Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.
Michelle Alexander, highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University, and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, delivers the 30th Annual George E. Kent Lecture, in honor of the late George E. Kent, who was one of the earliest tenured African American professors at the University of Chicago.
The Annual George E. Kent Lecture is organized and sponsored by the Organization of Black Students, the Black Student Law Association, and the Students for a Free Society.
Angela Davis and Michelle Alexander - End Mass Incarceration - Riverside Church - September 14, 2012:
Angela Davis and Michelle Alexander take part in a panel discussion on the issue of mass incarceration at Riverside Church in New York City on September 14, 2012. They answer the questions of, what is the problem of mass incarceration and what does it say about the United States society?
by Michelle Alexander November 8, 2018 New York Times
IMAGE: Illustration by Yoshi Sodeoka; Photographs by Juanmonino and SensorSpot/E+, via Getty Images
In the midterms, Michigan became the first state in the Midwest to legalize marijuana, Florida restored the vote to over 1.4 million people with felony convictions, and Louisiana passed a constitutional amendment requiring unanimous jury verdicts in felony trials. These are the latest examples of the astonishing progress that has been made in the last several years on a wide range of criminal justice issues. Since 2010, when I published “The New Jim Crow” — which argued that a system of legal discrimination and segregation had been born again in this country because of the war on drugs and mass incarceration — there have been significant changes to drug policy, sentencing and re-entry, including “ban the box” initiatives aimed at eliminating barriers to employment for formerly incarcerated people. This progress is unquestionably good news, but there are warning signs blinking brightly. Many of the current reform efforts contain the seeds of the next generation of racial and social control, a system of “e-carceration” that may prove more dangerous and more difficult to challenge than the one we hope to leave behind. Bail reform is a case in point. Thanks in part to new laws and policies — as well as actions like the mass bailout of inmates in New York City jails that’s underway — the unconscionable practice of cash bail is finally coming to an end. In August, California became the first state to decide to get rid of its cash bail system; last year, New Jersey virtually eliminated the use of money bonds. But what’s taking the place of cash bail may prove even worse in the long run. In California, a presumption of detention will effectively replace eligibility for immediate release when the new law takes effect in October 2019. And increasingly, computer algorithms are helping to determine who should be caged and who should be set “free.” Freedom — even when it’s granted, it turns out — isn’t really free. Under new policies in California, New Jersey, New York and beyond, “risk assessment” algorithms recommend to judges whether a person who’s been arrested should be released. These advanced mathematical models — or “weapons of math destruction” as data scientist Cathy O’Neil calls them — appear colorblind on the surface but they are based on factors that are not only highly correlated with race and class, but are also significantly influenced by pervasive bias in the criminal justice system. As O’Neil explains, “It’s tempting to believe that computers will be neutral and objective, but algorithms are nothing more than opinions embedded in mathematics.” Challenging these biased algorithms may be more difficult than challenging discrimination by the police, prosecutors and judges. Many algorithms are fiercely guarded corporate secrets. Those that are transparent — you can actually read the code — lack a public audit so it’s impossible to know how much more often they fail for people of color. Even if you’re lucky enough to be set “free” from a brick-and-mortar jail thanks to a computer algorithm, an expensive monitoring device likely will be shackled to your ankle — a GPS tracking device provided by a private company that may charge you around $300 per month, an involuntary leasing fee. Your permitted zones of movement may make it difficult or impossible to get or keep a job, attend school, care for your kids or visit family members. You’re effectively sentenced to an open-air digital prison, one that may not extend beyond your house, your block or your neighborhood. One false step (or one malfunction of the GPS tracking device) will bring cops to your front door, your workplace, or wherever they find you and snatch you right back to jail. Who benefits from this? Private corporations. According to a report released last month by the Center for Media Justice, four large corporations — including the GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies — have most of the private contracts to provide electronic monitoring for people on parole in some 30 states, giving them a combined annual revenue of more than $200 million just for e-monitoring. Companies that earned millions on contracts to run or serve prisons have, in an era of prison restructuring, begun to shift their business model to add electronic surveillance and monitoring of the same population. Even if old-fashioned prisons fade away, the profit margins of these companies will widen so long as growing numbers of people find themselves subject to perpetual criminalization, surveillance, monitoring and control. Who loses? Nearly everyone. A recent analysis by a Brookings Institution fellow found that “efforts to reduce recidivism through intensive supervision are not working.” Reducing the requirements and burdens of community supervision, so that people can more easily hold jobs, care for children and escape the stigma of criminality “would be a good first step toward breaking the vicious incarceration cycle,” the report said. Many reformers rightly point out that an ankle bracelet is preferable to a prison cell. Yet I find it difficult to call this progress. As I see it, digital prisons are to mass incarceration what Jim Crow was to slavery. If you asked slaves if they would rather live with their families and raise their own children, albeit subject to “whites only signs,” legal discrimination and Jim Crow segregation, they’d almost certainly say: I’ll take Jim Crow. By the same token, if you ask prisoners whether they’d rather live with their families and raise their children, albeit with nearly constant digital surveillance and monitoring, they’d almost certainly say: I’ll take the electronic monitor. I would too. But hopefully we can now see that Jim Crow was a less restrictive form of racial and social control, not a real alternative to racial caste systems. Similarly, if the goal is to end mass incarceration and mass criminalization, digital prisons are not an answer. They’re just another way of posing the question. Some insist that e-carceration is “a step in the right direction.” But where are we going with this? A growing number of scholars and activists predict that “e-gentrification” is where we’re headed as entire communities become trapped in digital prisons that keep them locked out of neighborhoods where jobs and opportunity can be found. If that scenario sounds far-fetched, keep in mind that mass incarceration itself was unimaginable just 40 years ago and that it was born partly out of well-intentioned reforms — chief among them mandatory sentencing laws that liberal proponents predicted would reduce racial disparities in sentencing. While those laws may have looked good on paper, they were passed within a political climate that was overwhelmingly hostile and punitive toward poor people and people of color, resulting in a prison-building boom, an increase in racial and class disparities in sentencing, and a quintupling of the incarcerated population. Fortunately, a growing number of advocates are organizing to ensure that important reforms, such as ending cash bail, are not replaced with systems that view poor people and people of color as little more than commodities to be bought, sold, evaluated and managed for profit. In July, more than 100 civil rights, faith, labor, legal and data science groups released a shared statement of concerns regarding the use of pretrial risk assessment instruments; numerous bail reform groups, such as Chicago Community Bond Fund, actively oppose the expansion of e-carceration. If our goal is not a better system of mass criminalization, but instead the creation of safe, caring, thriving communities, then we ought to be heavily investing in quality schools, job creation, drug treatment and mental health care in the least advantaged communities rather than pouring billions into their high-tech management and control. Fifty years ago, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned that “when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” We failed to heed his warning back then. Will we make a different choice today? A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 10, 2018, on Page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: The Newest Jim Crow. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michelle Alexander became a New York Times columnist in 2018. She is a civil rights lawyer and advocate, legal scholar and author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” IMAGE: Illustration by Yoshi Sodeoka; Photographs by Juanmonino and SensorSpot/E+, via Getty Images
"What's Past is Prologue..."
