Originally published by TheChicagoReporter.com here
Moments after President Biden thanked his team for their efforts in “bringing about a cease-fire” (that was actually brought about by Palestinian resistance), the social media posts of Palestinian and Arab American progressives across the U.S. echoed a similar sentiment: “We will not stop talking about Palestine just because a cease-fire was announced.” Two assumptions underpin this sentiment. First, for Arab Americans, the concept of “cease-fire” is meaningless as long as Israel continues colonizing Palestine. As we have learned from history, after every cease-fire, Israel has continued to expand its borders far beyond the areas of land it confiscated from Palestinians since 1947 by expelling and dispossessing Palestinians from their homes, as we saw in Sheikh Jarrah and intentionally killing Palestinians en masse. Second, Arab Americans are exceptionally aware that the struggle over Palestine is a battle over narratives. In other words, a persistent pro-Israeli doctrine stifles criticism of Israel in nearly every sector of public debate from the corporate media, to social media, education, and the non-profit industry. As Israel and the U.S. have institutionalized the idea of Israel as the victim, killing Palestinians only out of self-defense, Palestinian and Arab American social movement agendas have prioritized breaking the silence, shifting the narrative, and continuing to talk about Palestine.
Over the last few weeks, the necessity of breaking the silence has been more urgent than ever before. The corporate media has painted Israel’s killing of at least 230 people, including 65 children and its wounding of more than 1500 in the open air prison of Gaza through the longstandingpro-Israeli perspective Arab Americans have been critiquing since the 1960’s. These include the idea that there are two equal sides involved in a “conflict” and that Palestinians and Arabs are violent, anti-Semitic, and uncivilized. Adding insult to injury, Israeli and U.S. elected officials and the corporate media referred to the recent evictions of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah as a “property dispute.” In reality, these evictions are part of Israel’s settler-colonial expansion with grave implications for whether Palestinianswill be allowed to remain in their homes in East Jerusalem at all. To be sure, while Israel evicts Palestinians from their homes, it grants Jews permission to reclaim homes owned and occupied by Palestinian families in an effort to fully Judaize Jerusalem. To be sure, Palestinians resisting the bombardment targeted Israel. Yet the 10-1 disparity in casualty figures, reveals the inequities at stake on the ground.
Palestinian and Arab American movements have also insisted upon the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants to their original homes and villages and challenged the discriminatory policy whereby Israeli law grants exclusive rights to citizenship and land to any Jew from anywhere in the world, even those who have never been there before. Finally, they have insisted that the Palestinian struggle is not one of a people oppressed by an occupying force in a land far, far away. Rather, the Palestinian struggle is an inherently U.S. one. The U.S. provides Israel with $3.8 billion a year while removing more and more resources from our communities, especially communities of color. BIPOC communities are also heavily impacted by the training of U.S. police by the Israeli military. At the same time, many U.S. citizens reap the economic benefits of U.S. war-mongering abroad and intentionally or unintentionally U.S. taxpayers are also complicit in the U.S.-backed Israeli colonization of Palestine.
This May, Palestinian and Arab Americans are finally witnessing the bursting of the code of silence. On Sunday, May 16, the Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine led an unprecedented 25,000 protesters chanting, “Long Live Palestine.” Representative Jesus “Chuy” Garcia demanded, “It’s time we stand up in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Palestine.” Yet they also recognize President Biden must be challenged as all indicators imply he will resume giving Israel permission to continue itsethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Now that the cease-fire has been reached, it has yet to be seen whether that same outrage that drove hundreds and thousands of people to raise a Palestinian flag will continue to inspire solidarity far beyond that singular photo opportunity at the protest on the streets. Yet I am hopeful that in alliance with formations like the Movement for Black Lives,Indigenous People from Turtle Island to Palestine,Anakbayan, and many more, Palestinian liberation has already unequivocally affirmed the unacceptability of Israel settler-colonialism and that we will not stop talking about Palestine.
“The ‘ceasefire’ won’t end the siege of Gaza, reverse ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, prevent lynchings in ‘48 Palestine, or bring down the WB [West Bank] apartheid wall. It won’t enable refugees to return nor will it terminate colonialism. The struggle for freedom continues #FreePalestine.” —Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Facebook post, May 20, 2021.
As many sectors of our society are celebrating the “ceasefire”between Palestine and Israel, a chorus of Palestinian voices are blasting across social media echoing a shared consciousness that this ceasefire could never be enough. It is not only recent events but what Palestinian historian Sherene Seikaly explains as the century-long struggle to remain on one’s land in the face of persistent ethnic cleansing that inspires this sentiment.
Since early May, through massive air and ground strikes and ongoing land theft, Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinians, including 63 children. The Israeli state has wounded over 1,500, displaced more than 58,000 Palestinians, and destroyed or badly damaged nearly 450 buildings in the Gaza Strip, including medical centers that serve large segments of the population and provide COVID-19 testing and support. In the midst of this horrific attack, the U.S. blocked three United Nations Security Council resolutions, giving Israel permission to continue besieging the Gaza Strip, while President Biden agreed to continue providing $735 million in weapons to Israel.
The corporate media continues its egregious complicity in these horrors, either by portraying Israel as the victim or misrepresenting the Palestinian struggle as a conflict in which “two equal sides” have been fighting for centuries. Meanwhile Zionist advocates in a variety of spheres are seeking to censor even the slightest gesture of solidarity with Palestinian liberation.
An Instagram post from “Impact for Palestine’s” exposes Instagram’s censorship of criticism of Israeli state violence in May 2021. // Sarah Hassan
Zionist institutions and advocates, in conjunction with most U.S. elected officials and the corporate media, set up the terms of a debate that ultimately blames the victim. Beyond the charge of “antisemitism,” Zionist colonialist strategies delegitimize critics of Israel by publicly portraying them as supporters of “terrorism” and reframing Palestinian self-defense through the racist trope of violent Arab/Muslim “savagery.”
This is why, through political organizing and activism, teaching, writing, public conversation and debate, social media, and anywhere opportunity arises, solidarity with Palestinian decolonization requires mainstreaming the necessity of Palestinian liberation as a social justice,human rights,decolonial and feministfreedom struggle. Committing to solidarity also necessitates refusing to debate on terms set up by the Zionist, pro-Israeli U.S. status quo.
Instead, we must affirm the full demands of the Palestinian people. These demands include, for instance, engaging in boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on Israel until Palestinian refugees and their descendants achieve the right of return,and until Israel ends its occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands; lifting the siege on Gaza; dismantling the Apartheid Wall; ending the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; releasing all Palestinian political prisoners; and increasing Palestinian access to resources like employment, medical care, food,electricity and water.
Yet most U.S. public debate strives to corner Palestinians, Arabs and our allies into discussing sensationalist racist topics in order to push the just cause of Palestine out of public view. At events, on social media and through the violent emails we receive, advocates for justice for Palestinians, especially Palestinians themselves, are consistently met with silencing, racist and hateful questions about topics like “Palestinian terrorism” or “Arab antisemitism.” Such attacks often rely upon dishonest questions about why, for example, Palestinians “voluntarily” left Palestine or “rejected” a “peace process” (which, in reality, was meant to normalize colonization). Behind the scenes, pro-Israeli advocates use these framings to target, censor, surveil and threaten anyone and everyone who criticizes Israel, especially Palestinians and especially youth and students, working-class folks, immigrants and refugees, and people lacking job security.
To be sure, Hamas has fired rockets into Israel. Yet when it comes to Hamas, what we really need to be asking is not a set of intentionally provocative abstract moral questions about whether or not we agree with violent armed resistance (implying the racist idea that “all Palestinians and Arabs support violence”) but what the historical and political conditions are that have produced that resistance. We also need to consider what the asymmetry of violence, including the 10 to 1 disparity in casualty figures, reveals about the asymmetry in the balance of powers between Palestinians and Israelis.
The time is now for the hundreds and thousands of people who have now registered their solidarity by wearing a kuffiya or waving a Palestinian flag on the streets to continue joining Palestinian-led actions, supportingPalestinian social movements and speaking out, in the loudest terms possible, about the necessity of Palestinian liberation — at work, at home, in the news, through writing, in the classroom, at board meetings, among administrators and elected officials, in our unions, on social media, podcasts, chat rooms, and in the intimate spaces of family and home.
From the 1948 territories to Gaza, the West Bank and to the diaspora, Palestinians are united in protest against Israel’s agenda to displace and dispossess them in order to create a Jewish-majority state in what was, and once again is or will soon be, a Palestinian Arab-majority country.Their resistance offers up a choice between breaking the code of silence and growing the movement to free Palestine, or remaining complicit in the Zionist project of ethnic cleansing.
A flyer for a rally in Silicon Valley at Facebook headquarters calls people to protest against Facebook’s censorship of criticism of Israel on May 20, 2021. // Monadel Hirzallah
Reframing the Narrative for Palestinian Liberation
In breaking the silence, we must make our points clear. Here are five facts to emphasize in communicating the realities of Israel’s violence and the urgent goal of Palestinian liberation.
First and foremost, Israel is a settler-colonial state committed to displacing Indigenous Palestinian people from their land and replacing them with primarily European Israeli Jewish settlers. Consider the planned ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that underlined the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Early Zionists, using the term “transfer,”affirmed loud and clear that their plan was to settle on the land along with large-scale transfer and removal of the Indigenous Palestinian Arabs. On May 14, 1948, when the state of Israel was declared, more than 200 Palestinian villages had already been destroyed and emptied. The massacres, like that of Deir Yassin, accompanied by rape and imprisonment, will never be forgotten. Ultimately, over 500 Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed.
