The Solidarity Question: Why is Palestine Important to Antiracist Student Organizing?

By Marissa Sasso

During the spring semester, AU’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center hosted a Lunch and Learn event titled The Solidarity Question: Why is Palestine Important to Antiracist Student Organizing? The event focused on pro-Palestine student organizing through an academic perspective, bringing in experts in history, social movement theory, and decolonial theory to engage in dialogue together and with students in attendance. This transcription is intended to be used as an archive for those who are interested and were not able to attend.

Sara Clarke Kaplan: First of all, to all of you, welcome. My name is Sarah Clarke Kaplan, and I'm the Executive Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center here at American University. For those of you who are unfamiliar with us, the Antiracist Research and Policy Center is an intersectional hub for research, education, and policy intervention here at American University. We bring together scholars, educators, policy advocates, community based changemakers, and cultural producers to create transformative racial justice and decolonial change through the production of knowledge, the creation of accessible resources and tools, and the shaping of on the ground public policy and structural conditions with impact and input from the people most influenced by them.

 Our Lunch and Learns are one part of our four pillars of program, which includes research, education– that would be this–public engagement, and community based collaborations. We've been holding Lunch and Learns for two years as an opportunity for American University students to hear from scholars and educators with expertise in their fields about contemporary racial justice topics of interest to students on campus. Our previous Lunch and Learns have addressed a range of topics from environmental justice in Black and brown communities, to the questions and limits of allyship, to sexualized violence from intersectional feminist frameworks, to current and ongoing attacks on racial diversity and programs in higher education. 

The topics that we address tend to be not ones that everybody agrees on and certainly of critical importance in the current moment. In fact, every single one of our events is suggested by at least one student organization–this one I think has six or seven– who's interested in gaining greater information based on academic research about an issue that is relevant to their everyday lives as change makers on campus and beyond.

 As educational events, our Lunch and Learns are conducted in a spirit of collective learning and pedagogical generosity. This makes it all the more important that all attendees are aware of and abide by our participation guidelines, which I believe you were informed of when you registered and when you came in. I do want to remind you that our Lunch and Learns are student focused events. Therefore, students are given priority on asking questions and making comments to engage with speakers. Sometimes, our faculty affiliates are wonderful and they come and support us, but I always want to remind our, quote unquote, programmers in the room that this is a student centered space. 

Second, speakers are invited to share their expertise and to engage in a moderating conversation before we open the discussion with you today. We always try to make sure that there is time for you to ask questions and make comments, but we do not take questions and comments before the Q &A period. 

And third, we do record all of our Lunch and Learns. This is not because we're trying to lay all you out and create an FBI file for you. It's because we keep them for our control records. We keep those that we can assess what work does or didn't work, and so we can know what happened. If you don't want to be visible on the recording, do not worry. The recording right now is only at the panel forward, but if you want to remind you that if you need a record, you can always contact us. No personal photography, audio recording, or video recording is committed to our events. That's just how we roll. The last thing I want to do is to point out our amazing team at ARPC who made this event possible.. 

So with that note, this event is about an ongoing history. When we say that Palestine is important to antiracist student organizations, this is not a prescriptive state. It is not that Palestine should be important to antiracist student organizations, but many might believe that. And it is not a wish. It is a statement of historical and ongoing fact. 

Whether we are talking about SNCC in 1967 or the Black Panthers founding in 1970, whether you're talking about anti apartheid protesters on college campuses in the 1980s, or the anti sweatshop and WTO organizers protesting in favor of Palestinian liberation in 2003, we know that there is a long history of antiracist student organizations speaking and practicing in solidarity with Palestinian organizations seeking self -determination and liberation. What we are here today to discuss is what that history entails, why it is significant for understanding historical and ongoing conditions of transnational political mobilization and thinking, and particularly to understand the origin points.

 I think all too often one can imagine antiracism, even at our center, as a US-focused phenomenon, based entirely in the relations of race as we understand them in the United States. What we know, however, as scholars or budding scholars of race, racism, and racial justice is that while race operates in historically and geographically specific ways, it's different in different times and in different places, it is a transnational phenomenon. And that understanding and working around questions of power and difference and their impact on people's lives and deaths requires thinking transnationally. This is central to ARPC as a center that defines itself as doing antiracist work intersectionally, transnationally, and relationally. And I think for a generation living increasingly in a globalized world, it's crucial to our jobs in training youth in things of our race and mutualization. 

We are lucky today to have a panel of folks who are experts in precisely those tasks. I'm going to introduce them in the order that they will be speaking. Dr. Kirstie Dorr is an Associate Professor of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies and Literature here at American University. An interdisciplinary scholar, her research and teaching are anchored in the fields of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx studies, gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, and political geography. Her first book, On Sight and Sound: Performance Geographies in America Latina, examined the hemispheric circulation of South American musics by informal cultural and economic networks to theorize the dynamics. and a relationship between sonic texts and spatial contexts. Presently, she’s conducting research for a new monograph that contemplates the enduring racial colonial logics and infrastructures of domesticity and domestication within contemporary sites of social and cultural reproduction. Professor Dorr works in solidarity with the Black feminist led abolitionist community defense hub, Harriet's Wildest Dreams. 

Next up, we will have Dr. Dayo F. Gore, an associate professor of African American studies at Georgetown University and a Marguerite Peace and Freedom scholar. Her research interests include Black women's intellectual history, 20th century US political and cultural activism, African American and African diasporic politics, and gender and sexuality studies. Dr. Gore is the author of Radicalism at the CrossroadsL African American Women Activists in the Cold War, which tracks the political commitments and strategic leadership of a network of Black women radicals operating within the US left from the 1930s to the 1960s. Dr. Gore is currently working on a book-length study of Black women's transnational travels and activism in the long 20th century, forthcoming from Princeton University Press as part of its America in the World series. 