Social Justice Speaker Series: Dr. Michelle Alexander
Social Justice Speaker Series: Dr. Michelle Alexander
**PLEASE NOTE: Ms. Alexander begins speaking @32:40
ABOUT THE LECTURER:
Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer, advocate, legal scholar and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. (The New Press, 2010, 2020)
The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back From Anti-Lynching to Abolition by Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen Haymarket Books, 2024
[Publication date: April 2, 2024]
The
story of the fight against fascism across the African diaspora,
revealing that Black antifascism has always been vital to global freedom
struggles.
At once a history for understanding fascism and a handbook for organizing against, The Black Antifascist Tradition is an essential book for understanding our present moment and the challenges ahead.
From
London to the Caribbean, from Ethiopia to Harlem, from Black Lives
Matter to abolition, Black radicals and writers have long understood
fascism as a threat to the survival of Black people around the world—and
to everyone.
In The Black Antifascist Tradition,
scholar-activists Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen show how generations
of Black activists and intellectuals—from Ida B. Wells in the fight
against lynching, to Angela Y. Davis in the fight against the
prison-industrial complex—have stood within a tradition of Black
Antifascism.
As Davis once observed, pointing to the importance
of anti-Black racism in the development of facism as an ideology, Black
people have been “the first and most deeply injured victims of fascism.”
Indeed, the experience of living under and resisting racial capitalism
has often made Black radicals aware of the potential for fascism to take
hold long before others understood this danger.
The book
explores the powerful ideas and activism of Paul Robeson, Mary McLeod
Bethune, Claudia Jones, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire,
and Walter Rodney, as well as that of the Civil Rights Congress, the
Black Liberation Army, and the We Charge Genocide movement, among
others.
In shining a light on fascism and anti-Blackness, Hope
and Mullen argue, the writers and organizers featured in this book have
also developed urgent tools and strategies for overcoming it.
REVIEWS:
"This
introduction to the Black anti-fascist tradition is a necessary
intervention for our increasingly dangerous and authoritarian times.
Drawing on Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, Angela Davis, and more,
Hope and Mullen offer an accessible history and strategies for forward
movement." —Ms. Magazine
"The Black Antifascist Tradition
gives us the materials we need to face an uncertain future. The book
gives us the possibility of hope based on histories and trajectories it
maps and recovers. This remarkable book documents how those who began
the struggle against anti-Black racism were always already 'pre-mature
antifascists.'" —David Palumbo-Liu, author of Speaking Out of Place
"As we confront, arguably, the greatest assault on our already severely limited form of liberal democracy, The Black Antifascist Tradition is
essential reading for not only diagnosing the problems that we face,
but rather for providing us with historical tools to fight ascendant
fascism and right wing authoritarianism in the United States. Drawing
inspiration from Octavia Butler to anti-lynching campaigns and the 'We
Charge Genocide' movement, Hope and Mullen offer a powerful lens onto
the Black Radical Tradition that moves the discussion of fascism from a
narrow focus on interwar Europe to the transnational questions of racial
apartheid, settler colonialism and anti-Black racism. Beautifully
written and cogently argued, this book is a must read for this moment. I
can’t wait to assign it in my undergraduate and graduate classes." —Donna Murch, author, Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives
"The
Black Antifascist Tradition is a primer on the history and legacy of
over a century of Black antifascist activism. This timely collection
introduces readers to the political organizing, theoretical
interventions and world-making of some of the leading change makers and
theorists of our times. This book is the missing link between present
and past that is so urgently needed as a new generation confronts a new
manifestation of old problem. A must read and infusion of hope." —Robyn
C. Spencer-Antoine, Associate professsor of African American Studies
and History at Wayne State University and author of The Revolution has
Come: Black power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland
"The
Roman slave empire ruled by punishment and death, flogging, and
beheading. The bundle of rods with a protruding axe
blade—the fasces—were both means of execution and emblem of sovereign
power. Ever since, incarceration and systematic premature death have
remained the foundation of fascism. The Black Antifascist Tradition is
an absolutely needed chronicle showing how Black people lead
antifascism. It begins with Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Red Record against
lynching in the early twentieth century and concludes with the new
abolitionism against the carceral and death-dealing state in the
twenty-first century. In between are the essential campaigns by the
thinkers an actors of Pan-Africanism (1930s), Double Victory (1940s), We
Charge Genocide (1950s), Black Power (1960s), and the anarchist
antagonistic autonomy of our times, which have fought for life and for
our commons." —Peter Linebaugh, author, The Magna Carta Manifesto
"The Black Antifascist Tradition offers
an indispensable framing that places Black experience at the center to
show how anti-Blackness is inseparable from the development of US
fascism, past and present. Through a crisp synthesis of essential
writings by Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, William
Patterson, Huey P. Newton, Angela Y. Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and
Mariame Kaba, Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen make a compelling
argument for reconceptualizing a race-based history of Black life
through the lens of racialized fascism. An important read for anyone
interested in understanding how we arrived at today’s US style of
authoritarianism and state repression." —Diane Fujino, author, Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama
"From
the sophisticated understanding of law as an agent of fascism
articulated in the anti-lynching activism of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, to
the abolitionist theorization of fascism as both a theory of
anti-Blackness and a structure of oppression by scholar-activists such
as Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis; and with explorations of
anti-colonialism, antiwar movements, and Black Power along the way, The Black Antifascist Tradition offers