With the creation of the Israeli state or what Palestinians and Arabs call Al-Nakba (“the Catastrophe”), came the displacement of 500,000 Palestinians from their homes. Seventy-three years later, after massive Israeli expansion, the current number of Palestinian refugees exceeds 7 million. The current struggle of Sheikh Jarrah is not what U.S. and Israeli corporate media are calling a “real estate dispute” but a continuation of Israeli colonization that includes eliminating Indigenous Palestinians from their homes in Jerusalem and replacing them with Jews.
As we recognize Israel’s settler-colonial violence against Palestinians in Jerusalem and Gaza, we must also consider the West Bank — land international bodies determined to be controlled by Palestinians. In reality, Israel controls 60 percent of the West Bank and has divided the land up into what closely resembles Swiss cheese. Throughout the West Bank, there are more than 700 road obstacles and 140 Israeli checkpoints. Israeli settlers who have taken over Palestinian land in the West Bank total more than 450,000 (and 220,200 in East Jerusalem). An apartheid wall, which has transformed Palestinian neighborhoods into bantu stands, stretches throughout more than 700 kilometers, not to mention the 700 Israeli military road obstacles across the West Bank.
This is not a “conflict between two equal sides”; it is an asymmetrical relationship between colonizer/colonized and occupier/occupied.
Second, there is not one, but three groups of Palestinians. The U.S. and Israel would like us to believe that there is only one group of Palestinians, those living in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza. That’s because, in addition to efforts to cleanse the West Bank and erase Gaza out of existence, Israeli settler colonialism also attempts to erase the second group of Palestinians, those who remain inside Israel, by naming them “Arab Israelis.” They also want to erase the struggle of the third group, the 7 million Palestinian refugees who represent the struggle to return home. Ironically, Zionists often refer to the right of Palestinians to return as an attempt to “destroy Israel,” even though anyone who is Jewish has the birthright to settle in Israel. To be sure, the return of Palestinian refugees would alter the nature of the Israeli state, which is colonialist, racist and exclusionary.
Third, similar to the way U.S. white supremacy operates, Israel is an exclusionary racist state created for white European Jews. Its “ Jewish-only” nature, rooted in white supremacy, legitimizes Israel’s racist treatment of Jews of color, its treatment of non-Jews as second-class citizens within Israel, and its targeting of Palestinians as people to be eliminated. We must firmly put forth a counternarrative that refuses the “white man’s burden” that many elected Israeli and U.S. officials have been repeating for decades — a narrative that pretends Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East,” a “safe haven” in a region full of “savages.”
Fourth, the struggle to free Palestine is a struggle against U.S. imperialism. The U.S. unconditionally supports Israeli colonization with $3.8 billion per year. While many U.S.-based activists tend to treat Palestine as an island, ignoring Israel’s historical occupation of South Lebanon, Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the struggle over Palestine has long been part of an Arab, Iranian and North African regional struggle against European and U.S. empire, specifically, the misogynist, expansionist, hypermilitarized, U.S. settler-colonial war machine currently waging a regional “war on terror” that finds its perfect ally in Israel.
Fifth, U.S.-based pro-Israeli advocacy organizations are a key pillar maintaining Israeli settler-colonialism. They pay billions of dollars to repress criticism of Israel. These groups, in partnership with university officials and government officials, falsely accuse supporters of Palestinian liberation of “antisemitism” and “support of terrorism.” They intervene in democratic processes, hiring, tenure cases, K-12 curriculum, the corporate media, social media censorship, immigration cases, and more, devastating the lives of primarily Palestinian advocates (as well as other Arabs and their allies) in the U.S. In the case of the University of Illinois’ firing of tenured Professor Steven Salaita for tweeting his outrage over the 2014 Israeli massacre of Gaza, Chancellor Wise and her fellow administrators were responding to donor pressure.
In this moment of ongoing repression, we need to continue to grow our revolt against the censorship that obfuscates the asymmetry in the balance of powers between Palestinians and Israelis. In their report, the “Palestinian Exception to Free Speech,” Palestine Legal recalls that:
The Jewish Agency for Israel declared in 2013 that it was developing a plan that would eventually commit $300 million to this effort and “would combine donor dollars from the United States with Israeli government funds to create what is likely the most expensive pro-Israel campaign ever.” In June 2015, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and media proprietor Haim Saban convened a summit that reportedly raised “at least $20 million” to combat BDS efforts.
While this is what we are up against, we have learned from history that there is no power greater than the power of the people. Today, the people are rising up, united across historic Palestine, backed by stewards of solidarity across the globe. Perhaps it is the escalation in the tactics and methods of Israeli ethnic cleansing coupled with the brilliant organizing of Palestinian youth, feminists and working-class organizers in coalition with U.S.-based Indigenous struggles, the movement for Black lives,anti-imperialist Filipino organizing, and beyond that has escalated the shattering of the silence on Palestine.
As the voices of solidarity grow, the just cause of Palestinian liberation is taking the lead in the battle over narratives. Thanks to the power of Palestinian people’s unified resistance that rippled across the globe in May 2021, there is no neutral position here: Either you are with justice and liberation for Palestine or you are against it.
“Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up and join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.” –Audre Lorde
By Nadine Naber, Souzan Naser, and Johnaé Strong
Now is the time for healing the many divine forms of the feminine, led by Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color (BIPOC), mothers and the stewards of our next generations. As the world is coming face to face with the truth of our mortality through COVID-19, intensified authoritarianism, land confiscation, border control and mass incarceration, anyone who parents will experience Mother’s Day in struggle. Indeed, mother-survivors of victims of police violence, torture, deportation, incarceration and war have walked this road for decades.
For many BIPOC who mother, Mother’s Day is just as much a day of pain as it is a day of love, especially for those who have experienced forced separation from their children or loved ones by the state. While working with the collective Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity (MAMAS), we have found that the pain of mothering in the face of state violence inspires not only rage and resistance for the purpose of reunification with loved ones, but also strategies of collective care whereby no one is mothering individually and everyone is mothering collectively.
As a collective that amplifies the perspectives of mother-survivors of state violence in media, policy and activism, MAMAS has been humbled and blessed to hear and honor the stories of mothering, survival and mutual support emerging from Chicagoland’s undocumented, Indigenous and Palestinian communities, as well as from mothers of police torture survivors. On this Mother’s Day, we insist that we urgently follow their lead to harness the healing power necessary to reshape this country and our planet.
Our world has much to learn about the power of healing and building futures based on love, dignity and justice from collective mothering spaces like MAMAS, where the coming together of mother-survivors can inspire remarkable forces of change. For collective co-founder, Johnaé Strong, MAMAS helped lead her into deep inter-generational healing in her matrilineal bloodline. She writes of her mother joining her this Mother’s Day:
A year ago, we weren’t on speaking terms; I’d resolved in my mind that we may not ever reach that place on this physical plane. Then COVID-19 happened, and each day I held space for the pain and grieving of my chosen family as they processed the death of parents, elders and cherished loved ones. I could not bear the weight of losing someone I loved in a state of estrangement.
Strong goes on to describe how her involvement with MAMAS — and thereby witnessing mother-survivors of police torture enduring multi-level attacks from the state while fighting for the basic human dignity of their children — marked a critical change for her:
Sharing this collective mothering space, I am reminded of my own deep connection to mothering-activism as a Black mother in a long line of Black mothers who have been criminalized and robbed of our ability to heal due to systemic silencing of our trauma manifested as familial secrecy, emotional repression, and fear of expressing shortcomings due to social shaming and the very real threat of incarceration and family separation. It is a story I know intimately. I too am a survivor… Today, I have a heart fixed on connection, mutual care and healing for generations to come.
Strong notes that she often thinks about Regina Russell, mother of Tamon Russell, who was convicted for a crime he did not commit with the complicity of the police and whose story may never make mainstream national news.
At one of MAMAS’s weekly healing justice circles, Regina shared with us:
The state may physically have Tamon, his body behind bars in a cold cell, but I refuse to let them have his mind, his spirit and sense of self. I will continue to mother him. I will be his doctor when he is sick, his spiritual mentor when he’s lost faith, his advocate when he expresses defeat. I will assert all of these roles and more even while the state is trying to deprive me of them.
The joy and pain of the Black, Latinx, Arab, Palestinian, Asian, Indigenous, criminalized, surveilled and undocumented, war-torn and harassed mamas gives light to the necessity of stories like these for inspiring deep hope and instructing us towards ways of being in a time of mass grief, polarization and despair.
If there’s one thing we learned from MAMAS, it is that mothering in the face of state violence is a BIPOC feminist reproductive justice issue. People who share their stories are parenting children and loved ones who have been targeted by police violence; helping children and loved ones who have been detained as undocumented immigrants; and aiding loved ones in surviving the harsh conditions of U.S. and Israeli settler-colonialism. In one way or another, they have had the opportunity of loving, mothering, caring and nurturing their loved ones stolen from them — much as transpired over the years with the legacies of enslavement, the foster care-to-prison pipeline, forced sterilizations and Native American boarding schools.
So, this Mother’s Day, let’s commit to joining these mamas and stewards of care who are fervently opposing and resisting entrenched state violence and injustice globally, from the streets of Chicago to the cities and villages of Palestine.
This Mother’s Day, like most Mother’s Days, there will be no scarcity of touching corporate images of mothers going on picnics with their children, planting flowers and receiving gifts from loved ones. But what if your every breath exists on the other end of this commercialized, capitalist holiday?
