrated across the globe in 2011, is at risk. It is no surprise that Trump named el-Sisi his favorite dictator. It is also no surprise that cautious President Joe Biden prefers the status quo with el-Sisi rather than addressing fundamental injustices in places like Egypt, colonized Palestine and Saudi Arabia.
As leftists mourn the passing of former Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin and continue the struggle to free journalist and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, we should not forget other political prisoners whose incarceration and repression is enabled by U.S. aid.
Egyptian revolutionaries inspired many U.S. social movements and helped us prepare for the Trump era. They taught us how to maintain hope in the face of state repression. Abd El-Fattah also supported our movements, such as Occupy Wall Street.
Many of us paid federal taxes last month that contributed to Abd El-Fattah’s imprisonment. Dollars misspent in our name do very real harm, including to inspiring individuals like Abd El-Fattah who is allowed to see his young son far too infrequently — and not at all now.
U.S. support for violent repression abroad should inspire resistance by U.S. taxpayers.
Pressure on our elected officials is imperative as is grassroots movement building. More political prisoners could be freed if social movements in the U.S. and Egypt joined forces. We could stand together against how the U.S. supports political repression in Egypt. We could highlight how that support helps to strengthen systems that criminalize Black communities, Indigenous communities, and other communities of color here. We could also grow our solidarity out of the vast connections between U.S. foreign military aid and enormous expenditures on the U.S. military and the rates of impoverishment we see at home.
To be sure, U.S. support for violent repression abroad should inspire resistance by U.S. taxpayers. Yet our society is generally numb to the impact of U.S. policy internationally.
More public debate about how U.S. support of dictators and global human rights abuses takes dollars out of our communities here could make a difference. The U.S. prison-industrial complex, for example, has been strengthened by maintaining and legitimizing mass incarceration abroad. When Egypt is one of the top recipients of U.S. aid, Egypt’s incarceration of activists and public intellectuals like Abd El-Fattah has a ripple effect in our own communities. Militarist, carceral global politics means feeding chickens that will come home to roost.
The pandemic of the past two years has isolated us from one another, but simultaneously shown just how interconnected we all are. The injustice of Abd El-Fattah’s incarceration may seem very removed from the disproportionate incarceration of Black communities in Chicago by a corrupt police force, but they flow from the abuse of power that starts in Washington and spreads across borders, transnationally.
On May 2, we organized an event featuring Abd El-Fattah’s sister Sanaa Seif in Chicago. She was speaking with journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous and advocating for Abd El-Fattah’s release while reading from Abd El-Fattah’s new book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.
At the event, we were reminded that even now, Abd El-Fattah continues to gift us wisdom about what it means to maintain hope beyond despair and when or how to face defeat. We also noticed how the Chicago-based organizations that supported Seif and Abdel Kouddous’s visit — including the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter, Love & Protect, the United States Palestinian Community Network, MAMAS and the Dissenters — helped foster what Abdel Kouddous called “radical friendship” from Chicago to Egypt. During the discussion, the audience seemed to come to a shared sentiment: Hold on. Our friend is incarcerated by the regime the U.S. is funding.
Seif then reminded us that the struggle to #freeAlaa is not merely political. It is about his life and his death.
We hope everyone living in the U.S. committed to freedom, human rights and justice will support the struggle to free Abd El-Fattah and all Egyptian political prisoners. We also hope more people will organize to oppose the cruel impacts of U.S.-backed dictatorships on all people struggling to survive and thrive globally and right here in our own backyard.
Across the United States this Mother’s Day, the right to have control over one’s body is under attack. More than 530 abortion restrictions have been introduced in 42 states. The Supreme Court is on the precipice of delivering a lethal blow to Roe v. Wade. Conservative forces are denying people access to reproductive health care through birth control, safe abortion, infertility care, and prenatal and obstetric care while compounding psychological harm.
While the U.S. grapples with the breach of confidentiality revealing the looming reversal of Roe, the struggle for abortion access feels more urgent than ever before. Yet, our society tends to frame this struggle in white, middle-class terms, as if the theoretical right to choose abortion under the law translates into all people having the ability to make choices and control their bodies.
Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) feminist movements remind us that the “right” to abortion does not guarantee the resources to access it, and that if we truly care about reproductive justice for all, then we need to dismantle the institutionalized race and class oppression that obstructs many from accessing this “right.” Author Elena Guiterrez affirms that reproductive justice also necessitates environmental justice, especially since the colonization of Indigenous lands and threats from environmental toxins undermine fertility for many women of color. Overall, BIPOC feminists define reproductive justice as the human right to maintain bodily autonomy, have or not have children safely, and parent children in safe and sustainable communities.
Monica Simpson, executive director of the reproductive justice organization SisterSong, writes:
Roe never fully protected Black women — or poor women or so many others in this country. That’s because Roe ensured the right to abortion without ensuring that people could actually get an abortion. People seeking abortions in America must consider: Do I have the money? How far is the nearest clinic, and can I get there? Can I take off work? Will I be safe walking into the clinic? For more privileged people, these questions are rarely a deterrent. But for many women of color and poor people, they are major obstacles. That’s how white supremacy works.
U.S. authors and activists like Gutiérrez, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross and Jael Silliman, and Palestinian feminists like Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian and Rhoda Kanaaneh have been expanding the definition of what counts as reproductive injustice to account for the many conditions that deny people of color and colonized folks the capacity to control their own bodies. Indeed, BIPOC and decolonial feminists have insisted upon the right to abortion and the resources to access that right (i.e., economic resources and health care, access to language/translation in health care centers, adequate sex education in all schools), especially since BIPOC women and gender-expansive people face specific struggles around health disparities and rape and sexual assault, including a legal system that systematically fails (and was never meant to protect) BIPOC communities.
But they have also insisted that a host of other issues should be considered reproductive injustices, such as race/class/gender-based disparities that impact birthing experiences for people of color. Racist and colonialist practices of forced sterilization, “population control,”mass incarceration, and rape and sexual assault all impact BIPOC women, trans and nonbinary people’s control over their bodies.
We affirm what activists like Monica Cosby and organizations like Survived and Punished, Love and Protect, and Mothers United Against Violence teach us about the especially racist, heteropatriarchal, and patriarchal violence policing and prisons inflict on women, queer, and trans people of color and the many BIPOC mothers and caregivers of color who are themselves incarcerated and forced into isolation from their children and loved ones. This is why, as Black feminist abolitionists have long been saying, an expansive reproductive justice movement must take seriously that the violence of policing and prisons trickles downfar beyond prison walls.
As Black feminists like Dorothy Roberts, Andrea J. Ritchie, Mariame Kaba and Charity Tolliver teach us, reproductive injustice is inherent to the prison-industrial complex — including the foster care-to-prison pipeline. Through policing and incarceration, the state disproportionately denies BIPOC women and gender-expansive people the opportunity to birth and/or care for children during and after their imprisonment and takes away the opportunity for incarcerated individuals to decide if and when to have children. Medical violence and dangerous prenatal care rampant within the prison-industrial complex can also deny those imprisoned the right to have children (or not). Moreover, as organizations like Love and Protect point out, the U.S. routinely incarcerates women and gender-expansive people of color like Bresha Meadows and Marissa Alexander for defending themselves against gender-based violence.
What MAMAS Teaches Us
Mothers and caregivers who have worked with the collective we co-founded with Johnaé Strong, Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity (MAMAS), teach us that the state’s removal of a child from a mother or caregiver is also a feminist reproductive justice issue. Yet this is scarcely acknowledged across our society.
MAMAS – The System
Lakota member Cindy Soto is the daughter of a mother-survivor of Indigenous boarding schools. Soto teaches us the U.S.’s legacy of separating Indigenous children from their families continues to traumatize mothers and caregivers and takes away their capacity to pass on traditions and languages to their children.
Like the forced removal of Indigenous children in the U.S., family separations resulting from police-perpetrated violence, the incarceration of migrants, and the U.S.-backed Israeli colonization of Palestine deny mothers and caregivers the capacity to parent, nurture, and protect their children with dignity and in safety.
These families are not alone. Chicago is known as the U.S.’s torture capital. Despite a formal apology issued by the city in 2015 for the heinous crimes committed by police officers and a historic reparations package resulting from the tireless labor of social movements, hundreds of torture survivors remain incarcerated or stuck in a criminal legal system that was never meant to work for people of color.