a careful history of Black thought and art by way of a celebration of
the exquisite threads of antifascism woven inextricably into the Black
Radical Tradition. Hope and Mullen detail the ways the Black Radical
Tradition has not simply always been antifascist but that it has been
powerfully, effectively, originally responsible for formulating
antifascist analysis and strategy." —Micol Seigel, author, Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police "The Black Antifascist Tradition is
a handbook a century in the making. It is a historical synthesis of how
the forerunners of anti-colonial struggle, Pan-Africanism, and Black
revolutionary theory and practice identified and confronted fascist
emergence and organization from a local to an international scale and
across the formative epochs. Richly detailed and thoroughly researched,
this highly accessible and readable text is also wide-angled and
multi-layered in scope--adeptly interconnecting people, places, events,
and actions with their resultant insights, observations, and practical
formulations. This book is the complete exposition of Black antifascist
thought, and a necessary guide for the antifascist struggles of
today." —Justin Akers Chacón, author, Radicals in the Barrio
"Jeanelle
K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen have written the definitive history for one
of the most important, and least discussed, pieces of the antifascist
movement. Weaving together historical analysis, trenchant critique, and
future visioning, this is one of the most important books on antifascism
ever written." —Shane Burley, author, Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse
"The Black Anti-Fascist Tradition is
a dazzling work of reclamation and admonition that simultaneously
reaches into the folds of past and future to make an urgent, formidable
case that fascism, capitalism, and anti-Black violence are profoundly
interconnected. Hope and Mullen give voice to activists and
intellectuals of two centuries with compelling clarity. They have
produced a volume providing an astute and knowledgeable guide to a
complex legacy with which every partisan of 'freedom dreams' needs to
critically engage." —Alan Wald, author,Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade
"Through
the dialectic of 'Anti-black Fascism' and the 'Black Antifascist
Tradition,' Jeanelle Hope and Bill V. Mullen expertly convey how African
descendant antifascists in the United States and beyond developed a
unique interpretation of the fascist threat through their experience of,
and fightback against, Jim Crow, Euro-American (settler) colonialism
and imperialism, and policies and practices of white supremacy. A
stunning work of historical recovery, political analysis, and critical
interpretation, The Black Antifascist Tradition reads guerrilla
intellectuals like Ida B. Wells and Ruth Wilson Gilmore into the
tradition of Black Antifascism, highlights prominent Black Antifascists
like Aimé Césaire and George Jackson, and recovers lesser-known critics
of Anti-Black Fascism like Thyra Edwards and Lorenzo Kom’boa Irvin. In
doing so, it not only makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship on
the Black radical tradition (or the Tradition of Radical Blackness),
but also paves the way for deeper and more serious study of antifascisms
emanating from Black realities. In our current moment of naked acts of
genocide, intensified racialized police and military violence, and the
bold resurgence of rightwing authoritarianism, Hope and Mullen, and the
freedom fighters they examine, remind us of the long and rich praxis of
resistance on which we can—and must—build. Everything is at stake."
—Charisse Burden-Stelly, author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States and co-editor of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing
"In The Black Antifascist Tradition,
Hope and Mullen unearth a distinct and underacknowledged lineage of
Black antifascist organizing, from Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the
anti-lynching movement to Black Lives Matter and the struggle for police
abolition. Drawing on the contributions of past and present thinkers
and activists, this book offers an essential overview of the ways that
Black radicals have understood the relationship between fascism and
white supremacy and organized to confront both. The book introduces
readers to a history of Black internationalist and antifascist
organizing, including lesser-known campaigns by Black soldiers during
the Spanish Civil War and the Black Panther Party’s United Front Against
Fascism. In so doing, the authors raise provocative arguments about the
existential violence Black people experience even under 'normal'
conditions of capitalist exploitation, underscoring the role of
anti-Black racism in anticipating the rise of fascism long before its
formal ascent to power. Importantly, Hope and Mullen show how resisting
the conditions that threaten Black life in particular has produced
strategies that are equally relevant to struggles against violent,
anti-democratic movements everywhere. By broadening our horizons around
what counts as antifascist organizing, The Black Antifascist
Tradition insists on the inseparability of antifascism from the struggle
for Black liberation." —Haley Pessin, coeditor, Voices of a People's History of the United States in the Twenty-First Century
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Jeanelle K. Hope
is the Director and Associate Professor of African American Studies at
Prairie View A&M University. She is a native of Oakland, California,
and a scholar-activist, having formerly been engaged in organizing with
Socialist Alternative, Black Lives Matter-Sacramento, and various
campus groups, and as a current member of Democratic Socialists of
America. Her work has been published in several academic journals and
public outlets, including The American Studies Journal, Amerasia Journal, Black Camera, Essence, and The Forum Magazine. She lives in Houston, Texas.
Bill V. Mullen
is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue. He is a long-time
activist and organizer. He is currently a member of the editorial
collective for the United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural
Boycott of Israel, and is a co-founder of the Campus Antifascist
Network. His other books include James Baldwin: Living in Fire, Un-American: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution,Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Politics, Afro-Orientalism, and Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy by Isaac Arnsdorf Little, Brown and Company
[Publication date: April 9, 2024]
The immersive, captivating
untold story of the mass radicalization of the Republican Party in the
aftermath of January 6, 2021, entrenching the political power of a
radical right-wing movement dedicated to dismantling democracy itself.