This Mother’s Day, let’s affirm substance over crass commercialism with a commitment to mother-survivors of state violence across the globe, and anyone and everyone who cares for others and strives to love in the face of state violence, as well as anywhere people are deprived of the privilege of celebrating mothering with their loved ones.
This Mother’s Day, let’s insist that anyone who cares about mothering take seriously the ways prisons, war, colonization and immigration bans impact BIPOC individuals who mother — compromising, interfering and robbing them of that Mother’s Day hug or sharing smiles and laughter in the flesh.
On this Mother’s Day, let’s shift our focus to people who spend their Mother’s Days without dinner with their loved ones, but instead, as we saw in Chicago this week, rallying in front of Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s home demanding that the state set their loved ones free by signing the long overdue clemencies on his desk, decarcerating and reuniting mothers and their loved ones separated by the violence of long-term incarceration. And let’s join them by making noise, marching in the streets and growing the people power necessary to dismantle all of the systems of white supremacy combined — colonization, war, border control and prisons.
On this Mother’s Day, let’s not forget the mothers who are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border with their children in order to survive devastated economies induced by U.S.-led militarized neoliberalism, but who are being met with grave violence — from forced sterilizations to sexual assault and dehumanization by U.S. Border Patrol.
On this Mother’s Day, let’s not erase the harsh and cruel realities that many BIPOC who mother face. Instead, let their stories serve as a reminder that far too many mothers like Cynthia Soto’s mother and aunt were removed from their families by U.S. policies that force Native American children into boarding schools; or Sameera Shalaldeh Khattab, mother of Ata Khattab; or Lourdes Gonzalez, mother of Jesus Alberto “Beto” Lopez Gutierrez.
Many of them will not spend Mother’s Day with their loved ones. And, of course, there are the many people who are mothering and are themselves incarcerated by a U.S. prison system that remains brutally racist, disproportionately locking up BIPOC and Brown and Black immigrants. Let’s remember those who are denied the possibility of birthing, or harmed while birthing while incarcerated. These people, too, have their capacity to experience relational care, nurturance, love and support obstructed or taken away from them by the state.
The power of the state to break bonds between families, chosen families and loved ones cannot be forgotten this Mother’s Day. That power, instead, must be contested. With expanded police violence, militarism, land theft, border control and their devastating effects that ripple down into the intimate spaces of family, home, neighborhood, community and relations, this is no time for any of us to turn our backs.
So, on this Mother’s Day, let us uplift and grow the places for healing that live underneath the superficial and corporatized professions of love. And let us return to love, a love that moves us to nurture the wounds to be healed in our families and communities; a love that moves us to boldly address injustice in our world as an act of love essential to the future we want; a love that grows the power of the collective, and the urgency of mutual aid and support; a love that cannot be separated from the radical potential of revolution, abolition and decolonization.
Originally published by TheChicagoReporter.com here
After decades of institutionalized racism against people perceived to be Arab, Middle Eastern, or Muslim in the U.S., it is a great disappointment that the University of Illinois continues to categorize Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) students as racially white in data, surveys, and university records. These populations face significant levels of racism across the U.S., in the state of Illinois, and on college campuses. To fight racism and discrimination and quantify it, this group must have its own designation separate from white.
Currently, these students are classified as white, even as they are targeted as distinctly different from and inferior to whites, portrayed and treated as potential terrorists, enemies of the U.S. nation, and too frequently attacked for belonging to what bigots crudely deem a misogynist and backwards culture and religion (Islam). This institutionalizes their invisibility — meaning although they face racial adversity, they are denied recognition as a racial/ethnic group that has the legitimacy to advocate for racial justice, resources, and rights or simply be recognized, known about, and understood as having a distinct experience of race/ethnicity in the U.S. Perhaps institutionalizing their invisibility is intentional. Indeed, pro-war/anti-Arab and anti-Muslim policy makers benefit when the communities they are targeting lack avenues to advocate for their rights and their freedom.
Whether it is racial profiling at airports, government surveillance, or discriminatory immigration policy, racism against people from the MENA region has been growing since the 1970s and was consolidated after 9/11. Across Illinois, we have witnessed Islamophobic elected officials like Sharon Branniganspreading hate about local schools filling up with “Muslims” (referring to the large Arab immigrant population in her district).
Surveillance against Chicagoland’s Arab Americans is a serious form of racial profiling. When officials reinforce racism against people from the MENA region, they enable racist behaviors in everyday life, in local communities, on public transportation, at work, in the streets, and at school.
As a professor at the University of Illinois, my Arab American students tell me about their encounters with racism on campus. A freshman described how she was harassed by a man who screamed, “Do you have a bomb in your bag” when she was traversing a walkway alone. A chemistry student mentioned how his instructor blamed him for cheating based on his perception that all Muslims are liars.
It’s infuriating behavior they’ve been subjected to and yet at the moment we can’t adequately classify it as racism.
Racism devastates local communities. It creates fear of the broader society and has grave material implications — from employment to housing to medical care. For people from the MENA region, discrimination cannot be adequately documented because we lack data due to being unable to distinguish the MENA community from white people.
This is why I agree with the Arab American Cultural Center’s student-led campaign, #CountMENAIn at the University of Illinois advocating for a MENA category. In a study conducted by UIC’s Arab American Cultural Center with students primarily from Palestine, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Iran, and Egypt, the majority did not agree with being classified as white or Caucasian.
Despite the bankrupt nature of the U.S.’ racial classification system whereby people of color need to rely on the very system of racial designation to fight against racism, we cannot advocate for rights, racial justice, or resources without it. In the U.S., since the civil rights movement challenged the census to stop counting people in order to exclude them (Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow segregation), the census has been an essential tool for measuring who is excluded and what resources can be mobilized to better include them. For example, in 1977, a directive outlined the federal government’s definitions of race to determine whether and to what extent Latino students faced discrimination in education.
The impact of not having a category is profound. It not only erases a community’s experiences with racism, creating a lack of understanding that hatred against Arabs, Middle Easterners, and Muslims exists in the first place, but it also denies their advocates the data needed for effective advocacy for the resources they need to survive and thrive. These resources are essential to promote student learning and success — from culturally and racially specific mental health services to ensuring that faculty are knowledgeable about MENA students’ backgrounds and needs. Academic advisors should be better equipped to address challenges these students face such as in housing, scholarships, and tutoring — all areas where they are currently either invisible or not included. Recognition also contributes to a sense of belonging and inclusion — challenging isolation – which is essential to student success.
To be sure, some MENA students might pass or identify as white. Yet every community faces this and this reality should not obstruct efforts to right historical wrongs. One might also wonder whether a MENA category could be used to further surveillance or racial profiling of these communities. MENAadvocates across the U.S. have determined that the benefits of a racial category outweigh the risks, especially since many agree that even while designated as white, racist policies are still going to place them under surveillance.
UIC has specifically responded to students’ needs previously. When students organized in 2015-16 for an Arab American Cultural Center, Chancellor Michael Amiridis agreed and it is now one of the first such centers serving specifically Arab American students on a college campus. But the center cannot do its job of serving students without data about the student community.
It’s important to recognize that the new category would also benefit the larger University of Illinois community and the state of Illinois at large. Non-MENA students would get to learn about people from the region, their experiences, and their history, while reflecting on commonalities, solidarity, and shared social justice struggles. We live and work together, so where better than a campus to learn from one another? If diversity is truly a cornerstone of the University of Illinois system, it is time to take a step that accurately reflects this group’s racial positioning in U.S. society and solidifies the inclusion of MENA students.
Originally published in Ms. Magazine here on April 4, 2021
We remember Nawal El Saadawi, the renowned Egyptian feminist, physician, writer and activist, as our charismatic and outspoken mentor, from her arrival in Seattle in 1994 to teach at the University of Washington.
We remember her as we witness mainstream obituaries relying upon an imperialist feminist narrative that selectively highlights her childhood clitoridectomy and her fight against women’s oppression in the Arab world. Yet we knew her for her intersectional feminism driven by a critique of what she called “capitalist patriarchy” and imperialist domination, particularly in the wake of the U.S.-led Gulf War.
In the U.S. and Europe, Saadawi’s feminist activism and literary works are often reduced to a stance against “Arab culture” or “religion” (i.e. Islam). Yet she exposed issues such as honor killings as products—not of an isolated Arab culture abstracted from history, as colonialist and imperialist discourse would like us to believe, but rather as products of the intersections of global politics, international capitalism, militarism, patriarchy and class. Over and over, she would remind us, “You can’t separate them.”
Along these lines, Nawal El Saadawi quarreled with women from Western societies who travel to countries such as Sudan and “see” only clitoridectomy, but never notice the economic exploitation by multinational corporations.
El Saadawi was of that generation of third world Marxists who lived her anti-consumption values—she had three simple shirts that she wore in rotation, and she sometimes chided us for wearing jewelry and makeup, the latter which she called the “Western veil.” Her point was to expose the contradiction between the U.S.’s racist obsession with the Muslim “veil” [hijab] on the one hand and the widespread objectification of women’s bodies in the U.S. on the other. She often said these were “two sides of the same coin.”
Encouraged by El Saadawi’s energetic guidance, we founded the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association North America (AWSA NA) as an NGO and a chapter of the AWSA she founded in Egypt in 1982. Through our involvement in AWSA, Nawal opened up international feminist worlds to us, inspiring many young Arab American feminists of the 1990s to grow our political consciousness and our confidence.
With her support, we learned how to intervene in international feminist conferences such as the 1994 U.N. Population and Development Conference in Cairo. One AWSA NA member, Renda Dabit, presented Nawal’s speech there since Nawal was under attack for her stance against the Gulf War and could not attend.