Our reproductive justice vision insists that the state’s kidnapping of these individuals has wreaked psychological, physical, and financial havoc on the lives of their mothers and caregivers. This is why we also insist that mothers of individuals targeted by police-perpetrated violence are survivors of the violent policing and prison systems in their own right, and that the labor of caring for police violence survivors is indeed a feminist freedom struggle.
Incarcerating migrants is also a feminist reproductive justice issue. Fernanda Castellanos, a comrade of MAMAS and organizer with Organized Communities Against Deportations, teaches us about the profound impact of family separations on a mother or caregiver’s ability to nurture loved ones. “Most mothers are terrified of what will happen to their children if they get deported. They don’t always want their children back in their country because it’s not so safe. Mothers are trying to protect their children while worrying about their asylum case or whether they will be deported,” she says.
The carceral system also uses the tools of criminalization against migrant mothers and caregivers, according to Castellanos, from electronic monitoring (also known as e-carceration) to racist state and media rhetoric.
These compounded reproductive injustices contribute to the case for prison abolition.
U.S.-Backed Israeli Settler-Colonialism Is Also a Feminist Reproductive Justice Issue
Our comrades in Palestine responsible for the labor of mothering also remind us to examine the global reach of the U.S. prison-industrial complex and its targeting of people who mother. The U.S. exports settler-colonialism and carceral systems, including state and non-state actors like the Anti-Defamation League sending police to train in Israel; the U.S. and Israel sharing information about Palestinian activists; and the U.S. failing to hold Israel accountable for its denial of U.S. citizens, especially Palestinian Americans, from entering Israel.
Given the entrenched U.S.-Israeli alliance, it is no surprise that Israeli occupation forces engage in similar forms of reproductive injustice as found in U.S. prisons and policing practices. The U.S. system separates BIPOC mothers from their children in disproportionate numbers within a system that contains people of color for the purpose of protecting capitalism, white supremacy and heteropatriarchal gender violence. Similarly, Israel separates Palestinian mothers from their children through violent systems of policing and imprisonment for the racist, colonialist purpose of containing and repressing an occupied people.
The arrest and torture of children like Ahmad Manasra is now the focus of the US Palestinian Community Network’s campaign to free Ahmad Manasra. Manasra was arrested several years ago at the tender age of 13 and continues to languish in Israeli prison despite his deteriorating mental health condition. A video of his trial shows his mother shouting in the background, “Hey, hey, I want to hug him. We are here, Ahmad, we love you.”
To maintain these reproductive injustices, the U.S. and Israel scapegoat and dehumanize BIPOC mothers and caregivers as if they are to blame for social problems like gun violence and war. Every MOK member has been treated with racist-sexist dehumanization in court, during prison visits, on the phone and in the courtroom.
Elected officials and corporate media also blame mothers of individuals violated or killed by the police for their children’s death. The conservative media blamed Elizabeth Toledo for her son Adam’s killing at the hands of Chicago police. Palestinian mothers face similar political rhetoric as a way to punish Palestinian resistance. Palestinian feminist Nada Elia notes that Israeli Member of Knesset Ayelet Shaked referenced Palestinian children as “little snakes,” attacking their mothers for raising “terrorists.” Casting Palestinian resistance as the root of the problem is one means Israel has used to move attention away from occupation and apartheid — frequently with support from U.S. politicians.
BIPOC Caregivers Lead the Way Toward an Anti-Imperialist, Abolitionist Reproductive Justice Movement
The interconnected systems of policing and prisons, settler-colonialism, and migrant detentions and deportations undermine the capacity to control one’s body and to parent, nurture and protect loved ones, communities and lands. This is why we need an anti-imperialist, abolitionist reproductive justice movement led by the fierce power and wisdom of BIPOC individuals who have been responsible for the labor of mothering and caretaking of their communities in the face of state violence.
MOK members, along with the Campaign to Free Incarcerated Survivors of Police Torture, are demanding the office of the state’s attorney in Chicago vacate convictions for all those framed, tortured, and wrongfully convicted, particularly cases involving detectives where an established pattern of torture, forced confession and wrongful convictions exists.
Shared reproductive justice struggles persist and connect us — from the U.S. to Palestine — through the determination to live, love, mother and caretake in contexts free from all forms of violence.