Inspired by Donald Trump’s election lies, a growing movement of
grassroots activists mobilized around the country to pick up where the
insurrection left off, laying the groundwork to succeed next time where
Trump had failed to keep himself in power. But their own success in
taking over and purging the Republican Party became their undoing as it
drove away moderates and supplied the Democrats with a winning message
in the 2022 midterms. Still, the MAGA Republicans proved uninterested in
learning from that defeat, only becoming more extreme, divisive, and
dead set on returning Trump to power.
Washington Post
national political reporter Isaac Arnsdorf has spent years at the
forefront of reporting on this growing movement. Drawing on extensive,
exclusive on-the-ground reporting around the country, and deepened by
historical context, Arnsdorf has produced the defining journalistic
account of the origins, evolution and future of the MAGA movement.
Combining critical and rigorous reporting with the intimacy and
complexity of a novel, this book is unlike any other in the decade since
Donald Trump convulsed and transformed American politics.
Finish What We Started
tells the story of the ordinary Americans driving this change, who they
are and where they came from, what motivates them, and what their
movement means for the survival of American democracy.
REVIEWS
"Isaac
has a great eye for a story, and hangs out with people we all need to
know. I was thrilled to run some of the early reporting from this book
on our radio show, and I’m sobered to see how it all played out in the
months after. An entertaining, enlightening and disturbing book."―Ira Glass, host of This American Life
“Finish What We Started
is a bracing, deeply reported dispatch from the front lines of the MAGA
movement — a movement that, as Isaac Arnsdorf convincingly shows here,
is more radical and determined than ever as it gathers force for Trump’s
campaign to reclaim the White House.”―Joshua Green, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Devil’s Bargain
“Isaac
Arnsdorf is a political journalist par excellence, whose work is shaped
by deep, immersive reporting, perceptive analysis and a keen
understanding of history. Finish What We Started
is a sophisticated yet unnerving portrait of the MAGA movement and a
stark preview of what a second Trump term might portend. This is urgent
and essential reading for anyone who cares about the state of America’s
democracy.”―Philip Rucker, co-author of the New York Times bestselling A Very Stable Genius
“Isaac
Arnsdorf ventures beyond the punditry of Washington, D.C and delivers a
revealing, distinctive look at how our nation's democracy might be
forever changed. Peppered with scoops and fresh insight, Finish What We Started manages to be both spritely and ominous, a closely-reported depiction of the reorientation of modern politics.” ―Robert
Samuels, New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer-Prize winning co-author
of His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial
Justice
"This book is extraordinary. By turning the
lens away from the palace intrigues that crowd far too many Trump books,
patiently earning the trust of his most devoted grassroots followers to
document without adornment what they actually say and think instead,
Isaac Arnsdorf has provided an invaluable service for future historians.
But youcan read it now. And you must. Your jaw will drop. Even mine did."―Rick Perlstein, author of Reaganland
“Many
have been surprised at the radicalization of the Republican Party by
fringe extremists but Isaac Arnsdorf, a talented young political
reporter has been ahead of this story from the start. Now, in vivid and
chilling detail he takes readers inside the grassroots of the MAGA
movement as its foot soldiers fight to take over not just the
Republican Party, but the entire country. Anyone trying to understand
how America has come to the brink of embracing authoritarianism in 2024
should read this engagingly told yet terrifying book.”―Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
"An eye-opening look at how a fringe effected a hostile takeover of a once-mainstream political party."―Kirkus
"Washington Post
journalist Arnsdorf debuts with a raucous recap of the evolution of
Trumpism since the 2020 election via the 'Precinct Strategy,' a movement
encouraging adherents to join the Republican Party’s lowest ranks as
precinct committeemen, from which vantage point they can oust moderate
Republican leaders and promote MAGA primary candidates...It’s an
entertaining and insightful look at the Republican Party in extremis."―Publishers Weekly
“In Finish What We Started, Isaac Arnsdorf, a reporter at The Washington Post,
offers the first extended examination of Trump’s remarkable rise from
the depths of his humiliation after the failed January 6 coup to his
resurgence as the Republican front-runner… Filled with telling anecdotes
and vivid prose, his book provides an essential guide to understanding
Trump’s political resilience. He suggests that the 2022 midterm
elections were the closest America has come to being seized by a far
right fringe that is redoubling its efforts to orchestrate an
authoritarian seizure of power in 2024.”―Jacob Heilbrunn, Washington Monthly
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Isaac Arnsdorf is
a national political reporter for The Washington Post who covers former
president Donald Trump, the “Make America Great Again” political
movement, and the elected officials, activists, donors and media figures
on the right who are powering the Republican Party. He was previously
an investigative reporter covering national politics at ProPublica and a
money-in-politics reporter at Politico. His reporting on President
Trump's agenda for veterans won the Sidney Hillman Foundation's Sidney
Award and the National Press Club's Sandy Hume Award. Finish What We Startedis his first book.
Is This The End of Academic Freedom April 5, 2024 New York Times
By Paula Chakravartty and Vasuki Nesiah
[Dr. Chakravartty is a professor of media, communication and culture at New York University, where Dr. Nesiah is a professor of practice in human rights and international law.]
At New York University, the spring semester began with a poetry reading. Students and faculty gathered in the atrium of Bobst Library. At that time, about 26,000 Palestinians had already been killed in Israel’s horrific war on Gaza; the reading was a collective act of bearing witness.
The last poem read aloud was titled “If I Must Die.” It was written, hauntingly, by a Palestinian poet and academic named Refaat Alareer who was killed weeks earlier by an Israeli airstrike. The poem ends: “If I must die, let it bring hope — let it be a tale.”
Soon after those lines were recited, the university administration shut the reading down. Afterward, we learned that students and faculty members were called into disciplinary meetings for participating in this apparently “disruptive” act; written warnings were issued.
We have both taught at N.Y.U. for over a decade and believe we are in a moment of unparalleled repression. Over the past six months, since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, we have seen the university administration fail to adequately protect dissent on campus, actively squelching it instead. We believe what we are witnessing in response to student, staff and faculty opposition to the war violates the very foundations of academic freedom.