Interestingly, feminists emanating from the West often sensationalized Egyptian government attacks against El Saadawi as if they were solely based upon her insistence on “women’s rights.” AWSA’s intervention at the 1994 UNPD conference ultimately affirmed a radical decolonial reproductive justice perspective that confronted the entire framing of the crisis of “population and development” promoted by imperialist development projects—blaming poor women for poverty and asserting that too many Arab and African women are having babies. Rather, El Saadawi argued, global capitalism and the imperialist framing of “population and development” is a form of violence against poor women.
Another AWSA group presented at the 1995 U.N. Women’s Conference in Beijing. There, AWSA members read and distributed a critique of the imperialist feminist use of the idea of “Arab women’s oppression” to justify U.S.-led wars and the impact of these wars on women. In Seattle, Saadawi spoke at one of our first events, a benefit from the victims of the Israeli massacre of Hebron (1994).
We also formed a coalition, supported by Nawal El Saadawi and Angela Davis, between Arab and African American women. At one of our events, Saadawi and Davis reminisced on their meeting in 1982 in California and Davis’s subsequent visit to Cairo to meet with AWSA members. Saadawi addressed what she called “the globalization phenomenon”—the illusion that we lived in three worlds rather than one world dominated by one international system. Davis discussed the importance of coalition building, the emergence of “women of color” and “third world” feminisms, and the transforming role of women of color in the political and academic arenas. The hall was electrified, as we collectively felt a part of that transformative movement and moment.
To be sure, a vibrant history of Arab feminist activism and coalition building in the U.S. preceded this period. We took inspiration from the Union of Palestinian Women Associations in North America (1980s) and Palestinian women’s organizing and resistance during the first Intifada (1987-91). We drew strength from stories of the Feminist Arab American Network (1983), and the inclusion of Arab American feminists in early third world feminist coalitions within social movements and at the National Women Studies Association conferences.
The same year we formed AWSA, Food for Our Grandmothers, the first collection of Arab American and Arab Canadian feminist writers (edited by Joe Kadi, 1994) gave voice to our complex stories, positioning us at the intersections of anti-imperialist Arab feminist perspectives and those of radical U.S. women of color.
With El Saadawi’s passion and inspiring energy, the formation of AWSA North American in the mid-1990’s opened up new possibilities for Arab American feminists. Some of us launched CYBER-AWSA, an email list through which Arab feminists across the U.S. organized political actions, integrated feminist perspectives into broader Arab liberation movements in the U.S., and debated and discussed politics together. Some of us launched a chapter in San Francisco and joined the Women of Color Resource Center’s delegation to the World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa in 2001. AWSA SF became an affiliate of the movement INCITE!, and integrated decolonial, anti-imperialist Arab feminist perspectives into projects like the Color of Violence anthology.
But we also came to learn that Nawal’s intersectionality was limited, that her conception of feminism was not expansive enough, especially for our generation. In the mid 1990s in San Francisco, Nadine remembers becoming politicized about homophobia when a group of Arab/Arab American feminists protested Saadawi outside of a building where she was going to speak. They were there to hold Saadawi accountable for her homophobic viewpoint that discussions about gender-non-conforming sexuality are irrelevant and should remain silent.
By the turn of the 21st century, El Saadawi was also increasingly expressing her position against religion, Islam and the hijab in offensive terms, publicly shaming the Muslim women wearing hijab who sat in her lectures for “participating in women’s oppression.”
On this point, her position was ironically similar to that of imperialist feminists who dominate Muslim women by dictating the terms of their liberation. El Saadawi’s disregard of queer and trans people’s experiences and struggles for liberation, coupled with her treatment of women who wear hijab, contributed to harm and exclusion. It also led some of us to part ways with her in order to form alternatives that could encompass the breadth of our political vision and our accountability to all forms of gender justice and anti-racism.
As Arab American feminists remember her in social media, many posts acknowledge her transformative role in uplifting Arab socialist feminism and tahrir al-ma’rah [the liberation of women] in the Arab world, but also point to her perpetuation of homophobia and Islamophobia. Nawal taught us many things, empowered us in many ways, but she also taught us that there are no faultless heroes—just warriors committed to casting off oppressive structures of this world with limitations and sometimes investments in the oppression of others.
Reflecting back on our memories of El Saadawi, we understand her stances, in part, as products of her context and her generation. El Saadawi came of age during the rise of third world liberation movements across the globe. In the Arab region, secular-nationalism and socialism—including the exclusion of religion and Islam, queer people, and queer liberation—were the primary frameworks people relied upon to resist Western imperialism. Her critique of religion and her resistance to integrating queer and trans justice into her concept of liberation was widespread among her generation.
As Arab feminists in the U.S., we have been faced with the challenge of crafting a more nuanced position, an intersectional transnational decolonial feminist vision that insists on challenging pervasive Islamophobia and racist views against women and gender non-conforming people who identify with Islam.
We also recognize that exclusionary religious politics are practiced by many groups—Muslim, Christian, Jewish and so on—as well as by rigid secularists who are hostile to people whose lives are shaped by their relationship to religion, spirituality, and the divine. For us, intersectional transnational feminism is non-exclusionary and seeks to dismantle all forms of oppression and discrimination, while building alternatives based upon the values of collective love, access to resources, and dignity for all.
Looking back, we are grateful that Nawal El Saadawi provided us with a framework for challenging capitalist patriarchy and the impact of U.S. global domination on women in the Arab world, and that she empowered us to build a widespread transnational Arab feminist movement. Yet she also left us to struggle over how to celebrate a feminist legend whose commitment to social justice was incomplete. And that too was an important lesson from our mentor.
An earlier version of this article was originally published by The Arab Center Washington D.C. here on 11 March 2021 and on Jadaliyya here on 25 March 2021.
In a series of unprecedented moves, President Biden has included six Arab Americans in his administration; partnered with Arab Americans; increased the refugee admission cap; explicitly named the problem of anti-Arab bigotry and committed to end it, and ended the Muslim Ban. Yet rather than quickly deeming these as “victories” for Arab American communities, we need to look beyond individual policy stances or political slogans. Instead, we need to explore the root causes of the problems that Biden claims his partnership with Arab Americans will address and ask ourselves to what extent the Biden administration is committed to unraveling the underlying systems that maintain anti-Arab bigotry or the structures that make policies like the Muslim Ban possible. A “root-cause” approach allows us to envision structural changes that can ensure not only an end to anti-Arab bigotry but also a world where anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism become unimaginable.
As a scholar of Critical Ethnic Studies, I have relied upon a “root-cause” approach to explore the systems that hold anti-Arab bigotry in place. For instance, it is well established that the problem of anti-Black racism in the U.S. is rooted in the systems of policing and prisons and that the disenfranchisement of Native Americans is rooted in histories of land confiscation. This explains why, in 2008, most Black racial justice advocates understood that as long as these systems remain intact, the election of a Black president was not going to end anti-Blackness. This also explains why Indigenous advocates affirmed the important election of two Indigenous women to Congress after the Standing Rock sit-in while reminding us that this will not stop the U.S. government’s “willy-nilly trespass[ing] through indigenous land.”
Indeed the root-cause of anti-Arab bigotry, or what we more precisely describe as anti-Arab racism, is imperial war. It is well established that the post-Cold War period is one of the many histories out of which anti-Arab racism developed in the U.S., when the U.S. committed to imperial expansion in the Arab region, including enabling and facilitating—through military and diplomatic support—Israeli settler-colonialism. To justify U.S.-led wars, a “terrorism” framework, which portrays all Palestinians and Arabs as Muslims and all Muslims as potential terrorists, was institutionalized, especially after 09/11, through interconnected domestic and global policy and corporate media rhetoric. In this sense, the global reach of anti-Arab racism is intertwined with the policies impacting Arab Americans. Militarist agendas in the Arab region, such as bombings or sanctions rely on the same “terrorism” framework as the militarist agendas deployed against Arab Americans, such as surveillance, FBI entrapment, or No-Fly Lists. In this sense, the question we need to be asking is what the Biden plan is—if it offers a vision for ending the global war on Arabs and Arab Americans. If not, what does it mean to be included, and to be held responsible for a system that structurally, institutionally, and politically not only devalues but justifies the detention, deportation, displacement, surveillance, and in many cases, killing of Arabs or Arab Americans through the racist “terrorism” framework.
A critique of the neoliberal politics that guide the Democratic Party can also help guide an analysis of the significance of Arab American inclusion within the Biden Administration. Neoliberal politics appropriate the discourse of multiculturalism, diversity, and inclusion to cover up the violent systems of racial capitalism, U.S. settler-colonialism, and white supremacy. In other words, multicultural “inclusion” obscures the centrality of racializing Arabs and Arab Americans as “potential terrorists” within the neoliberal economic agenda of the war on terror. We might then ask whether and to what extent the inclusion of Arab Americans in the Biden Administration not only falls short in relation to the kinds of systemic changes many Arab Americans hope to see but more importantly, whether their very inclusion helps to normalize the system of capital accumulation through war-mongering that allows the US to maintain global power. Critic of neoliberal multiculturalism Jodi Melamid explains that a politics of inclusion is not only limited, but makes neoliberalism appear just, while obscuring the racial antagonisms and inequalities on which the neoliberal project depends.