Third, because anyone who's been to our Lunch and Learns knows that we believe strongly that knowledge comes from a variety of sites, not just from PhDs. We always have a student on our panels. Lily Song is a senior transcultural literature major and American Studies minor. She is from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is interested in antiracist and decolonial studies, revolutionary love, and the role of creative writing and imagining liberatory futures. 

And our last speaker, Dr. Irene Calis, is a Palestinian decolonial scholar, educator, and organizer. Her research focuses on emancipatory politics from the perspective of those living their struggle, aiming to invent critique and the dismantling of oppressions in forging new alternatives. Her scholarship, grounded in the Palestinian liberation struggle, involves long-term ethnographic field work, living and working with Palestinian farming, and youth communities throughout the West Bank, as well as with popular struggles in South Africa, Oceania, and indigenous North America. She's the director of American University's Bureau of World Studies program and the faculty advisor for Students for Justice in Palestine, who have together been building an intersectional coalition with AU student organizations for the past five years.

As you can see, we are lucky to have an incredibly experienced and expert panel. They're each going to speak for about five minutes. Maybe a scooch more, at which point Dr. Wong will invite them to have a bit of a conversation with each other and then we'll open it up for Q&A. Thank you all. Let's give a round of applause. So with that, I'm going to invite Dr. Dorr to start us off and then we'll go along the table.

Kirstie Dorr: So I apologize in advance, I did prepare a bit of a narrative that I will read only because I'm recovering from yet another cold and I want to try to be mildly coherent today in my comments. But I also had a lot to say and not a lot of time so I invite you to ask follow up questions. 

Today I'm going to address the themes of this conversation by focusing on the formation of ethnic studies in the late 1960s. I return to this history because I believe that at this moment we are at a political crossroads that demands this retelling. In an essay that I published in 2018, I argued that since its inception in the late 1960s, ethnic studies has undergone multiple phases of what I call domestication. And this is an analytic rooted in feminists of color’s work that genders racial formation to track ideological and technocratic modes of discipline and accommodation that constrain social justice agendas. I argue that the domestication of ethnic studies formations has worked to obscure, strain, and silo the ethnic studies project and to remain to this conversation its coalition of ethos and international impulses. 

I think that returning to the moment in which this field was founded not only sheds light on the six decades of solidarity work that has bound US racial justice struggles with the Palestinian liberation movement, but it also helps to explain the urgency of cross-campus solidarity at this moment. In which racial revanchism, the suspension of academic freedom, and the Palestine question have become inextricably linked on college campuses. 

Though rarely remembered as such, the creation of ethnic studies as an academic field of education, inaugurated in the fall of 1968-9, was the product of coalitional struggle and cross-constituency solidarities that localized in a university setting was just one front of what was imagined to be a global struggle against racism and colonialism. Drawing momentum from the US Civil Rights Movement, anti war mobilization, and decolonization movements around the world, university students, staff, and faculty at San Francisco State College joined forces with activists, artists, and other community members in the fall of 1968 to demand what they defined as a meaningful inclusion of Third World peoples in California's state system of higher education. At that time, the college's administration and student body was, like at most other colleges and universities nationwide, almost exclusively white and predominantly male. The ensuing San Francisco State College strike, the longest university student strike in US history, was fomented by a coalition between the college's Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front, which was an umbrella alliance among members of the Latin American Students Organization, Asian American Political Alliance, Filipino American Collegiate Endeavor, and the Native American Studies Student Union. 

With the backing of a broad base of college community members, many of whom were active in the Black Panther Party, the United Farm Workers Association, and the anti war movement, the BSU and TWLF issued a list of 15 demands for institutional changes that even today on many academic campuses remain unrealized, if not unimaginable. These included the establishment of a divisional school of ethnic studies, the allocation of 50 full time faculty lines, and this is my favorite, that all applications of nonwhite students be accepted in the college's incoming spring and fall classes of 1969. 

In January of that same year, inspired by the militant action of San Francisco college activists, a separate Third World Liberation Front was formed on the University of California Berkeley campus, which allied members of the Mexican American Student Confederation, Asian American Political Alliance, African American Student Union, and the Native American Group. There the TWLF lead strike was met with militarized state resistance, as then-Governor Ronald Reagan ordered five police departments, the California Highway Patrol, the Alameda County Deputies, and finally, the California National Guard to occupy the campus. There were helicopters buzzing overhead, spreading tear gas, the campus was an armed camp. The student strike made it possible to extract from the university a commitment in the form of an academic senate resolution to build the College of Third World Studies.

 So in both cases, these student-led strikes were successful not only at securing a college and department of ethnic studies respectively in 1969, they also irrevocably shaped the landscapes of US. colleges and universities. To contextualize the emergence of ethnic studies, we can turn to the work of sociologist Robert Blauner to historicize the political conditions and impulses that influence this struggle. In his 1969 essay, “Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt,” Blauner wrote “It is becoming almost fashionable to analyze American racial conflict today in terms of the colonial analogy.” Blauner goes on to historicize the ways in which concepts of internal or domestic colonialism had first become popular among US-based Black militants, later expanding in usage among other US communities of color. 