Castellanos and Organized Communities Against Deportations helped abuelita Genoveva Ramirezwin her legal case after refusing to accept her detention and potential deportation. The Chicago community strongly supported her and her grandson in their effort, in part because local activists have been organizing for years against misconduct by “law enforcement” officials.
Palestinian mothers are fighting for justice in Israeli prisons — from demanding access to phone calls to access to women doctors, to meeting and hugging their children, and to freedom from incarceration and colonization.
While the state may separate BIPOC mothers and caregivers from their loved ones in different ways and to different degrees, shared reproductive justice struggles persist and connect us — from the U.S. to Palestine — through the determination to live, love, mother and caretake in contexts free from all forms of violence.
Where the state steals one’s capacity to mother, an expansive reproductive justice movement committed to abolishing borders, prisons, and policing and to a free Palestine envisions self-determination, healing, strength and hope.
Some dominant strands of our society are slow to recognize the fundamental reality that state violence, including separating mothers and caregivers from children, is a feminist reproductive justice issue. But BIPOC mothers, organizers, and community caretakers will continue the struggle to demand every person has the right to have or not have a child, and to have the resources to care for that child.
We all deserve comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services, and we must demand self-determination over our bodies and lives. Let’s free the loved ones tortured and caged by agents of the state, nurture and protect each other, rebuild our communities, and live in freedom even after all the news headlines have faded, when the camera lights have dimmed, when hashtags no longer serve their purpose, and when the streets that were once lined with protesters have emptied out.
This Mother’s Day, a more expansive understanding of feminist reproductive justice is needed — one that is broader and more courageous than the limited agenda long set by white, middle-class movements that prioritize rights under the law, failing to adequately wrestle with the fact that institutionalized racism, classism, heterosexism, imperialism and settler-colonialism are baked into the law itself.
For 20 years, the U.S. proclaimed it went to war in Afghanistan for humanitarian reasons. The U.S. maintained it was “saving women” to secure democracy, advance women’s rights, or ensure the destruction of the Taliban to help women. Yet the talk about “helping Afghan women” was just a means to securing domestic support for an imperial war that only made matters worse for Afghan women. Now that we’re out, Afghan women are all but forgotten as we move on to lionizing Ukrainian women in ways the U.S. corporate media would never do for Palestinian women.
U.S. rhetoric regarding the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021 reinforces the hypocrisy of this so-called humanitarian war. The outcry in August about the rapid collapse and departure of U.S. military forces, and the awareness given to the many refugee resettlement organizations conducting urgent relief work, was only a media blip. It is as if the crisis is now over. The U.S. military came, saw, and destroyed, leaving Afghanistan more dangerous than when we entered and starvation a real possibility as we now focus elsewhere.
Ensuring the arrival of Afghan refugees is not enough. How are refugees surviving in the face of immense trauma and loss after they get here?
Many were forced to leave loved ones in one of the poorest countries in the world where they contend with the U.S. seizing assets and face rapidly declining living standards.One in 10 Afghans is now addicted to opium as a result of Afghanistanaccounting for 90 percent of the global heroin market since the U.S. invasion which brought the deaths of45,000–100,000 Afghans.
Afghan refugees who came to Chicago during the fall of Kabul are struggling with their recent displacement. In the aftermath of 9/11, theMuslim Women Resource Center (MWRC) in Chicago’s West Ridge neighborhood supported thousands of women who were left to support their families after the U.S. deported Muslim immigrant men en masse.
As Chicago welcomed approximately 3,000 Afghan refugees after August, the MWRC supported the movement of Afghan refugees from military bases and is temporarily housing them in hotels as they secure long-term housing. Although the U.S. corporate media singled out August 2021 as their media-worthy moment of crisis, this was just the beginning of these refugees’ nightmare in the U.S.
Their nightmare emerges in the mundane aspects of daily life many of us take for granted: remembering how to find one’s apartment after a walk to the grocery store, communicating on the bus without English language skills, and the ongoing pain of missing loved ones.
Yet if we really want to grasp the full plight of Afghan refugees, we must see it through an anti-war/anti-imperialist feminist lens.