Indeed, celebrations of Biden’s plan to partner with Arab Americans obscure not only his past support for the U.S. wars on Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s but also the future that many progressive scholars and activists are projecting wherein the Biden Administration will not only continue, but expand the War on Terror through the “domestic terrorism” framework. Expert analyst of domestic counter-terrorism policies Nicole Nguyen explains, “Despite Biden’s promise to end the Trump administration’s Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Program, given its targeting of Arab and Muslim communities, he announced plans to expand funding for TVTP. TVTP relies on the concept of “radicalization,” which tends to conflate particular strands of Islam with the turn to violence and terrorism.” Whether explicitly designed to target Arabs and Muslims or not, surveillance and policing strategies like TVTP, Fusion Centers, or social media vetting surveillance programs reinforce anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism and racial profiling. Given Biden’s career-long history of supporting Israel’s aggression towards Palestinians, there is also little hope that he will end Trump’s 2019 Executive Order, “Combating Anti-Semitism,” which defines criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and consolidates the repression of Arab American activism. While Biden publicly pledges to protect the free speech of all Americans and reject efforts that criminalize free speech, he simultaneously rejects the BDS movement and by extension, supports the criminalization of free speech for Arab Americans. Indeed, Material Support Laws used in federal terrorism prosecutions have a similarly chilling effect, creating a culture of fear around community-based activism, social service work, and philanthropy. This explains why progressive Arab American scholar Noura Erakat told me, “I’m not excited about seeing Palestinians in office just as I’m not excited to see a Black woman as the UN Ambassador, given her politics on BDS and Palestine. Identity politics can be misleading. I’m not interested in being in alliance with Palestinians because they are Palestinian. I am in alliance with Palestinians who share a politics of justice.” Rashid Khalidi shared a similar stance with me, “In the broader scheme of things, the presence of Arab Americans in the Biden Administration will make very little difference: the red lines where Israel is concerned are too bright, and Palestine remains the third rail of US politics. Moreover, these few Arab-Americans are heavily outnumbered by the many passionate advocates of Israel in the top ranks of the Biden administration, Congress and the Democratic Party machine.”
To be sure, Arab American inclusion represents a shift, even if tokenistic or symbolic. At least the Arab Americans Biden included are not explicitly pro-war. Yet I do not expect Biden’s agenda to scratch the surface, let alone attend to the root causes of anti-Arab racism that are necessary for unraveling its many effects. Given Biden’s opposition to the International Criminal Court’s war crimes probe of Israel and the strike in eastern Syria both, just last week, the inclusion of Arab Americans appears to serve as a marketing strategy or brand, rather than a sign of systemic change. This does not mean we should opt-out of electoral politics altogether. Indeed, opting out is a privilege we cannot afford. Yet my hope is that the Arab Americans who have been included in the Biden administration follow the lead of people like congresswoman Rachida Tlaib who has opened up new possibilities for an integration of electoral politics with grassroots movements that are necessary for holding elected officials accountable to the people disproportionately impacted by unjust racial, gendered, and socio-economic policies while striving for systemic transformation for the long haul. For instance, perhaps they could help uplift grassroots, people-centered policy platforms such as, “Abolishing the War on Terror and Build Communities of Care” or the “Feminist Peace Initiative’s Movement-Driven Policy Framework” both of which integrate Arab American commitments to racial justice within a coalitional racial justice platform that neither compromises on the significance of ending the war on terror and racial profiling as global and domestic concerns nor ignores the significance of people-centered anti-poverty initiatives that ensure access to food, shelter, and education for all. Through the integration of social movements and policy agendas, Arab Americans need a collective vision far more radical than neoliberal multicultural inclusion. We need to affirm the expectation, the hope, and the possibility of a society rooted in the principles of collective care and dignity for all, a society where no one is disposable, and where any and all forms of containment, racism, colonization, and war become, as Black feminist abolitionist Mariame Kaba says about policing and prisons, truly unfathomable.
The lack of COVID-19 protections in prisons show officials believe that inmates are less than human, that they do not deserve to be protected from death like everyone else, and that their lives do not matter.
After a long struggle led by prison justice activists, the Illinois COVID-19 vaccination plan now includes prison inmates, who are starting to receive the vaccine along with prison guards and essential workers. To be sure, vaccination is a good and necessary step. Yet it is not all that is needed and does not make up for the terrible horrors inmates and their loved ones, especially their mothers, have endured throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Consider that across Illinois, under Phase 4 guidelines, the COVID-19 plan requires that everyone abide by social distancing policies and strict public health procedures. Across the state, personnel must make sure employees have protective equipment, and testing is widely available—except within the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC).
In Illinois, there are no phases for inmates. There is indefinite lockdown.
I have learned about how COVID-19 has been raging through IDOC and the terrible conditions Illinois inmates have endured from my work with MAMAS, an organization of mothers of primarily Black and Latinx incarcerated victims of police violence. For these mothers, COVID-19 continues to mean that they do not know when they might see their children again; when their children might gain access to their lawyers; or when their children will be able to adequately move their bodies again.
Mothers of inmates who have been infected with COVID-19 live with the terror that prison guards are trapping their child is in a cell as big as a parking spot for 23 hours a day as “quarantine,” or that their child may never recover—especially since some inmates are already suffering long-term effects and some have died. Inmates are not receiving proper medical attention and the system denies their mothers information about their children’s existing symptoms or whether or not they might survive.
As the New York Times editorial board noted last November, America is letting the coronavirus rage through prisons. Indeed, the Illinois Department of Corrections does not follow COVID-19 safety guidelines. Near the end of 2020, the Chicago Tribune reported at least 59 incarcerated people have died since March after becoming infected with COVID-19 in Illinois custody. This death toll has doubled since November.
Last month, the Marshall Project reported the spread amongst inmates in Illinois prisons is 205 percent higher than the general population. At the same time, Gov. Pritzker’s plan for Illinois makes recommendations for nearly every place where people live except for IDOC.
If Gov. Pritzker truly cares about containing COVID-19, he should work to ensure that IDOC follows a set of guidelines for safety and protection in prisons and jails. He should take responsibility for failing to protect the state of Illinois from prison staff bringing the virus outside when they come in and out of our communities everyday while also ignoring the terror inmates and their families have been enduring.
Mothers report that prison staff get masks while their children do not; that many guards don’t wear masks at all and some barely wash their hands. They say inmates with symptoms are barely tested and those who are recovering from COVID-19 or have long-term effects have been virtually ignored. The children of these mothers, all grown adults, lack access to adequate soap, water, and cleaning supplies. They are constantly moved around, and they are crowded into showers.
On top of all of this, inmates are struggling with additional mental health challenges, an understandable but still terrible response to being trapped in a place where COVID-19 is raging like wildfire.
Since Black people are overly represented in Illinois prisons, the Black mothers I work with feel that the governor, along with IDOC officials, believe that Black lives don’t matter and that the COVID-19 death sentence in Illinois prisons and jails is an extension of slavery.
If Gov. Pritzker truly cares about containing COVID-19, he should listen to what mothers and all loved ones of inmates are saying about how and why COVID-19 has been raging in IDOC. The mothers I work with have become advocates and experts on COVID-19 in prisons in their own right, out of necessity, in the absence of state action. Governor Pritzker might then realize that he is placing everyone in the state of Illinois at risk.
The Path Forward
A campaign launched by loved ones fighting for the mental and physical health of inmates demonstrates the steps needed to stop the spread of COVID-19 in jails and prisons. The petition calls for expanded yard time, access to libraries, more mental health resources, phone and video calls, and in-person visits when safe. Additionally, the campaign demands that the Illinois Department of Corrections follow CDC safety guidelines and set a rational timeline to end its lockdown. I only wish IDOC would stand on the right side of COVID-19 history and do the same.
Now that we have a vaccine, many of us are celebrating the positive outcomes of the last 10 months. Some of us found a new love of community. Others started feeding their hungry neighbors. Yet if we continue to ignore the physical and mental health needs and struggles of inmates, their mothers, and their loved ones that will continue long after vaccinations, any claim to an expanded love for community in a COVID-19 world remains meaningless.
Shortly after his inauguration, President Joe Biden reversed former President’s Donald Trump’s Muslim Travel Ban, stating those actions are a stain on our national conscience.” This stance aligns with that of the tens of thousands of protesters who, at the time the first Muslim Travel Ban was enacted in January 2017, took to the streets and to airports across the country with slogans such as, “We are all Immigrants,” “Standing with Muslims against Islamophobia,” and “Stop Hatred against Muslims.” To be sure, the Muslim Travel Ban is a racist policy. It seeks to keep out or deport people perceived to be Muslim based upon the racist assumption that “they” are violent potential terrorist enemies of the U.S. nation. The ban was an executive order that prevented individuals from primarily Muslim countries, and later, from many African countries, from entering the United States.
Yet ending the Muslim Ban only scratches the surface of a much larger problem. If progressives really want to end anti-Muslim racism, we are going to need a more radical approach, that requires, as Angela Davis reminds us, “grasping things at the root.” The root cause of the Muslim Ban is anti-Muslim racism, which has many roots. Europeans perceived Islam and Muslims as a barbaric threat ever since its arrival in the 7th century. White Christian supremacist thought perceived “Islam” as a threat when Black people found within it liberatory possibilities in the context of the transatlantic slave trade and far beyond. Contemporary anti-Muslim racism grew especially out of the post-Cold War period when the U.S. began launching its imperialist wars in the Arab region and growing its unconditional support for Israeli settler-colonialism. Out of this context, anti-Muslim racism, based on the idea that all Palestinians and Arabs are Muslim and all Muslims are potential terrorists, was institutionalized through domestic and global policies and the U.S. corporate media’s rhetoric.