Inspired by the writings of anti -colonial activists such as Patrice Lumumba, Mahatma Gandhi, and Frantz Fanon, identifications with the struggle of African, Asian, Caribbean, and other colonized peoples became increasingly important for US activists who viewed their political work as part of an inherently and thus necessarily internationalist struggle against racial oppression. Indeed, this conceptualization of white supremacy as a global problem inexorably tied to interrelational, intercolonial, intercontinental histories of settler colonialism, chattel slavery, xenophobia, and capitalist expansion inform the internationalist and coalitional impulses of various social movements that took root in and throughout the United States during the mid century. 

So, these radical antiracisms indelibly shaped the coalitional imaginary that united campus populations at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley who framed their demands for the creation of ethnic studies around the need to establish an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that foregrounded the histories of Third World peoples. Here we begin to see the historical conditions that enabled political connections between Third World internationalism, the formation of ethnic studies, and Palestinian solidarity work. As historian Pamela Knott has argued “for many American activists, an evolving understanding of the Palestinian question emerged from their heightened commitment to Third World solidarity during that period, which coincided with Israel's displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians as an outcome of the Arab Israeli war of 1967.” 

The 1967 Six Day War, which resulted in Israel seizing the West Bank and Gaza Strip, galvanized Arabs and Arab Americans studying at American universities, who situated their advocacy for Palestine within these connected anti imperialist antiracist struggles on college campuses throughout the US. Moreover, it coincided with the moment in which organizations such as the Student For Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party were becoming increasingly internationalist. In the summer of 1967, SNCC published in its bimonthly newsletter an article entitled, “The Palestine Problem:Test Your Knowledge.” Fashioned according to a toolkit model with numbered bullet points, it described Israel as both an illegal state, that, “dispossesses Arabs of their homes, land, and livelihood, and described Palestinian refugees as both victims of Zionist, British, and U .S. aggression.” Three years later, the Black Panther Party released a statement declaring, “We support the Palestinians just struggle for liberation one hundred percent.” 

These articulations of Palestinian solidarity within ethnic studies have remained vibrant over the past five decades, owed in no small part to our shared political and analytical investments in the study and critique of settler colonialism, militarism, state power, racial practice, reproductive control, and apartheid. However, what I refer to as the domestication of ethnic studies as a field in the 1980s to 90s, that is, the process through which economic and ideological technocratic pressures resulted in an increasingly domestic scholarly and curricular focus within the field has overshadowed the transnational alliances that were central to its formation. 

Recalling this history at this moment is crucial for several reasons. Conservative politicians, administrators, and donors are currently engaged in attacks on free speech that cast solidarity with Palestine as un-American. Some have gone as far to dismiss decades of feminist of color scholarship by suggesting that intersectionality is a call for antisemitism. As factions of this movement have joined forces with campaigns to dismantle affirmative action and DEI programming to ban ethnic and gender studies in elementary, middle high school, and college classrooms, to repeal post-2020 policing reforms, and to expand the militarism of the southern border, we have to insist on drawing analytical and political connections across these shifts and to build coalitions across different fronts. So I'm going to limit my comments there, and I'm happy to expand during the Q&A.

Dayo F. Gore: Good afternoon, everyone. How are we doing today? I'm so pleased to be here. I want to thank Professor Kaplan for the invitation and the students and staff who helped organize this. I think these are such important conversations to have, and that the university is the site in which we should be having them because we have the tools, the resources, and sometimes the time to delve into this material. And thank you for taking classes and learning more. I hope that you're all inspired to do that. The last few months with the war on Gaza, it has really inspired me to learn as much more, as someone who practiced solidarity, about the issues, about the history. I have a stack of books I still read, so I encourage everyone to do that. It's a resource the university provides, and I encourage people to take advantage of it. 

Today, I'm going to talk a bit about the nature of Black-Palestinian solidarity, the history of it, and maybe give you a way to think about it politically, strategically, as it's been mapped out. I am a scholar of social movements, particularly Black feminists and Black diasporic, African American based social movements. So that's the perspective and analysis I'm gonna try to bring to this and think about it sort of in more recent history and along how we might think about solidarity and how it develops.

 Maybe most of you, you're familiar with the Black and Palestinian solidarity that emerged after the Ferguson campaign and there were all these trips back and forth. And that's probably the most recent one we have in our mind around 2014, when in the midst of what was happening in Ferguson, Missouri, the killing of Mike Brown and leaving his body in the streets of Ferguson by the police at the same time that there was an uprising in Gaza and Israel's military response to that. You saw conversations develop between these two places, people wrote back and forth on Twitter. 

There's a great article called #Ferguson by young anthropologists that studied the hashtag conversations they developed. You can see the exchange between people, activists, young folks in Gaza and young folks in Ferguson talking back. And then they eventually did exchanges. They brought some people– people came here, people went there, and they wrote about it, sort of how solidarity was built. And one of the things that emerged out of that probably shapes how we think about solidarity or becomes one of the key ways in which we think about solidarity, It was a lot of discussion about analogy, right? Like, that's how the police treat me. You know, people that went there would be like, “I went to Gaza, I walked around, and I could feel what it felt like when the police are eyeing me on the streets of my city,” right? And scholars talk about this idea of a sort of solidarity of analogies and equivalency, which is often where solidarity starts, right? That when you're organizing, you begin to see other people, and then what you see is a similar struggle to your party.

But I want to argue today that it's not where solidarity should live. And I can give you an example. There was a coalition of feminists called the Book of Palestine in 2011, and they wrote this as a broader statement. But this was one of the statements that I think speaks to the idea of solidarity of analogy or equivalence or what scholar writes, identifying equivalent modalities of oppression, exploitation, and resistance. And the statements they wrote when they came back said this, “We can now confidently name this as the Israeli project or apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Each and every one of us, including those members of our delegation who grew up in the Jim Crow South, and a part of South Africa, on Indian reservations in the US, was shocked by what we saw.” 