While N.Y.U. says that it remains committed to free expression on campus and that its rules about and approach to protest activity haven’t changed, students and faculty members in solidarity with the Palestinian people have found the campus environment alarmingly constrained.
About a week after Hamas’s attacks in October, the Grand Staircase in the Kimmel student center, a storied site of student protests, closed indefinitely; it has yet to reopen fully. A graduate student employee was reprimanded for putting up fliers in support of Palestinians on the student’s office door and ultimately took them down; that person is not the only N.Y.U. student to face some form of disciplinary consequence for pro-Palestinian speech or action. A resolution calling for the university to reaffirm protection of pro-Palestinian speech and civic activity on campus, passed by the elected Student Government Assembly in December, has apparently been stuck in a procedural black hole since.
The New York Police Department has become a pervasive presence on campus, with over 6,000 hours of officer presence added after the war broke out. Hundreds of faculty members have signed onto an open letter condemning the university’s “culture of fear about campus speech and activism.”
Such draconian interventions are direct threats to academic freedom.
At universities across the country, any criticism of Israel’s policies, expressions of solidarity with Palestinians, organized calls for a cease-fire or even pedagogy on the recent history of the land have all emerged as perilous speech. In a letter to university presidents in November, the A.C.L.U. expressed concern about “impermissible chilling of free speech and association on campus” in relation to pro-Palestinian student groups and views; since then, the atmosphere at colleges has become downright McCarthyite.
The donors, trustees, administrators and third parties who oppose pro-Palestinian speech seem to equate any criticism of the State of Israel — an occupying power under international law and one accused of committing war crimes — with antisemitism. To them, the norms of free speech are inherently problematic, and a broad definition of antisemitism is a tool for censorship. Outside funding has poured into horrifying doxxing and harassment campaigns. Pro-Israel surveillance groups like Canary Mission and CAMERA relentlessly target individuals and groups deemed antisemitic or critical of Israel. Ominous threats follow faculty and students for just expressing their opinions or living out their values.
To be clear, we abhor all expressions of antisemitism and wholeheartedly reject any role for antisemitism on our campuses. Equally, we believe that conflating criticism of Israel or Zionism with antisemitism is dangerous. Equating the criticism of any nation with inherent racism endangers basic democratic freedoms on and off campus. As the A.C.L.U. wrote in its November statement, a university “cannot fulfill its mission as a forum for vigorous debate” if it polices the views of faculty members and students, however much any of us may disagree with them or find them offensive.
In a wave of crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech nationwide, students have had scholarships revoked, job offers pulled and student groups suspended. At Columbia, protesters have reported being sprayed by what they said was skunk, a chemical weapon used by the Israeli military; at Northwestern, two Black students faced criminal charges, later dropped, for publishing a pro-Palestinian newspaper parody; at Cornell, students were arrested during a peaceful protest. In a shocking episode of violence last fall, three Palestinian students, two of them wearing kaffiyehs, were shot while walking near the University of Vermont.
Many more cases of student repression on campuses are unfolding.
Academic freedom, as defined by the American Association of University Professors in the mid-20th century, provides protection for the pursuit of knowledge by faculty members, whose job is to educate, learn and research both inside and outside the academy. Not only does this resonate with the Constitution’s free speech protections; international human rights law also affirms the centrality of academic freedom to the right to education and the institutional autonomy of educational institutions.
Across the United States, attacks on free speech are on the rise. In recent years, right-wing groups opposed to the teaching of critical race theory have tried to undermine these principles through measures including restrictions on the discussion of history and structural racism in curriculums, heightened scrutiny of lectures and courses that are seen to promote dissent and disciplinary procedures against academics who work on these topics.
What people may not realize is that speech critical of Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies has long been censored, posing persistent challenges to those of us who uphold academic freedom. Well before Oct. 7, speech and action at N.Y.U. in support of Palestinians faced intense and undue scrutiny.
Our students are heeding Refaat Alareer’s call to bear witness. They are speaking out — writing statements, organizing protests and responding to a plausible threat of genocide with idealism and conviction. As faculty members, we believe that college should be a time when students are encouraged to ask big questions about justice and the future of humanity and to pursue answers however disquieting to the powerful.
Universities must be places where students have access to specialized knowledge that shapes contemporary debates, where faculty members are encouraged to be public intellectuals, even when, or perhaps especially when, they are expressing dissenting opinions speaking truth to power. Classrooms must allow for contextual learning, where rapidly mutating current events are put into a longer historical timeline.
This is a high-stakes moment. A century ago, attacks on open discussion of European antisemitism, the criminalization of dissent and the denial of Jewish histories of oppression and dispossession helped create the conditions for the Holocaust. One crucial “never again” lesson from that period is that the thought police can be dangerous. They can render vulnerable communities targets of oppression. They can convince the world that some lives are not as valuable as others, justifying mass slaughter.
It is no wonder that students across the country are protesting an unpopular and brutal war that, besides Israel, only the United States is capable of stopping. It is extraordinary that the very institutions that ought to safeguard their exercise of free speech are instead escalating surveillance and policing, working on ever more restrictive student conduct rulesand essentially risking the death of academic freedom.
From the Vietnam War to apartheid South Africa, universities have been important places for open discussion and disagreement about government policies, the historical record, structural racism and settler colonialism. They have also long served as sites of protest. If the university cannot serve as an arena for such freedoms, the possibilities of democratic life inside and outside the university gates are not only impoverished but under threat of extinction.
Paula Chakravartty is a professor of media, communication and culture at New York University, where Vasuki Nesiah is a professor of practice in human rights and international law. Both are members of the executive committee of the N.Y.U. chapter of the American Association of University Professors and members of N.Y.U.’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
A version of this article appears in print on April 8, 2024, Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Political Dissent Is Under Attack on Campus. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
[Mr. Beinart is the editor at large of Jewish Currents and a journalist and writer who has written extensively on the Middle East, Jewish life and American foreign policy.]