This means noticing how the trauma of family separations disproportionately falls on women. Afghan refugee and founder of the MWRC Sima Quraishi told me that one mother who traveled to the U.S. immediately after the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport believed her daughter had died in that explosion. Eventually, she learned her daughter was alive in Afghanistan. This mother, now in Chicago with wounds from the bombing, wants nothing more than to be reunited with her daughter. Another mother, currently separated from her young children, one of whom is autistic, also strives for family reunification.
Afghan women refugees face a double burden in overcoming their own personal struggles while helping those around them do the same. They are protecting loved ones while they are personally suffering. They are caring for children, taking neighbors to see doctors, and feeding people while they strive to care for themselves.
Yet our society must stop explaining this gendered division of labor through racist ideas about “Afghan culture” or “Islam.” The invisible emotional labor Afghan refugee women are conducting across Chicagoland, like soothing traumatized children who have lost siblings and loved ones while they are also grieving, is an outcome of the war on terror and the heteropatriarchal underpinnings of nearly every culture and society – not simply “Islam” or “Afghan culture.”
And these realities devastate women’s mental health, sparking spikes in anxiety and depression that take a physical toll on refugee women’s bodies. As Sima Quraishi told me: “Afghan women refugees lose their health.”
Chicago’s Afghan women refugees are not victims but survivors and fighters. With community organizations like MWRC behind them, they are learning English and taking action to get back on their feet.
After 9/11, anti-imperialist feminists said “no” to justifying war through racist ideas about “Afghan women’s oppression.” Twenty years later, let’s say no to the media’s momentary recognition of Afghan refugees’ struggles and insist on a deeper engagement with what has forced them here and the gendered burdens they face in adjusting to a traumatic new reality. This Women’s History Month, let’s stand with Afghan women refugees. Locally, we can mobilize our communities to end deadly U.S.-led wars and ally with organizations supporting them to work through the horrors they’ve witnessed over the past two decades and to thrive.
As we consider the past, many people living in the U.S. believe they would have supported the civil rights movement, even in the face of the white supremacists of the KKK and the Jim Crow stalwarts in Congress. If old enough, many likely believe they would have at least supported from afar the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa led by Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. For too many people, of course, that is revisionist history. Many failed even to support the boycott and divest from South African apartheid movement by passing up a Coca-Cola.
Today, with the passing of Tutu, it is worth reflecting on the fact that in his later years he became an outspoken opponent of Israel’s practice of apartheid. Tutu was a supporter of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement for Palestinian freedom and equal rights.
For this, he is vilified by leading apologists of Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism. Yishai Fleisher, spokesperson for settlers in the Israeli-occupied city of Hebron where apartheidstreets are a shocking reality, tweeted of Tutu’s passing: “An antisemite has died today.” This is a vile and untrue statement about one of the great moral voices of our time on the day of his death.
The Illinois Investment Policy Board (IIPB) stands against Tutu and his support of BDS. Thankfully, no such anti-boycott laws prevented his important work when he was pushing for divestment from apartheid South Africa, but these laws are very real today and hindering solidarity activist work on behalf of Palestinians.
Earlier this month, the IIPB voted unanimously to divest the state’s pension funds from investments in Unilever, which is the parent company of Ben & Jerry’s. This was a reprisal as this past summer Ben & Jerry’s took the limited step of deciding to cut off product sales in the illegal settlements of the occupied West Bank. For this, antisemitism.org, with its politicized definition of antisemitism, put forward Ben & Jerry’s board chair Anuradha Mittal as one of its three candidates for “antisemite” of the year.
No one deserves to be called an antisemite for standing against Israel’s military and economic occupation of Palestinian land. What we are witnessing today is an anti-Palestinian racism intended to shut down any advocacy for the rights and freedom of Palestinians. To put Mittal – or Dua Lipa for that matter – alongside Marjorie Taylor Greene for the “prize” is obscene.
Illinois acted after Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett stated that Israel would “act aggressively” in response to Ben & Jerry’s courageous action. Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the US, wrote a letter to 35 governors whose states have passed laws prohibiting boycotts on behalf of equal rights for Palestinians. “Rapid and determined action,” he claimed, “must be taken to counter such discriminatory and antisemitic actions.”
This turns reality on its head to conflate advocacy in solidarity with Palestinian freedom with “discriminatory and antisemitic actions.”