So there's the sense that we had experienced these types of oppression, set with colonialism, apartheid in South Africa, racial segregation in the South, and we could see it at play in Palestine, right? And you can think about it, I don't know if you've ever heard Tom []’s talk. “So I was walking down the street and I saw the police separating out the Palestinians and giving him the search and I knew what that was.” Well, he didn't actually know what that is, but he has a familiarity though. And I'm not critiquing that as a bad thing, but that is often how solidarity starts. I want to argue for ways in which a Black and Palestinian solidarity historically has built on more than that, building what scholars have talked about as, and Professor Dorr talked about it as a critique of imperialism and global white supremacy. 

Well, some scholars talk about it as a way of not simply critiquing the state or state control of violence, but worldly, imagining different futures without sort of structures that fall. And so I want to revisit a little bit of a similar timeline that Professor Dorr gave, and then I want to focus a little bit on two Black feminist scholars and their solidarity in politics. Yeah, that's a lot. All right, I'm going to do it in five minutes or less. 

I'll start with, I sort of frame the Ferguson-Palestine solidarity as this sort of introductory analogous Palestinian solidarity movement. But as we look at the developments after that, and we can talk about that, how I would see those movements and even the feminist and numerous  delegations that went to Palestine and came here as a way that built a solidarity movement that today is more than synonymous. But when we look at the history, one of the people, the places where we might start, we go back earlier than ‘67, but ‘67 becomes a key moment for Black-Palestinian solidarity. 

Professor Dorr pointed out some of it, but it really becomes the moment when you see the uprising from the US, particularly in the urban cities and the debates that are happening in organizations like SNCC and the Black Panther Party that are challenging the idea, can we reform the system, or is the system too invested in an imperialist project for us to reform it? Do we have to make it? How do we see ourselves, not only domestically, but globally, right? How do we see ourselves in these terms... and all of the other struggles for liberation that are happening. 

If you think about ‘67, it is a moment where protests are happening all around the globe, what we particularly see in the Global South, Africa, Latin America, these revolutionary movements taking hold. And so we see in ‘69, Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver both go to Lebanon, which is a site for many exiled members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. They meet with them and the Black Panther Party makes an office in Algeria that includes Katherine Cleaver and a number of other Black women who do international work. We can see this activism continue during this moment, right? We see in the ‘70s and ‘80s– the Black Panther Party in the ‘80s, it's coming to an end, but still active. We see the Third World Women's Alliance form a coalition as a force of Black and Palestinian solidarity, particularly in its intersectional analysis of the ways in which race, gender, and imperialism– now this is where I wish I had a PowerPoint because I have these great magazine covers that talk about politics being raised and included one of the noted feminists who signed off of the solidarity project Fran Beal, who was probably well known for writing Double Jeopardy[: To Be Black and Female].

Jesse Jackson goes to Alabama in 1979 and gives a speech that rhymes, as he was one to do, but it's interesting because he goes in ‘79. Jesse Jackson's one of the first African Americans to run for president in the ‘80s and in ‘79 to keep carrying on the civil rights struggle of the ‘60s and he goes there and makes quite a splash because the Israeli government does not meet with him, says that his basic politics are anti-Israeli government and so he gets welcomed in other places. 

Then we see in the ‘80s, the rising protest movement emerges as we see Black feminism are murdered, right, in sort of in plain academic spaces we see sort of the development of a Black feminist voice around it gaining a lot of national attention. Not that it's new, but we begin to see it gaining national attention and one of the most well known figures is June Jordan. She gets pulled out a lot for her 1982 Moving Towards Home, and I'll just be quote the probably the most pointed one, “I was born a black woman / and now / I am become a Palestinian / against the relentless laughter of evil / there's less and less living room / and where are my loved ones?” and that's a part of a longer piece she wrote after reading in the New York Times about this massacre that happened to the Palestinian refugees. That is her entry into a solidarity policy, and then she invests much more in the project. An analogous experience then leads her to a broader solidarity politics that includes writing extensively about this, traveling there extensively, building the line to support around that. 

I'll leave with the last person who I think provides an interesting figure for someone who's solidarity politics with Palestine emerged out of a broader anti imperialist, anticolonial vision. I don't know if you're familiar with her work with Sister Outsider, her collection that's published in the 1980s. It includes two powerful essays on anticolonialism. One is about her visit to the Soviet Union where she talks about what that is like, how she understands socialism in that context;  the second is her revisit to Granada, where her mother is from, after it has undergone a revolution and the revolution has been overthrown, assisted by the US government. 

These two pieces critique what it means for her to be based in the US and looking outward for strategy of survival, resistance, revolution for her Black community, parsing the experiences of here in these different places, meeting people in these different places, and how you might think about how central that internationalist vision, that solidarity politics, that it's beyond simply, “I see you are like me,” but that our strategies together might make a new world, right? We need the strength of each other as opposed to the strength of the state to move us forward. After that articulation of radical solidarity politics in her selection Sister Outsider, she went to Oberlin College in 1989 and she gave a speech that I think is pretty powerful. I'm just going to read from it because she says it better than I do. It's to the graduating class of Oberlin that she writes, “We do not need to become each other in order to work together, but we do need to recognize each other. Our differences as well as the sameness of our goals, not for altruism, for self preservation.” Warning the audience that “every day that you sit back silent refusing to use your power, terrible things are being done in power.”