After the U.S. first confirmed its alliance with Israel in 1967, U.S. government and media rhetoric portrayed Palestinians Arabs and Muslims as terrorist enemies. At this time, the FBI began harassing and stifling the voices of Arab students and activists based upon this racist logic. In the 1980s, seven Palestinians and one Kenyan were placed into deportation proceedings for enacting free speech rights. Their case, referred to as the L.A. 8, revealed a secret plan to intern Arab Americans. The period of the first Iraq war brought President Bill Clinton’s Omnibus Counterterrorism Bill, introduced by then-Sen. Joe Biden, granting the U.S. government the power to deport individuals based upon secret evidence. A form of racial profiling, the U.S. used this bill to target primarily Arab Muslim men. The post-9-11 era consolidated the racial profiling of people perceived to be Muslim in the U.S. through airport profiling, surveillance of Muslim communities, detention, deportations, special registration of immigrants, and much more. All along, the racist idea of the “Muslim terrorist enemy” has justified the war on terror abroad and legitimized the racial profiling of Muslims in the U.S. as an extension of this war.
Whether it is global war or domestic surveillance, anti-Muslim racism devastates the lives of local Muslim and Muslim American communities. Consider the reality whereby U.S. law enforcement officials have placed Muslim communities under surveillance that in some cases, have entailed entrapment. Also consider the racial profiling that underlies the current Countering Violent Extremism program whereby simply praying five times a day can render any Muslim as someone who embodies the potential for violent extremism. While conducting research with Arab American communities, I have met many Muslim immigrant mothers who stay up at night fearing their son will be picked up for a crime they never committed. A simple trip involving air travel also can devastate any Arab or Muslim family. In 2019, an Arab Christian immigrant father told me that he couldn’t print his boarding pass at O’Hare. When he went to the ticket counter with his middle school age kids, the agent announced, in front of everyone in line, that the Department of Homeland Security is blocking him from boarding the plane. Although he may never know why his name showed up on a No-Fly list, his experience with racial profiling has damaged his mental health and that of his children. Anti-Muslim racism within the system of policing takes a distinct toll on the lives of Muslim women. When officers like the Chicago Police Union President’s post that “all Muslims deserve a bullet,” it would not be a stretch to assume that Muslim women are not going to call the police for help when they experience domestic violence. Globally, it is no secret that hundreds of men have been taken to the torturous prison camp of Guantanamo Bay or tortured in overt U.S. prisons like Abu-Ghraib or secret CIA prisons through extraordinary rendition and that millions of Yemenis, Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians and Palestinians have been killed or displaced by U.S.-led militarism. Truly ending anti-Muslim racism will require widescale systemic change. If progressives really care about ending anti-Muslim racism, we need to stand for ending the war on terror in all of its forms. Given recent strikes on Syria, my community of progressive Arab and Muslim immigrants is gravely concerned that Biden may turn out to be a more hawkish than President Trump and that the continuation of the war on terror will have grave anti-Muslim consequences not only abroad, but also here in the U.S. and in Chicago. For instance, the Biden Administration needs to stop all forms of racial profiling, including the surveillance of Arab and Muslim Americans and stop supporting the Israeli government’s oppression of Palestinians, including gross funding for the egregious Israeli military and as founder of Palestine Legal, Dima Khalidi explains, undo Trump’s executive order that silences Palestinian voices in the U.S. The Biden administration also needs to end U.S. support for the war in Yemen and say no to all forms of reckless killing and the use of militarism as a strategy of global political and economic dominance. Such policies changes can go a long way. More than ever before, it’s time to change racist, common sense ways of thinking about Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, and anyone perceived to be connected, in one way or another, to the idea of a “Muslim terrorist threat.”
HOSSAM EL-HAMALAWY One of the last big protests in Egypt after the 2013 military coup is pictured on October 26, 2013. Soon after the military coup on July 3, 2013, the military regime enacted a draconian anti-protest law, implicitly justifying the coup. Egyptian revolutionaries continued to protest military rule and the draconian anti-protest law for a brief period of time until the military regime fully banned any and all protest.
Seven Lessons the US Left Can Learn From Egypt to Resist Post-Election Fascism
By Nadine Naber and Atef Said
Leftists across the nation are terrified about the aftermath of the U.S. election. Whether Donald Trump wins or loses, many are deeply anxious about the possibility of far right white supremacist violence. If Joe Biden wins, many worry he will betray the demands of the Movement for Black Lives and return us to a status quo that disregards the lives of Black people, people of color, immigrants, Indigenous people, working-class people, women, queer and transgender people, and people with disabilities.
As people with roots in the Arab region, including Egypt, we believe that what has happened in Egypt since the revolution of 2011 is useful for thinking about the scenario the left is currently facing here in the U.S.
To be sure, the U.S. and Egypt are distinct places with unique historical and political realities. Yet they both have authoritarian and fascist tendencies. In Egypt, this tendency was consolidated during the militarized counterrevolution after 2013, and in the U.S., around the White House’s endorsement and unleashing of white supremacist violence. Indeed, some of the political factors at play in the U.S. resemble those that led many Egyptians into a state of total despair, including grave political repression, unprecedented poverty and unemployment, sexualized state violence, and the incarceration and torture of dissenters.
Since the revolution of 2011, when 15 million people took to the streetsto overthrow their U.S.-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak, Egyptians witnessed a transitionary government that betrayed the revolution after promising to see it through; the election of President Mohamad Morsi; and a coup, followed by the election of President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi in 2014 (renewed in 2018). Al-Sisi has consolidated an exceptionally violent, highly militarized fascist counterrevolution par excellence.
Here are seven lessons from Egypt that may be useful for the U.S. in the wake of the presidential election.
Don’t act as though politics are only about elections.
In Egypt, seemingly progressive strands of the regime and conservatives used electoral politics to suppress the revolutionary momentum in the streets. To be sure, elections matter. Yet popular mobilizations in the streets, alongside elections, are both essential to resisting and stopping fascism.
2. Grassroots activists must watch and document electoral violations through a movement infrastructure that is not based in state or nonprofit structures.
Prepare to take legal or other actions in response. In Egypt, before and after the revolution, many activists formed grassroots networks to document electoral violations through the revolution’s various stages. Independent monitoring proved to be critical to processes such as lawsuits or contestations regarding electoral violations. In response, the Egypt government began restricting the monitoring of elections and limiting it only to governmental or government-friendly NGOs.
3. Do not expect the middle class to carry a revolution forward, but do not give up on the middle class.
In Egypt, the middle class played an important role in the revolution for social justice and democracy in 2011. Yet many members of the middle class abandoned the revolution when their interests were no longer threatened. They cared about freedom of speech but not about justice for workers or youth, and they tolerated the regime’s persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the U.S., within liberal middle-class communities, there seems to be a pattern that assumes a victory over Trump through elections is the end of the story of the U.S.’s engagement with neo-fascism. The concern is whether or not these communities would be willing to continue the struggle against Biden and the establishment to fight for racial, economic, gendered, and other interconnected forms of justice.
4. Don’t be fooled by neoliberalism’s seemingly progressive face — like the liberal multicultural appropriations of the slogan “Black Lives Matter” — and keep your eyes on the prize.
Egyptians learned the hard way not to trust an army that made false promises of protecting protesters against the violence of an authoritarian regime. If Biden wins, for instance, will people in the U.S. whose main objective is to defeat Trump care about the Movement for Black Lives? If Trump wins, will progressives trust the military and intelligence apparatuses in the U.S. to save us from Trump-backed white supremacist violence? Are we going to trust that state forces will protect people against white supremacists? If Trump refuses to concede, will we allow for a rise in excessive state power at the cost of people power? Any response to the current state of affairs must rely on movement-building for the long haul by opposing U.S. settler-colonialism, racial capitalism and Trumpism, not merely Trump, while defeating Trump-backed fascism along the way.
5. Work diligently against divisions within progressive movement organizing.
This does not mean complying with the liberal notion of “unity” that obscures racial, socio-economic, colonial, gendered and ableist structural violence. It means a principled united vision committed to dismantling and building alternatives to all forms of structural violence. Dividing the movement was the primary counterrevolutionary tactic in Egypt: Polarization after the revolution was inevitable, especially since revolutionary partners generally tend to see implementing revolutions differently afterward. But in Egypt’s case, the military regime’s support of groups such as the Muslim brotherhood and liberals helped fueled sectarian polarization. Thus, instead of a healthy polarization to implement the revolution’s goals or debating about how best to implement the goals of the revolution, revolutionaries and many parts of the society were entrapped in unnecessary, highly divisive and dangerous sectarian conflicts. Fueling sectarianism was a counterrevolutionary tactic par excellence. In short, the military regime dictated its counterrevolutionary divisive logic onto the trajectory of the revolution. While divisions among U.S. social movements are inevitable, we need to notice and address them early on before the counterrevolution beats us to it.
6. Make plans for surviving the endless series of rapid-fire attacks.
In Egypt, activists and nonactivists alike were taken by surprise when the authoritarian power structure revealed its vicious determination to save corporations from the demands of poor and working-class people by any means necessary. What would it take to prepare us for the violence of a potential counterrevolution in the U.S.? In Egypt, the scale of attacks was new, if not immobilizing, to many. If we agree that we cannot risk being underprepared in the face of what’s to come, how will we balance emotionally and physically surviving the violence while we continue organizing, protesting and resisting for the long haul? In light of the possibility of mass hopelessness, despair, defeat and self-blame, what is our political strategy — especially when helplessness among us is precisely what the Trump administration wants?
7. Commit to abolition, decolonization and anti-imperialism.
A corrupt military apparatus backed by the U.S. is the backbone of Egypt’s authoritarian regime. Yet some strands of the Egyptian left shortsightedly focused only on domestic conditions like fighting against corruption or fighting for democracy within Egypt, producing an agenda that left the U.S. backing of Egyptian militarism intact. If U.S. leftists truly believe that racial capitalism is the problem, then we need to take seriously how global militarism and imperialism — from U.S. settler-colonialism to the “war on terror” and far beyond — enable and sustain racial capitalism.