March 22, 2024
New York Times
For the last decade or so, an ideological tremor has been unsettling American Jewish life. Since Oct. 7, it has become an earthquake. It concerns the relationship between liberalism and Zionism, two creeds that for more than half a century have defined American Jewish identity. In the years to come, American Jews will face growing pressure to choose between them.
They will face that pressure because Israel’s war in Gaza has supercharged a transformation on the American left. Solidarity with Palestinians is becoming as essential to leftist politics as support for abortion rights or opposition to fossil fuels. And as happened during the Vietnam War and the struggle against South African apartheid, leftist fervor is reshaping the liberal mainstream. In December, the United Automobile Workers demanded a cease-fire and formed a divestment working group to consider the union’s “economic ties to the conflict.” In January, the National L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force called for a cease-fire as well. In February, the leadership of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the nation’s oldest Black Protestant denomination, called on the United States to halt aid to the Jewish state. Across blue America, many liberals who once supported Israel or avoided the subject are making the Palestinian cause their own.
This transformation remains in its early stages. In many prominent liberal institutions — most significantly, the Democratic Party — supporters of Israel remain not only welcome but also dominant. But the leaders of those institutions no longer represent much of their base. The Democratic majority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer, acknowledged this divide in a speech on Israel on the Senate floor last week. He reiterated his longstanding commitment to the Jewish state, though not its prime minister. But he also conceded, in the speech’s most remarkable line, that he “can understand the idealism that inspires so many young people in particular to support a one-state solution” — a solution that does not involve a Jewish state. Those are the words of a politician who understands that his party is undergoing profound change.
The American Jews most committed to Zionism, the ones who run establishment institutions, understand that liberal America is becoming less ideologically hospitable. And they are responding by forging common cause with the American right. It’s no surprise that the Anti-Defamation League, which only a few years ago harshly criticized Donald Trump’s immigration policies, recently honored his son-in-law and former senior adviser, Jared Kushner.
Mr. Trump himself recognizes the emerging political split. “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” he said in an interview
published on Monday. “They hate everything about Israel, and they
should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.” It’s
typical Trumpian indecency and hyperbole, but it’s rooted in a political
reality. For American Jews who want to preserve their country’s
unconditional support for Israel for another generation, there is only
one reliable political partner: a Republican Party that views standing
for Palestinian rights as part of the “woke” agenda.
The
American Jews who are making a different choice — jettisoning Zionism
because they can’t reconcile it with the liberal principle of equality
under the law — garner less attention because they remain further from
power. But their numbers are larger than many recognize, especially
among millennials and Gen Z. And they face their own dilemmas. They are
joining a Palestine solidarity movement that is growing larger, but also
more radical, in response to Israel’s destruction of Gaza. That growing
radicalism has produced a paradox: A movement that welcomes more and
more American Jews finds it harder to explain where Israeli Jews fit
into its vision of Palestinian liberation.
The
emerging rupture between American liberalism and American Zionism
constitutes the greatest transformation in American Jewish politics in
half a century. It will redefine American Jewish life for decades to
come.
Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
“American
Jews,” writes Marc Dollinger in his book “Quest for Inclusion: Jews and
Liberalism in Modern America,” have long depicted themselves as
“guardians of liberal America.” Since they came to the United States in
large numbers around the turn of the 20th century, Jews have been wildly
overrepresented in movements for civil, women’s, labor and gay rights.
Since the 1930s, despite their rising prosperity, they have voted
overwhelmingly for Democrats. For generations of American Jews, the
icons of American liberalism — Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Kennedy, Martin
Luther King Jr., Gloria Steinem — have been secular saints.
The American Jewish love affair with
Zionism dates from the early 20th century as well. But it came to
dominate communal life only after Israel’s dramatic victory in the 1967
war exhilarated American Jews eager for an antidote to Jewish
powerlessness during the Holocaust. The American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, which was nearly bankrupt on the eve of the 1967 war, had
become American Jewry’s most powerful institution by the 1980s. American
Jews, wrote
Albert Vorspan, a leader of Reform Judaism, in 1988, “have made of
Israel an icon — a surrogate faith, surrogate synagogue, surrogate God.”
Given the depth of these twin
commitments, it’s no surprise that American Jews have long sought to
fuse them by describing Zionism as a liberal cause. It has always been a
strange pairing. American liberals generally consider themselves
advocates of equal citizenship irrespective of ethnicity, religion and
race. Zionism — or at the least the version that has guided Israel since
its founding — requires Jewish dominance. From 1948 to 1966, Israel
held most of its Palestinian citizens under military law; since 1967 it
has ruled millions of Palestinians who hold no citizenship at all. Even
so, American Jews could until recently assert their Zionism without
having their liberal credentials challenged.
The
primary reason was the absence from American public discourse of
Palestinians, the people whose testimony would cast those credentials
into greatest doubt. In 1984, the Palestinian American literary critic
Edward Said argued
that in the West, Palestinians lack “permission to narrate” their own
experience. For decades after he wrote those words, they remained true. A
study
by the University of Arizona’s Maha Nassar found that of the opinion
articles about Palestinians published in The New York Times and The
Washington Post between 2000 and 2009, Palestinians themselves wrote
roughly 1 percent.
But in recent years, Palestinian voices, while still embattled and even censored,
have begun to carry. Palestinians have turned to social media to combat
their exclusion from the press. In an era of youth-led activism, they
have joined intersectional movements forged by parallel experiences of
discrimination and injustice. Meanwhile, Israel — under the leadership
of Benjamin Netanyahu for most of the past two decades — has lurched to
the right, producing politicians so openly racist that their behavior
cannot be defended in liberal terms.
Many
Palestine solidarity activists identify as leftists, not liberals. But
like the activists of the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter
movements, they have helped change liberal opinion with their radical
critiques. In 2002, according to Gallup,
Democrats sympathized with Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of
34 points. By early 2023, they favored the Palestinians by 11 points.
And because opinion about Israel cleaves along generational lines, that
pro-Palestinian skew is much greater among the young. According to a Quinnipiac University poll in November, Democrats under the age of 35 sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis by 58 points.