As it ranges and then she goes to dissect a lot of different things about what's happening in the eighties, we can revisit it or not, before she moves to push the constant taxpayer's fund as a tacit and material support towards where she quotes “military occupation of the Palestinian people's homeland and the detaining of thousands of Palestinians who use it.” 

Lorde concludes pressing for a peaceful solution that then when we fight for recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people, it is not altruism, it is survival, she asserts. “My sisters and brothers, I urge you to remember while we battle the many faces of racism in our lives as African -Americans, that we are part of an international community of people's home and pose a central question of her speech, how are we using the power we have, or are we allowing our power to be meanest against them, our brothers and sisters in the struggle for their education?” And I love that, I think that piece, the idea that it is not, we do not need to become each other, but we need to recognize each other and speak to this other form of solidarity politics that I think is important, a form of politics that is built on creating new structures of power and resistance, understanding the ways in which power operates in these sort of mutations and asymmetrical and commonness and warfare and actually being able to build collective resistance to these moments in possibly different ways. They don't all look the same, but being able to recognize, even if they look different, the ways in which our visions were making the new world my thoughts.

Lily Song: First of all, I'm beyond honored to be here with these incredible and talented professors. This is thanks to ARPC, who has done really incredible and very impactful work at American University. These are not just my words, these are the words of my professors, my classmates, my friends, writers and leaders in liberation movements. I've learned that we must select and reselect our lineages and recommit to liberation every day. 

When I first learned in-depth about Palestine in Professor Calis' class, I was struck by the similarities to US settler colonialism, the dehumanization of Palestinians, the collective amnesia and deliberate exclusion of narratives, the idea of being critical of violence, but this sentiment never getting stemmed into the violence of colonization. One thing that really stuck with me from Professor Calis’ class is the idea of “power with,” which is the idea of bonding collective power from standing with each other in struggle and with the environment around us. Colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy are all based on having “power over.” Power over bodies, land, narratives. And this is why I believe everyone should be talking about Palestine and why solidarity with Palestine is absolutely crucial to antiracist student organizing because it impacts all of us. These are the same systems operating all over the world and the same logic that continuously racializes and dehumanizes people for profit. 

We all have inseparable ties to the machine of imperialism– either we're impacted by it, benefit from it, or an amalgamation of the two. For example, my family in Korea were liberated by the US who divided Korea and kept them in a position of continued militarization and development. And as an Asian American, the same logics of Orientalism are used as a humanizing force. This discourse of less civilized people in need of rational development, the act of cluttering. These Orientalist ideals portray Arab and Muslim people as terrorists depoliticizing them from their history, be it in Taiwan, has an article explaining this on why Asian American solidarity, for example, with Palestine, is important since Asian American as a concept came from solidarity and coalition organizing. And as Dr. Thor, sorry. And as Dr. Thor mentioned, it runs. Previously about the Third World Liberation Front and all of these past weekends, a lot of this started with students. 

This imperial machine is the same one that exploits countries all over the world, funds the policing of Black and brown communities in the US, funds the violence on the border. The privilege I get from my witness comes at the expense of people of color. Additionally, as a person in the heart of the empire in the US, my tax dollars are going towards dropping bombs on children in Palestine while people in our own city have no access to food, housing, education, and healthcare. This is violence. Additionally, as students, our money is going towards the institution of American University, which is an institution that is entangled and invested in these larger systems. It is not separate from the wider community and involved.

But the university is a very important and pivotal space. It's about learning, growing, finding our next steps in our lives before we go into our careers. It's especially important to be at a university that promotes social change and intersectionality,  though. I'm sure many of you have read “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” by Tuck and Yang in your classes; one of the many readings that has impacted the way I see the world, we are being, as students, we are being given the language to articulate these concepts and that is powerful. University is a new space to question preconceived notions and critique them away from the environments we grew up in. But we can't just keep these ideas as words on a page. Palestine is central to antiracist student organizing because it is inseparable from antiracist student organizing. 

The idea of solidarity, as Professor Gore spoke about, revolves around shared objectives and standards, unity towards a convenient goal, which in this case is ending imperialism and state-sanctioned violence. I've heard "no one is free until everyone is free" so many times in the past few months. And this is really a form of solidarity. Who am I as a non-Palestinian to tell Palestinians what to do and how to react to their genocide? 

We're all students right now, but we must continue to learn and listen throughout our entire lives. I'm still very much in the process of learning and unlearning. Palestine is an issue of the humanity of over 30,000 lives we've lost on the record, as well as countless more. If this isn't normal, and you can't get to the point where we let this feel normal– there's violence happening, we are open to brutality, right? Within DC, school shootings across the nation, I could go on and on, but we cannot keep accepting that violence from the state is the norm. There's a lot of things going on, we're all around having the imagination for a better world, but it must be grounded in materiality and action. This is where solidarity comes in, because none of this was inevitable, none of these systems, so we have the potential to create a liberatory future for us.

Irene Calis: Thank you so much. It's so wonderful to see you all here. Thank you for carving out time, I'm really honored to be in conversation with you. The main thing is inspiring people, educators, scholars, mentors. I also really want to thank ARPC and the amazing team, and especially take a moment to thank Dr. Kaplan. I really want to take a moment to honor the kind of rigor that Dr. Kaplan has brought to this decolonial center, this space, coming to AU. We know from all the different locations we have internationally, the kind of legibility that Dr. Kaplan has brought across the globe to this space, single because of this kind of commitment to a rigorous kind of decolonial work in thinking. So I want to say thank you, Dr. Kaplan. 