Similar abuse was hurled at Tutu when in 2012 he called for the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA) to divest from three companies doing business in the occupied West Bank.
And he knew the reality. In 2013, he wrote to students at Stanford University supporting their efforts to divest from the Israeli occupation: “I have visited the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and I have witnessed the racially-segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.”
Israeli officials and the IIPB are seeking to prohibit, or at least undermine, organizing like the BDS movement on behalf of Palestinian rights. Julia Bacha has a new film out documenting limits being placed on free speech in the US related to Palestinian advocacy. Adam Leveritt, the publisher of The Arkansas Times, recently wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in which he contended that “states are trading their citizens’ First Amendment rights for what looks like unconditional support for a foreign government.”
These concerns were compounded for me during the Christmas season with the many contradictions embedded in how many people celebrate it in this country. The most obvious, of course, is the materialism that belies the very meaning of Jesus’ birth within Christianity. As an Arab American from a Christian family background, I am always astonished by the US establishment’s contradictory commitments to Christianity. This year, that’s been seen in the embrace of violent Christmas card imagery from Congresspeople Thomas Massie and Lauren Boebert.
It’s also seen in the news that Israel will only issue some of the permits Christians in Gaza need to travel to Bethlehem for Christmas. These are descendants of some of the oldest Christian communities in the world as Jesus is believed to have been born in Bethlehem and to have been crucified in Jerusalem – just a short trip from the open-air prison of Gaza when checkpoints are removed from the travel time. The U.S. makes much of religious freedom yet time and again has sided with Israel despite its limits on freedom of worship for Palestinian Christians and Muslims. At root, however, this is not a religious struggle but one of colonizer versus colonized with the U.S. repeatedly weighing in for the colonizer.
Tutu understood this imbalance. He was consistently, not selectively, anti-apartheid. From South Africa to Palestine, he stood with the colonized and the struggle for freedom. The IIPB and the state of Illinois have made their decision to stand with the colonizer, actively blocking efforts to promote equal rights.
U.S. culture makes much out of freedom fighters after they have passed. Yet government officials and the media generally scrub them to downplay their struggles for social transformation.
This can be seen in the treatment of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and efforts reducing him to his “I have a dream” speech, while disregarding his concerns with poverty, militarization and some of his stances on the evils of racism. Something similar happened with Tutu as we saw the media honor the victories he won in South Africa while avoiding his message on Israeli apartheid where the struggle continues.
To truly honor the life’s work of Tutu, the IIPB should reverse its Unilever decision and the Illinois legislature should rescind its anti-Palestinian legislation. This, sadly, has little immediate likelihood of occurring as Governor J.B. Pritzker is already about the work of whitewashing Tutu’s full legacy. Almost immediately, the governor tweeted that Tutu was “a universal inspiration” and “may we continue to be inspired [by] his lasting legacy, standing arm-in-arm in the name of justice.”
Palestinians, Pritzker could have noted, need not apply. Hypocrisy has found a home in Illinois as the state promotes the “safe” Tutu while criminalizing those who take seriously his still-repressed message insisting upon freedom, equality, and justice for Palestinians.
We have major problems in this country in how we think about and get appropriate government assistance to Arab Americans. Social workers, translators, housing and transportation experts, health workers, and community-based funding agencies all face three substantial difficulties.
First, the U.S. Census folds Arab Americans into the category “white/Caucasian,” making it nearly impossible to access comprehensive data about Arab Americans’ condition.
Second, racist government policies and media rhetoric create myths that further obscure the realities of Arab American life, projecting racist tropes onto everyone within this diverse category. We only need to look to Hollywood for the fiction that all Arabs, Middle Easterners, and Muslims are the same or that they are all connected, in one way or another, to violence or terrorism.
Third, when policymakers do look at the data for Arab Americans, they use “collective averages” rather than paying attention to important group differences. This can be quite deceiving. For Arab Americans, as with Asian Americans, collective averages cover up not only the diversity but also the significant gap between rich and poor, thus turning attention away from the needs of economically disenfranchised Arab Americans.