Given this
generational gulf, universities offer a preview of the way many liberals
— or “progressives,” a term that straddles liberalism and leftism and
enjoys more currency among young Americans — may view Zionism in the
years to come. Supporting Palestine has become a core feature of
progressive politics on many campuses. At Columbia, for example, 94
campus organizations — including the Vietnamese Students Association,
the Reproductive Justice Collective and Poetry Slam, Columbia’s “only
recreational spoken word club” — announced in November
that they “see Palestine as the vanguard for our collective
liberation.” As a result, Zionist Jewish students find themselves at
odds with most of their politically active peers.
Accompanying
this shift, on campus and beyond, has been a rise in Israel-related
antisemitism. It follows a pattern in American history. From the hostility toward German Americans
during World War I to violence against American Muslims after Sept. 11
and assaults on Asian Americans during the Covid pandemic, Americans
have a long and ugly tradition of expressing their hostility toward
foreign governments or movements by targeting compatriots who share a
religion, ethnicity or nationality with those overseas adversaries.
Today, tragically, some Americans who loathe Israel are taking it out on
American Jews. (Palestinian Americans, who have endured multipleviolenthate crimes
since Oct. 7, are experiencing their own version of this phenomenon.)
The spike in antisemitism since Oct. 7 follows a pattern. Five years
ago, the political scientist
Ayal Feinberg, using data from 2001 and 2014, found that reported
antisemitic incidents in the United States spike when the Israeli
military conducts a substantial military operation.
Attributing
the growing discomfort of pro-Israel Jewish students entirely to
antisemitism, however, misses something fundamental. Unlike
establishment Jewish organizations, Jewish students often distinguish
between bigotry and ideological antagonism.In a 2022 study,
the political scientist Eitan Hersh found that more than 50 percent of
Jewish college students felt “they pay a social cost for supporting the
existence of Israel as a Jewish state.” And yet, in general, Dr. Hersh
reported, “the students do not fear antisemitism.”
Surveys since Oct. 7 find something similar. Asked in November in a Hillel International poll
to describe the climate on campus since the start of the war, 20
percent of Jewish students answered “unsafe” and 23 percent answered
“scary.” By contrast, 45 percent answered “uncomfortable” and 53 percent
answered “tense.” A survey that same month
by the Jewish Electorate Institute found that only 37 percent of
American Jewish voters ages 18 to 35 consider campus antisemitism a
“very serious problem,” compared with nearly 80 percent of American
Jewish voters over the age of 35.
While
some young pro-Israel American Jews experience antisemitism, they more
frequently report ideological exclusion. As Zionism becomes associated
with the political right, their experiences on progressive campuses are
coming to resemble the experiences of young Republicans. The difference
is that unlike young Republicans, most young American Zionists were
raised to believe that theirs was a liberal creed. When their parents
attended college, that assertion was rarely challenged. On the same
campuses where their parents felt at home, Jewish students who view
Zionism as central to their identity now often feel like outsiders.
In 1979, Mr. Said observed
that in the West, “to be a Palestinian is in political terms to be an
outlaw.” In much of America — including Washington — that remains true.
But within progressive institutions one can glimpse the beginning of a
historic inversion. Often, it’s now the Zionists who feel like outlaws.
Given
the organized American Jewish community’s professed devotion to liberal
principles, which include free speech, one might imagine that Jewish
institutions would greet this ideological shift by urging pro-Israel
students to tolerate and even learn from their pro-Palestinian peers.
Such a stance would flow naturally from the statements establishment
Jewish groups have made in the past. A few years ago, the
Anti-Defamation League declared
that “our country’s universities serve as laboratories for the exchange
of differing viewpoints and beliefs. Offensive, hateful speech is
protected by the Constitution’s First Amendment.”
But
as pro-Palestinian sentiment has grown in progressive America,
pro-Israel Jewish leaders have apparently made an exception for
anti-Zionism. While still claiming to support free speech on campus, the
ADL last October asked
college presidents to investigate local chapters of Students for
Justice in Palestine to determine whether they violated university
regulations or state or federal laws, a demand that the American Civil
Liberties Union warned
could “chill speech” and “betray the spirit of free inquiry.” After the
University of Pennsylvania hosted a Palestinian literature festival
last fall, Marc Rowan, chair of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York and chair of the board of advisers of Penn’s Wharton business school, condemned the university’s president for giving the festival Penn’s “imprimatur.” In December, he encouraged trustees to alter university policies in ways that Penn’s branch of the American Association of University Professors warned could “silence and punish speech with which trustees disagree.”
In
this effort to limit pro-Palestinian speech, establishment Jewish
leaders are finding their strongest allies on the authoritarian right.
Pro-Trump Republicans have their own censorship agenda: They want to
stop schools and universities from emphasizing America’s history of
racial and other oppression. Calling that pedagogy antisemitic makes it
easier to ban or defund. At a much discussed congressional hearing in
December featuring the presidents of Harvard, Penn and M.I.T., the
Republican representative Virginia Foxx noted
that Harvard teaches courses like “Race and Racism in the Making of the
United States as a Global Power” and hosts seminars such as “Scientific
Racism and Anti-Racism: History and Recent Perspectives” before
declaring that “Harvard also, not coincidentally but causally, was
ground zero for antisemitism following Oct. 7.”
Ms.
Foxx’s view is typical. While some Democrats also equate anti-Zionism
and antisemitism, the politicians and business leaders most eager to
suppress pro-Palestinian speech are conservatives who link such speech
to the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda they despise. Elise
Stefanik, a Trump acolyte who has accused Harvard of “caving to the woke left,” became the star of that congressional hearing by demanding that Harvard’s president,
Claudine Gay, punish students who chant slogans like “From the river to
the sea, Palestine will be free.” (Ms. Gay was subsequently forced to
resign following charges of plagiarism.) Elon Musk, who in November said that the phrase “from the river to the sea” was banned from his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), the following month declared, “D.E.I. must die.” The first governor to ban Students for Justice in Palestine chapters at his state’s public universities was Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who has also signed legislation that limits what those universities can teach about race and gender.