Defunding and abolishing prisons and policing necessitates abolishing U.S. colonial and imperial war. The U.S. has been backing Egyptian dictators for over 30 years, and Trump and Trumpism have helped consolidate fascist tendencies and dictatorships across the globe. In this sense, perhaps beyond merely heeding these lessons from Egypt, those of us living in the U.S. should approach our Egyptian comrades, like survivors of fascism across the globe, as allies in a conjoined struggle with exceptionally high stakes rather than through mere gestures of solidarity.
Mothers of Victims of Police Don’t Want Your Pity. They Want Solidarity—and Justice.
By Nadine Naber
With his face pinned down on the cold concrete floor and the weight of Derek Chauvin’s body pressed against his neck for over eight minutes, the final cries from George Floyd repeatedly calling for his mother reverberated in minds and hearts across the nation last May and ever since.
The cry of a dying child for their mother has inspired grave sympathy across the globe for centuries. From the ways the media sensationalizes the grief of Afghan and Iraqi mothers who lost children in the war on terror, to how U.S. culture remembers the grief of Black mothers who lost enslaved children to lynching, our world is full of sentimentalized beliefs that the suffering of a mother is unlike any other.
To be sure, losing a child to police violence is deeply traumatizing and Black mothers in the U.S. share a disproportionate burden of this trauma.
Yet, what is the consequence of responding to mothers of victims of police (or other violence) with sentimental tropes that assume a mother’s reproductive capacities render her the ultimate sign of life, the absolute beacon of comfort and protection, and therefore, the ultimate victim?
Indeed, mothers of police violence are not merely biological extensions of their children, who exist only to nurture them through life and cry and grieve through their child’s pain. They are revolutionaries. By integrating the work of grief, nurture and care withtheir ongoing fight for justice, these women are the kinds of activists we need to have leading the way.
Some mothers I know in Chicago are a good model of this. I co-founded an organization that supports mothers whose primarily Black and Latinx children were tortured by Chicago police officers. The women call themselves “mothers of the kidnapped.”
One of these mothers, Bertha Escamilla, has documented 130 such cases in Chicago since 1994 after three police officers spent eighteen hours punching, slapping and spitting on her son, Nick, and threatening his girlfriend and their child until he signed a false confession. Nick served fourteen years in prison. Although he was released, he remains “a felon” on paper, and his life has been devastated.
All of the “mothers of the kidnapped” share similar experiences. They are supporting not only their biological children, but all torture survivors in obtaining justice.
Forced to learn the law and figure it out collectively, Bertha Escamilla collects data on the cases of Chicago’s torture survivors. She looks into police reports, locates information about each case, contacts family members by phone or meets them at the courthouse and explains to them what to do and what to look for.
Armanda Shackelford says that because her son Gerald is not incarcerated alone, she speaks at protests in support of all prisoners.
Esther Hernandez, mother of the “Hernandez Brothers,” mobilizes people to show up at court hearings for all the victims since an empty courtroom could harm a case.
Mothers like Denice Bronis are trying to make sure her son, and all inmates, do not die in COVID-infested prisons and jails. Regina Russell and Rosemary Cade are demanding the state of Illinois change the ways it investigates torture claims.
The current structure, Torture Investigation Relief Committee (TIRC), entails a lengthy process, taking on average ten years to resolve. Even if the TIRC finally determines that an individual has a valid claim of torture, a judge can still deny the claim in court at the drop of a hat.
Bertha Escamilla is fighting to hold the officers, judges and prosecutors with whom they worked accountable for violating the rights of torture survivors with impunity.
Christina Borizov is fighting for her son and other inmates to be adequately treated for health problems like diabetes, kidney failure, heart conditions, hypertension and blood clots. Together, mothers of the kidnapped are fighting so that no mother—and no person—will ever have to suffer at the hands of the police.
To be sure, there is excruciating pain and there are tears, and the road to healing never ends. Yet we can no longer allow our reactions to mothers of police violence victims begin and end with mere pity. Mothers of the kidnapped, like enslaved Black mothers, mothers of children in ICE prison camps, or mothers of prisoners of war are affirming what they want, and it is not our pity. It is action.
Their activism models for all of us what we should be doing if we really want to end police violence, and it’s much more than grief.
It’s also about justice. That’s why they do not need our pity. They need solidarity in whatever form that might take, whether it’s protest, pressuring public officials or voting.
Originally posted at abolitionjournal.org here on June 18, 2020
Radical Mothering for Abolitionist Futures Post–COVID–19
By Nadine Naber, Souzan Naser, and Johnaé Strong
The initial effects of COVID-19 coupled with the current uprisings against police violence have torn us from our common sense of normalcy. This sudden shift in the toxic state of living under the violence of racial capitalism, white supremacy, and settler colonialism affords us the opportunity to uplift centuries of communal wisdom that abound all around us. The current pandemic made it increasingly apparent that capitalism, not simply COVID-19, is the disaster.
The killing by white vigilantes (including an ex-cop) of Ahmaud Arbery on February 23, and the police killings of Breonna Taylor on March 13, George Floyd on May 25 and Tony McDade on May 27 reignited the righteous anger stemming from 500 years of U.S. state violence. In this moment of mass anxiety at the loss of work and economic security, these uprisings have expressed outright refusal against continued abuse by a country built upon the mass genocide of Black and Indigenous peoples.
Five years ago, when abolition began to hit mainstream conversation, adages of “burn it all down” never led to its physical manifestation in a concerted sense. Now, as images circulate of the Minneapolis police department on fire and Black bodies raging and protesting in the streets, it is a new moment, a legitimately defiant one. This system no longer serves us. It has never served us. It must fall.
This system no longer serves us. It has never served us. It must fall.
The violence surrounding state responses to COVID has bolstered ongoing campaigns to defund police and invest in community institutions such as schools and healthcare. As people struggle to adjust to these extraordinary conditions of a global pandemic and mass uprisings, our hope lies in the end of generations of genocide and the beginnings of a new world based upon alternative ways of being in the world.
The values of mutual aid and collective care that environmental justice and abolitionist social movements, disability justice activists, regenerative or feminist economy movements, Indigenous people and others have been calling for are taking hold in the everyday practices of local communities. At this moment, we believe our movements have a great deal to learn from one group of people in particular—mothers and caretakers trapped within the prison industrial complex.
George Floyd spent his last, final breaths amongst us calling, calling, calling, for his mother.
Tamika Palmer has now spoken out to fight for the lost life of her daughter, Breonna Taylor, joining the mothers of Kalief Browder, Trayvon Martin, and Tamir Rice.
All of these heartbreaking stories, coupled with the invisible histories of state violence against Black mothers, which reach back to the rape and sexual assault of enslaved African women as a means for reproducing enslaved people in service to White capital to the killing of black mothers like Korryn Gaines, bring to stark light that people who do the labor of mothering are expected to accelerate the progress of capital and serve as nurturers for their family and community systems, all while enduring systematic targeting—including murder–by the same state apparatus from which they are fighting to protect their loved ones.
As a result, mothers trapped within the prison industrial complex in one way or another have been modeling what it looks like to integrate care work (often conceived of as “service”) and political organizing as part of a collective, revolutionary project. Yet all along, the labor, visions, and strategies of these very individuals tend to remain invisible within many social movements in ways that we have an opportunity now to uplift and reconsider.
There has long existed in many of our organizing spaces a silent devaluing of the realm of reproduction, including mothering and caretaking, whether biological or non-biological.While those who are mothering attend, lead, and assume the responsibility of caretaker in organizing spaces, it is often true that our positions as anchors of our movements’ micro-communities are overlooked as opposed to engaged as an asset.
As a result, mothers trapped within the prison industrial complex in one way or another have been modeling what it looks like to integrate care work (often conceived of as “service”) and political organizing as part of a collective, revolutionary project.
The increased neoliberal professionalization of organizing puts pressure on movements to focus on and respond to questions about the metrics of productivity, such as: how many actions are able to be executed, how many members are joining, and how many dollars can be raised in grant funding? Core principles of relationship-building and collaborative thinking suffer due to the need for more campaigns, more rallies, and more wins—understandable priorities. On the ground, social movement resistance to the neo-liberal professionalization of activism reinstates the discrepancy in value between “political organizing” and “service,” and has the effect of intentionally or unintentionally reinforcing the devaluing of mothering and caretaking forms of labor.
Context: Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity
We co-founded the collective Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity (MAMAS) in Chicago to resist the interconnected systems of prisons, anti-immigrant violence, war and colonization, with a focus on uplifting the movement possibilities of mother-survivors of these systems. Here, we dive into our work around prisons by focusing on practices of mothering among people who have been incarcerated themselves or those with children currently or previously incarcerated.
Like many feminist abolitionists have been saying, we insist that the violence of prisons extends far beyond prison walls into working class families, neighborhoods, and Black and Brown communities. A number of folks active in MAMAS are mothering individuals who were physically or psychologically tortured by police into making false confessions, and identify as survivors of police and prison violence in their own right.
As Mary L. Johnson, mother of police torture survivor Michael Johnson, puts itwhen reflecting on the ripple effect of prisons on her own life: “As long as my son is doing life, I’m a lifer.” Chicago is home to a powerful movement that has won reparations for police violence and continues to demand justice around police violence and prison abolition. Chicago’s torture survivors have served or are still serving long prison sentences. Our work draws upon this long history of organizing and collective knowledge production around prison abolition in Chicago, as well as our personal histories as people of Arab and African descent who have been mothering under these systems of oppression, in addition to the fierce and unapologetic body of scholarship-activism on revolutionary mothering.