I don't have something written out, but I'm going to think about this from a different perspective, and I'm just going to offer you some points about what comes to my mind when we ask why is Palestine important to antiracist organizing? In my mind, it raises a question of what does it mean to be in solidarity with people as a central part of thinking through the event theme today. When I think about what it means to be in solidarity with, in my mind, this question begins with what do we see? What do we see? What that does or does not bring into our view, bring into our frame, bring into our knowing. So for me, one of the central aspects of the starting points or the work, the ongoing work about what does it mean to be in solidarity with and how that connects to Palestine, which I'm going to hopefully come through from a different way, is really starting with a commitment to expanding our understanding about the workings of power in our society. I know if you're one of my students, you hear this from me in different ways all the time. I think this is really essential,  a commitment to understanding and deepening our understanding about how the workings of power operate in our society is an animal of commitment. First and foremost, it's an ongoing enterprise. 

We can start with an example, if we just take the idea of the concept of race, and we hear and we speak about race being a social construct. Okay, yeah, that's an important thing to say. But what does it mean? And when we talk about race as a social construct, of course, it's important because it's speaking against the notion of biological origins. But that alone, the concept of race and speaking about it as a social construct does not really tell us about what the relationship of race is with racism. It does not alone tell us how racial thinking is anchored in and a product of a logic of supremacy that orients us around who and what is valued in our society. That is a different kind of question to be thinking about, and once we start to deepen our understanding of the workings of power, then what we mean by the social itself transforms, how we are all embedded in a web of power relationships in different kinds of ways. So we start to see the gravity and implications of even saying race is a social construct.

If we take, for example, racial thinking and its implications in telling us who and what is valued in our society, let's just take some core examples across colonial space and time. We have the notion of non European that was designated to colonized people across different spaces, right? Non-European. It's a similar reference, non-white, and the reference of being non-Jew. Now, all of these terms emerge contemporaneously, in particular moments in history. And thinking about the term itself, to be referenced as a non-entity is itself a term of negation. It is a designation of what the reference point is of humanity. When we look at the term non-Jew, which, as far as I have been able to find, this reference first emerges within the Balfour Declaration of 1917. And it was a word that was used to describe the majority, 97%,  Palestinian population. What does it mean to construct a majority population as a non-entity? When we start to think about non-European, non-white, non-Jew, it starts to illuminate certain kinds of connections and processes and reference themes. 

Similarly, if we ask a question, how did Palestine become Israel? And we ask the same question, how did Turtle Island become the United States? And we ask the question, how did Aotearoa become New Zealand? It illuminates to us certain kinds of processes, which to me is the central kind of part of critical thinking: making the connections. So I don't have to tell you what solidarity means, right? I don't have to tell you why Palestine is important. You can discover that on your own by making a commitment to work, a commitment to the harder work to make those connections, because as we know, power operates in societies by creating those invisibilities and those non-existing entities, the logics of elimination that are operating not just in who is allowed to speak on campus. on whose voices are prioritized. 

And what does it mean to not have those voices present? I know, as students, we can just look at your syllabi– whose voices are being represented? What does it mean to have the same voices represented all the time? If we're trying to build a depth of understanding about the workings of power, then it is essential that we have new concepts to draw. And so that gives us new ways to name, to think, to be in solidarity with. This is why it is so important for us to be diversifying the body of knowledge that we engage with, to understand that you all are producers of knowledge, not consumers of knowledge, and that you can refuse the kinds of narratives that are being reinforced by not having the diversity of voices. 

So what it means to talk about Palestine is a conversation through this wider project of a commitment to the kind of knowledge you are engaging with and producing and refusing all at once in that way. And I think, similarly, antiracist work begins with what we see, and it begins with how we think, and it informs how we act. So once again, you don't have to be told to be in solidarity, you just have to make a commitment to do the work of demonizing and nuancing politics. And we can talk about that more later, because this is also, the power that that holds is also the reason why the academy is such a site of surveillance and control, and the Russians, right? We can, we can obviously, we can get to that, that conversation a little bit more together. 

That's the point that is fundamental in thinking about how Palestine corresponds to South Africa, corresponds to Aotearoa, and, and the fact of Palestine being central to solidarity work is expressed through these different locations and over time. So when we think about the kind of races and supremacies, narratives that underpin colonialism. in different places, this is where the comparative aspect of our work becomes really important. You can investigate and inquire about what were the logics of similar colonialism in Falvazenkum, the kind of frameworks that were operating, and then read those against the kinds of logics that were espoused in Turtle Island, and read those against the kinds of logics that were espoused in Palestine. And you control your own connections with those similarities. It comes in many different forms. It comes in the logics of supremacy that are anchored in a divine right, the manifest destiny, “the Bible is our mandate” in the context of Palestine. 

It comes as Edward Said, the late Palestinian scholar who mentioned the rendering of the indigenous people as non-existent, so the functional absence of indigenous people. Well, how is that, how was that enacted, right? We know that settler colonialism begins, and Edward Said shows us this, with an ideological erasure. But that ideological erasure is not enough, right? What are you going to do with those indigenous people who refuse to leave? It inherently produces and involves ethnic cleansing and genocide, a practical necessity of settler colonies. We can see how this is anchored in different spaces in very similar ways. Another kind of cross-comparative analogy we can make is the language on how these contested and coveted lands were spoken of. The term of the frontier, and the pioneer, and what those concepts conjure up and how they are contiguous, contemporaneous, and consistent across every single settler colonial space I have spent time working on and working in. The narrative of the frontier, the narrative of the pioneer, and how all of that rests on an ideological measure. It rests on an illogical supremacy and so those connections become illuminating into our own conversations with these different spaces across space and time. So I'm going to leave it here. 