The economic situation of Asian Americans, for example, would be profoundly misunderstood if statistics were not disaggregated. The report, Uncovering the Diversity of Asian American Students at the University of Illinois at Chicago, shows that while 37% of 1,700 survey respondents indicated being first in their family to attend college, the disaggregated data shows that this number is higher for Southeast Asian American students (66%) and Chinese American students (54%) at UIC. Disaggregated data show how economic and educational disparities among different ethnic groups based on immigration and refugee histories are obscured by the aggregate data.
Sociologists Chris D. Poulos, Louise Cainkar, and Rita Stephan are currently helping me develop the report, The Status of Racial Justice for Arab Americans for the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy (IRRPP) at UIC. They skillfully zeroed in ancestry, rather than the typical race or ethnicity questions within a smaller data set, the U.S. Census’ American Community Survey (ACS), to access data on Arab Americans. As a result, we were able to assess some overarching patterns in the data for Arab Americans. While less robust than accessing information from the full population count Census, this approach does allow for disaggregating data by ancestry group.
Looking at the Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) when disaggregating data by ancestry group, we found that economic challenges vary by ancestry group. Egyptians and Lebanese, for example, have a much higher median household income relative to both Arab Americans overall and relative to the overall MSA population. Contrastingly, eight Arab ancestry groups have median household incomes below the Chicago MSA median.
We also found that while a larger portion of Arab Americans has bachelor’s degrees or higher relative to the Chicago MSA (45 percent versus 35 percent, respectively), some groups (Jordanians, Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriacs, and Yemenis) have much lower educational attainment relative to both the Chicago MSA and Arab Americans overall. Even for those with high rates of college education, there is evidence that they are receiving lower expected returns for their years of education. While we have yet to determine what accounts for this, we speculate that anti-Arab racism is a factor.
This is why collective averages are not useful. Many individuals from the groups at the top (Lebanese and Egyptian) came to the U.S. decades before others, are in their third and fourth generations, and were already highly educated. Especially those with privileges such as lighter skin tone or a Christian religious identity are thriving here.
The success rates of Lebanese and Egyptians, when included in collective averages, cover up the devastating socioeconomic challenges facing other groups within the category Arab American, many of whom are recent immigrants, came as refugees, and are among the most socioeconomically struggling in the region.
Collective averages impede recognizing nuances like the difference between those who come on H1B visas — who are among the most highly educated in the places they come from — and those coming as refugees. We need to pay attention to that diversity. We can’t see both while using a general category.
Most importantly, we can’t see those groups that have high levels of need and require resources and support to survive and thrive.
Chicagoland’s Arab American community needs a census category.
Research conducted by the Arab American Institute (calculated in 2017) suggests that the way the U.S. Census currently collects data through the American Community Survey (ACS) leads to significant undercounting (by about 1.6 million). That is because the ACS relies upon a small sample of the US population (about 3.5 million households a year pre COVID), while the Decennial Census is meant to obtain a full count and is sent to all households.
While the Census does not have an ancestry question, it does include questions on race/ethnicity.
Yet while the Office of Management and Budget, which provides guidelines for the Census, requires that data be collected on five racial groups, Arabs are not one of them. The decennial census form encourages Arab Americans to fill out ‘white’ for race/ethnicity. Although anyone can fill out multiple race/ethnicity categories, the issue is that Arab Americans are then lumped in with other racial/ethnic groups.
If a Middle East North Africa (MENA) census category was included in the race question, we would approach a fuller count of MENA populations and better enable them to gain access to the resources they need.
Adding a Middle East North Africa question on the decennial census would effectively disaggregate Arabs from other racial/ethnic groups. This could affect political redistricting and the allocation of public dollars.
Even with the problems of collective averages, the data show that Arab Americans in the Chicago MSA collectively have a higher rate of poverty, lower median household income, higher portion of renters, and a higher portion of rent-burdened renters than the Chicago MSA overall. This signals that the successes of some Arab American groups are not enough to conceal the economic challenges faced by a substantial proportion of Arab Americans.
The vast differences within the Arab American community require that community leaders — whether in government, education, or public health — look more precisely at the communities before them. The socioeconomic issues confronting many (not all) Egyptian Americans are often strikingly different from those affecting refugee communities recently arriving from the region or even those affecting other Arab American communities here for decades. Public policy will falter if pollsters and leaders continue to speak of the Arab American community as monolithic and not comprised of diverse parts.
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