This
alignment between the American Jewish organizational establishment and
the Trumpist right is not limited to universities. If the ADL has
aligned with Republicans who want to silence “woke” activists on campus,
AIPAC has joined forces with Republicans who want to disenfranchise
“woke” voters. In the 2022 midterm elections, AIPAC endorsed
at least 109 Republicans who opposed certifying the 2020 election. For
an organization single-mindedly focused on sustaining unconditional U.S.
support for Israel, that constituted a rational decision. Since
Republican members of Congress don’t have to mollify pro-Palestinian
voters, they’re AIPAC’s most dependable allies. And if many of those
Republicans used specious claims of Black voter fraud to oppose the
democratic transfer of power in 2020 — and may do so again — that’s a
price AIPAC seems to be prepared to pay.
Credit: Leah Millis/Reuters
For
the many American Jews who still consider themselves both progressives
and Zionists, this growing alliance between leading Zionist institutions
and a Trumpist Republican Party is uncomfortable. But in the short
term, they have an answer: politicians like President Biden, whose views
about both Israel and American democracy roughly reflect their own. In
his speech last week, Mr. Schumer called these liberal Zionists American Jewry’s “silent majority.”
For
the moment he may be right. In the years to come, however, as
generational currents pull the Democratic Party in a more
pro-Palestinian direction and push America’s pro-Israel establishment to
the right, liberal Zionists will likely find it harder to reconcile
their two faiths. Young American Jews offer a glimpse into that future,
in which a sizable wing of American Jewry decides that to hold fast to
its progressive principles it must jettison Zionism and embrace equal
citizenship in Israel and Palestine, as well as in the United States.
For
an American Jewish establishment that equates anti-Zionism with
antisemitism, these anti-Zionist Jews are inconvenient. Sometimes,
pro-Israel Jewish organizations pretend they don’t exist. In November,
after Columbia suspended two anti-Zionist campus groups, the ADL thanked
university leaders for acting “to protect Jewish students” — even
though one of the suspended groups was Jewish Voice for Peace. At other
times, pro-Israel leaders describe anti-Zionist Jews as a negligible
fringe. If American Jews are divided over the war in Gaza, Andrés
Spokoiny, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Funders
Network, an organization for Jewish philanthropists, declared in December, “the split is 98 percent/2 percent.”
Among
older American Jews, this assertion of a Zionist consensus contains
some truth. But among younger American Jews, it’s false. In 2021, even
before Israel’s current far-right government took power, the Jewish
Electorate Institute found
that 38 percent of American Jewish voters under the age of 40 viewed
Israel as an apartheid state, compared with 47 percent who said it’s
not. In November, it revealed
that 49 percent of American Jewish voters ages 18 to 35 opposed Mr.
Biden’s request for additional military aid to Israel. On many campuses,
Jewish students are at the forefront of protests for a cease-fire and
divestment from Israel. They don’t speak for all — and maybe not even
most — of their Jewish peers. But they represent far more than 2
percent.
These progressive Jews are,
as the U.S. editor of The London Review of Books, Adam Shatz, noted to
me, a double minority. Their anti-Zionism makes them a minority among
American Jews, while their Jewishness makes them a minority in the
Palestine solidarity movement. Fifteen years ago, when the liberal
Zionist group J Street was intent on being the “blocking back”
for President Barack Obama’s push for a two-state solution, some
liberal Jews imagined themselves leading the push to end Israel’s
occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Today, the prospect of
partition has diminished, and Palestinians increasingly set the terms of
activist criticism of Israel. That discourse, which is peppered with
terms like “apartheid” and “decolonization," is generally hostile to a
Jewish state within any borders.
There’s
nothing antisemitic about envisioning a future in which Palestinians
and Jews coexist on the basis of legal equality rather than Jewish
supremacy. But in pro-Palestine activist circles in the United States,
coexistence has receded as a theme. In 1999, Mr. Said argued
for “a binational Israeli-Palestinian state” that offered
“self-determination for both peoples.” In his 2007 book, “One Country,”
Ali Abunimah, a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, an influential
source of pro-Palestine news and opinion, imagined one state whose name
reflected the identities of both major communities that inhabit it. The
terms “‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ are dear to those who use them and they
should not be abandoned,” he argued. “The country could be called
Yisrael-Falastin in Hebrew and Filastin-Isra’il in Arabic.”
In
recent years, however, as Israel has moved to the right,
pro-Palestinian discourse in the United States has hardened. The phrase
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which dates from
the 1960s but has gained new prominence since Oct. 7, does not
acknowledge Palestine and Israel’s binational character. To many
American Jews, in fact, the phrase suggests a Palestine free of Jews. It
sounds expulsionist, if not genocidal. It’s an ironic charge, given
that it is Israel that today controls the land between the river and the
sea, whose leaders openly advocate the mass exodus of Palestinians and that the International Court of Justice says could plausibly be committing genocide in Gaza.
Palestinian scholars like Maha Nassar and Ahmad Khalidi
argue that “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” does not
imply the subjugation of Jews. It instead reflects the longstanding
Palestinian belief that Palestine should have become an independent
country when released from European colonial control, a vision that does
not preclude Jews from living freely alongside their Muslim and
Christian neighbors. The Jewish groups closest to the Palestine
solidarity movement agree: Jewish Voice for Peace’s Los Angeles chapter
has argued
that the slogan is no more anti-Jewish than the phrase “Black lives
matter” is anti-white. And if the Palestine solidarity movement in the
United States calls for the genocide of Jews, it’s hard to explain why
so many Jews have joined its ranks. Rabbi Alissa Wise, an organizer of
Rabbis for Cease-Fire, estimates that other than Palestinians, no other
group has been as prominent in the protests against the war as Jews.
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."
Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)
"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .
Angela Davis (b. 1944)
"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
Ella Baker (1903-1986)
"Strong people don't need strong leaders"
Paul Robeson (1898-1976)
"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."
C.L.R. James (1901-1989)
"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."
Edward Said (1935-2003)
“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."
Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