SCK: So, y 'all, I promised our panelists something, which was that they were going to get the chance to now put a verse with each other. I know I've been saying all this truth in advertising, but I'm actually going to break my word, which I tried not to do. I'm going to break my bargain here for a minute because I've been hearing from a lot of students on campus lately that there's a real experience of feeling like lately in events related to Gaza, there's so many opportunities where you're getting talked at but not a lot of chances to get talked with. So, I want to take a moment and then open up for students to ask questions. I want to start off by just reframing for students before we open up. You've been given really four amazing models for thinking about solidarity. Solidarity is the refusal of domestication. Solidarity, not as analogy, but as recognition. Solidarity as the practice of collective liberation. And solidarity as our hermeneutic with power, value, and erasure. So now I want to give you a chance to think and ask questions of our amazing panelists of what you want to know about this question for solidarity.

Student 1: Hi, my question is, well starting against the comment, I feel like at AU there's a lot of individualist mindsets, especially those students, especially being in DC where we are. And so I was wondering if you could think on how we can find a commitment to each other when so many people, even in their activism, are so individually minded? 

Student 2: Thank you. Sorry, this is a little off the cuff, but I feel like the problem that I often see with on campus organizing, or just in general when it comes to student community building, especially when it comes to community building around identity, people get caught up in this idea of literal ideas of representation, where we talk about, “oh, as long as we have a club that is so-and-so for this community, that means that we're all together and we're doing something,” but those organizations aren't necessarily dedicated to antiracism and dedicated to these ideas of solidarity and cross-community organizing. I guess for me specifically, when I'm not a student of words like the Asian American Student Union, it's very much based on this idea of I think identity and versus distribution, but not necessarily political coalition building or actually working with other boards. 

So I wonder if when it comes to things like the immigration fund, building coalition with the Black Student Union at San Francisco University, that was the moment where it was cross-coalitional, cross-identity, certainly united around this common solidarity versus the anti-theorism of domestic oppression. I wonder, in this current moment, do you think that something similar can occur in the world? 

SCK: I mean, actually one of the follow up questions that I was thinking of was precisely that, and also I'm going to propose something here. We spend a lot of time in the world, all of us, and particularly folks who are marginalized in different kinds of ways, being told that what we're saying doesn’t make sense, that we're rambling and that we don't need to say it. We do not need to do it to ourselves. That's a good question. So, next question, then we'll send the faculty those three questions, professors from three questions, professors and amazing students, those two questions. 
Student 3: One thing I was thinking about that you all kind of touched on was the particular ways you have to navigate university places as both a space that is sanctioned, or at least permitted by the larger university, are also a space that the university has invested interest in not letting it go too far. So how do you feel at home?

SCK: Okay, so we've got three questions, one on individualism, one on building coalitions, particularly are there possibilities for that? And then one about working within the complex structures of institution, educational institutions, as well as sites of opportunity. 

DFG: I guess I'll jump in there and say those are amazing questions. I don't have the answers. That's probably a question we're struggling with. Two things, and maybe they'll answer big questions. One, I always think of Mariame Kaba. If people know Mariam Kaba, anything worth doing, you do it with someone else. And I truly believe that. 

I think we live in a very individualist society, and the university is really invested in their autocracy, including yourself. And there's a way in which activism has become another mark on our CV, our achievements. But I do believe that if we're invested in thinking more broadly about changing the world or having an impact, we have to do it closely. I often say to people, they're like, “there's no one, I can't find anyone, there's no group,” and I'm like, you've got to try. Because if we can't build with each other, how are we going to make a change? And that, to me, is always the first task, to be able to feel collectively and to challenge yourself to do that and find ways of doing that. Because that's where we have to start. 

You might have a perfect plan. I always say, some people, maybe they have a plan with a car, but no one's going to go out to get the car with them, and then push that button. So you might feel like you have the perfect answer, but if you can't talk to people about it, people aren’t going to join you. So I think that's a struggle, absolutely. I think we have to push against it. We have to be able to learn how we want to step back, but also how we want to step up. I think that's important because it's sometimes easier to let someone who always takes space continue to take space, just as it's sometimes easier for someone who always takes space to just feel like, “that's what I do well.” So I think these are all challenges, in that we have to focus on them. 

I think the question of the university is a big one. How do we negotiate with the university? I will say, I think at this moment, I'll pull in one of our questions. The response by the university against pro-Palestinian activism and speakers on campus is, to me, a humor. I think it does, as one of our panelists, speak to the success that people have had in building solidarity across these movements and BDS and other activities. But the pushback is not only coming from within the university, but donors and from higher ups outside the university, and we can see that. I think this demands us to take a little more risk and be braver. 

I think part of that strategy is that people who have more power or resources have to step up more and take those risks. Too often, you see students at the front lines, non-tenured folks, more tenuously employed folks. This is where if you have tenure and you have some status, you think you're committed to these struggles: you should use it. There has to be a more collective and attentive diagnosis of these strategies. The turn from administrative strategies to police people in the university and what you can say, and that turn to making demands on the university, which I think has always been our sort of a strategy of life, right? The university should create a safe space for me. The university should create resources. We've now seen that the university is being used against us in really powerful ways. These become the things I think we have to think more critically about how we hold space. Because what is happening? It may be coming down around pro -Palestinian support, but what is happening? Who's this going to have a chilling effect on? We see it already in a whole host of areas and organizations. Even if you don't support this, your organization now has to ungroup all these universities. Ten days in advance, you're abandoning all this regulation that everyone's going to have to adhere to, right? Or that you can't be in a classroom where you feel uncomfortable, which I was like, wow, what are they going to do with African -Americans' studies? Like, I'm uncomfortable teaching this! 