We work from a number of important assumptions; that
People who mother incarcerated individuals are survivors of gender violence, specifically reproductive injustice, given that
the state violently denies them the ability to mother and to care for and protect their children, and
the criminal justice system blatantly covers up state violence by calling their mothering into question, assuming that unfit parenting is to blame for their child’s “criminality;”
That the purpose of the criminal justice system is to serve and protect white supremacy and racial capitalism; and
We have to care for ourselves and each other on the long road to justice.
In our work, we use the idea of mothering to refer to reproductive forms of labor that have, historically, been specifically gendered as female/feminine while at the same time we recognize that such caring work is not performed exclusively by those recognized as women and/or by those biologically related to those receiving care.
The Power of Mutual Aid and Identification on Behalf of the Collective
Regina Russell, mother of torture survivor Tamon Russell, says when she first met Armanda, mother of torture survivor Gerald Reed, she turned to her union brother, Joe, and whispered to him, “She’s telling my story.” Regina describes feeling helpless and suffering in silence until she connected with Armanda’s strength, which gave her permission to break her own silence and share for the first time, in public, the story of what happened to her own son. Armanda says she is going to stay in the fight to release her son until the bitter end because there are so many others going through the same struggle.
While folks like Regina and Armanda call on their courage and use their voices to advocate and care for themselves, their children, the children of the other mothers, and all incarcerated people, they insist on the interconnectedness of care work and political organizing. This dual strategy has the effect of breaking down capitalist forms of isolation and individualism that take a disproportionate toll on their lives as they take on the state in a demand for justice.
JeNae Taylor, while working as the Fellowship Coordinator for the National Bailout Collective, talked with us about the power of connection between mothers impacted by incarceration:
…for them to embrace each other and be like “Yo! What’s up?” and say “Hello” and introduce themselves because cages isolate us intentionally and for folks to have one experience [of] cages and be a part of the mass bailout and do a deep dive of political education to get answers to the questions they have answers to and to meet each other and anticipate the glow up it fulfilled at that moment– I will never forget. I think that is the coolest thing because we get to tear down isolation and be a part of fellowship together.
Connecting with each other provides nourishment and breaking the isolation that comes with living with the ripple effects of incarceration. Bella, founder of Sister Survivor Network and daughter to parents who were incarcerated, tells us she learns collective ways of being from her mother’s incarceration:
What my mother and other folks she knows that have been incarcerated do is give themselves permission to see themselves in a different way, as valuable and not disposable. I want to follow in my mother’s footsteps. She has never left any of her friends behind. I have had my mother’s examples to show me that in real life and real time.
Indeed, building such a collective sense of self constitutes a challenge to neoliberalism’s prioritization of the individual—and profit–over all else. Folks who work with MAMAS are able to model collective ways of being for each other and for anyone willing to look at incarceration through a critical lens. At the mercy of courts, often excluded from access to adequate legal aid and information about the law or courts, and excluded from professional networks connected to the criminal justice system, activists with MAMAS combine sharing knowledge as a practice of collective care and as political resistance.
Bertha Escamilla’s son, torture survivor Nick Eschamilla, was released in 2008, but Bertha continues to collect data on the cases of all Chicago’s torture survivors, including many tortured by cops whose violence is not yet publicly known and of those who have yet to qualify for reparations. Mothers, loved ones, lawyers, researchers and activists have all relied on the data she shares–including information on ninety-two cases of police violence– to seek justice. She looks into police reports, locates information about each case, contacts family members by phone or meets them at the courthouse, and explains to them what to do and what to look for.
Reflecting on the need for collective informationsharing and relationship-building, Bertha explains:
We are put into this situation where we don’t have any knowledge of what we’re supposed to do. We’re not educated to know about the law. We are factory workers or just driving a bus. We [mothers] encourage other mothers to look for things pertaining to their case so they know what to ask the lawyers. We do this with a lot of the families.
Forced to learn the law and figure it out collectively, Bertha and other activists with MAMAS replace a corporate individualist system that depends on control over people and knowledge for the purposes of exploitation with a horizontal system of knowledge-sharing for the purposes of resistance. In community, they are caring for each other and those behind bars through both emotional support and fighting for justice on the premise that organizing and care are simultaneously revolutionary. Here, collective care-work is a way of life, born out of the realities of mothering while being targeted by prisons and police.
Bella remembers how her mother, who served years in prison, continued to write letters to her still incarcerated friends and to their children after she was released: “I see a whole lot of women in my family who take on those roles. It’s not really amplified in a way that a lot of other work is because it is not work for them. It is life.”
Caring for incarcerated people extends far beyond the individual and far beyond biology to include extended relatives, friends, and neighbors as central actors in collective mothering and caretaking. Armanda describes how her work against state violence will continue long after her son, Gerald, is released from prison:
I have had some people tell me when Gerald gets out your fight is over, but NO my fight is just beginning. Thinking about what I have been through and the people that were there to support me and thinking there are other men locked up in prison some whose families are gone and some of them their mothers are no longer around. I talk to some of those young men out there in those facilities. Gerald puts me on the phone to talk to them because they have nobody else. That is what I am fighting for. He [Gerald] is not there by himself.
Esther Hernandez, whose sons are Juan and Rosendo, says she is fighting for everyone, not only her own child:
Every year in November we hold a potluck and fill out Christmas cards for all of them [inmates incarcerated with her sons]. The ones who are out tell me we are giving them hope. We are all here to fight for our loved ones. Together we have something to offer. All around Chicago, there is corruption with the police and we want to let people know it is going on.
Indeed, folks connected to MAMAS care for many individuals to whom they are not biologically related. Kathy Wanek Levettman’s best friend’s son, Matthew Echevarria, is an incarcerated torture survivor. As Kathy puts it, “The thing is, I love him too now. I have my own personal relationship with him, that’s why I don’t drop out.” Likewise, Bertha regularly visits and speaks to prisoners on the phone over a decade after her biological son’s release: “I am involved with anyone who has loved ones incarcerated.”
They work tirelessly not only to support those they love, but also to send a message to the criminal justice system and to society more broadly. They reject narrowly conceived definitions of family and take collective responsibility for each other’s children, caring and demanding justice all at once. When they show up in the courtroom for each other, they are deliberate about the message it sends, as Esther explains:
The judges look at that. When judges see an empty courtroom, it could harm your case. I always tell people, “Let’s go.” Our community was a target by the corrupted cops so our thing is to bring awareness. We like to support whenever there is a court hearing for the guys. We do rallies in front of the courthouse and we want to expose these detectives for the corruption they have done.
This collective care-work thus serves very practical purposes such as the sharing of information and resources, but it also has symbolic power. Being present to witness and support each other’s struggles disrupts the 1950’s heteropatriarchal-capitalist ideal of the “nuclear family” –and rejects the negative stigmatization of those who are incarcerated as well as those who love them. Caring for one another unleashes collective organizing power—whether it is by mobilizing people to show up in court or raising the political consciousness of people unaware of the racist and corrupt police and prison systems.
Mamas Leading the Way Forward
Nationalist, colonialist, and capitalist forces seekto devalue and exploit individuals, families, and communities; people who mother have long been targets of these systems because the caring work they do stand as obstacles to this process. In Chicago, mother-survivors share a fierce determination to collectively challenge repressive systems and corporate vultures who profit from incarceration. They nurture one another, declare their love for each other, and seek not only to bring their own children home, but also to expose and protest the inhumanity of the entire prison system. As they integrate care and collective unity with resistance, they are a force to be reckoned with. While they stand on the front lines of the fight for future generations, social movements of all types would do well to let them lead by example.
If the aim of abolition is to build another, better society and if the current surge of support for Black Lives Matter and for defunding and abolishing police make the violent injustices of capitalist control ever more visible, then we need a renewed commitment to horizontal politics, collective labor and to recognizing the often invisible and highly gendered forms of work that enable social movements to survive and thrive.
Left-leaning social movement rhetoric often insists that “we are not a direct service organization,” as if to imply that providing services and support is somehow disconnected from the loftier political goals of justice and liberation. Collective practices of mothering show that dismantling harmful structures like the prison industrial complex must be an ongoing collective endeavor that recognizes the power and well-being of all sectors of our communities as essential resources. They show that mothering labor is movement work that must be nourished, uplifted, and contended with.
If the aim of abolition is to build another, better society and if the current surge of support for Black Lives Matter and for defunding and abolishing police make the violent injustices of capitalist control ever more visible, then we need a renewed commitment to horizontal politics, collective labor and to recognizing the often invisible and highly gendered forms of work that enable social movements to survive and thrive.
The ultimate outcome of this current pandemic and today’s mass uprisings remains unknown. One thing we have learned again and again, from contexts like NoDAPL, Tahrir Square, and far beyond, is that protests against militarized state violence require carework if the movement—or the revolution–is going to survive. Today, masses of protestors wear masks and use distance when possible, and care for one another in an unprecedented situation of protesting during pandemic, enacting the many ways of fighting for life while protecting life.
This time, we need to insist that no one takes for granted any longer the carework that has always been exceptionally urgent to our movements. Whether faced with extraordinary events such as natural disasters, political revolutions, virulent new diseases, or the mundane operations of violent institutions, the movement strategies of those who mother–centered upon the integration of care work and political organizing–constitute some of the most urgently collective ways of being in the world. Indeed, the labor of mothering in the face of state violence is an inherently radical act.
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