KD: I just wanted to add in response to your brilliant question that one of the things that I've also thought a lot about and that I've kind of addressed in digging through more around this question is how one of the kind the investigation of ethnic studies has been replicated and also student organizations has been a kind of siloing that has relished coalition and now because we're so far away from this political moment here these positions were literally being built. There was nothing expected or essential about showing up because you were an Asian American for you to come it was this was all coming together around people who were organizing on different fronts from labor around different things and so We have to remember that coalition has to be that before the work that we do, that it is within communities and across communities. I think that's a piece that we have to insist upon and that we have it within our power to stage dialogues and conversations that allow us to build coalition. I think that Professor Calis spoke to this really brilliantly in terms of being able to look at different sites where you can see how the machinations of power are at work and systems of devalue those are at work. And I think that Professor Gore spoke to this as well, quite eloquently in terms of thinking about moving beyond analogy to think about how coalition can be built and actively organized around particular issues. 

LS: First of all, I remember that again the university is an institution, and it functions like an institution, profits on the same systems. As an institution they are there to protect their money. It's been very disheartening to know that the administration has so much power over what we learn, how we express ourselves and engage with education and it just like has the power to sound voices as it chooses to, as it's been said to students constantly. One of the things that I've been thinking about lately is A Third University is Possible by la paperson, he writes about finding the little openings within the structure [of the institution]. 

I feel like I've been relatively new to organizing. I know a lot of the students who've been doing this work continuously. I would say at the center of it right now is Students for Justice in Palestine and Palestinian students on campus. It's been amazing to see the creation of the Jewish Voices for Peace at AU. And I feel like also at AU, we have some of the incredible professors here that have stayed and created space for these important conversations. And I can't stress how important it is to have these little organizations at the university that are about finding community.  Being in DC is a very unique opportunity in life, walking into larger community spaces. And so some of these organizations have been laying the groundwork for other students to create continuous work, which has been amazing to see. 

I suppose this is a little cliche, but the importance of interpersonal relationships and community because these larger concepts of world building really do start on like a local level with our commitment to each other and hearing my friends like different majors and opinions on things like I've given you a lot of different perspectives and able to look at these bigger issues and yeah. 

IC: So maybe that's the issue of coalition, the issue of university. I want to really underscore what I have come to see more and more is the importance of relational building. I think this is an aspect of coalition work that we might tend to take for granted when the fact of coalition can become our focus. Let's build the coalition, but actually the harder work is building the relationships, you know, the real relationships. And I think the challenge today is using social media as that space. And of course it has its place, but you can't build relations completely on social media. I know for myself that there is nothing anybody can tell me that would allow me to cancel people that I have been working with for many years across different spaces because we have been building the kind of relations that can't be canceled by fads and by particular moments, right? And that's the kind of compass that we need to have, that I feel is really important in this work here at AU. The relational building part can't be over-emphasized from my perspective and how that's really difficult in part to do because that raises all sorts of intersectionality, questions, et cetera, and positionalities.

 And then the work of making commitments, as I said, to nuance your own politics. I think sometimes we can be wrapped up in approaching information and receiving information as if it's on a pamphlet and kind of just jumping on board. But we need to be able to think critically for ourselves. We need to know what the nuances of these struggles are. And not only for the knowing part, but in my experience, I find that to be one of your biggest sources of power against being swept up by the power structures that are trying to distract you. The more you can nuance your own politics is one of your biggest strengths and empowering parts of this process. You're less susceptible to fear because fear operates, as we know, from ignorance and we know that ignorance is not neutral. Ignorance is not the lack of information, right? It's the presence of certain kinds of narrative frames itself. So that would be one of my thoughts and in terms of the university.

There's many factors to consider in terms of the material consequences, the real material realities that that have very real consequences on people's lives absolutely/ e all have the capacity to self educate Nobody can prevent you from seeing, and I think that is really important just to say– we don't say that enough, that you have the power to make claims about what you want in this university. I think one of the things we don't see enough of is your voices being articulated about these issues, but we hear a lot about the powers that be telling us what the problems are, but not your voices articulating well why you know at this moment. Why do we have such a disparate or lack of knowledge production about Palestine on this campus? Why am I one of only two Palestinian professors on this campus? Why are there these kind of resources, finances, events, and courses, even within Middle East studies? Every time I look each semester about what's coming, and not in Arab world states, but in the Middle East studies network, a disproportionate amount of those courses are about Israel, even while the region is predominantly Arab and Muslim. What does that tell us? So, thinking about your own role and the power that you hold is something. Thank you. 

SCK: Well as we wrap up, I'm going to ask our panelists, actually, no, I'm going to ask you out of the audience, but if there's one more burning question, and somebody is like, if I sat in all this time and put on this panel, we don't get to say this thing, I might have to explode. Anything on the panel, and the panelists, any last thing, you're like, I was so committed to making sure this got said today, and it hasn't yet, and I want to make sure it gets said. 
KD: I just want to extend the same thank you to Professor Calis. I know that many of you are in this room because of work that you've done. I wanted to extend my gratitude to Professor Calis for the incredible work that she has been doing on this campus. I know that many of you are here because you've taken courses with her, you've worked with her, and I have learned so much  working in solidarity alongside her. So I just wanted to collectively honor her incredible contributions on this campus.