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Wondering If Radical Movements Work? Look to the Arab Spring.
I fled to the Middle East to escape racism, but now I see that our oppression is forever linked to those oppressed abroad. Here’s why.
As a Black woman born and raised in Brooklyn, the experience of having police regularly invade my neighborhood was part of the reason I decided to run away to the Middle East at 19. I not only wanted to escape the lurking, armed, and violent NYPD but also the hired security that followed me through every store in the city. In the Brooklyn of the ’80s and ’90s, being tracked and surveilled were experiences you simply had to live with if you were Black. Once overseas, I was surprised that the Arabs I met in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and Lebanon regarded their local and national armed forces with a similar resentment. Police abuse is familiar to people living under Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes: It has also long been a common reference point between Black and Arab scholars who advocate for global decolonization.
From the Palestinian solidarity of the Black Panthers’ Huey P. Newton to the post-Ferguson Black-Palestinian solidarity video “When I See Them I See Us” produced in 2015, activists such as Angela Davis, June Jordan, Cornel West, Noura Erakat, and others have framed the struggle for Black liberation in America as tied to an international anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-carceral movement. The fight against police violence was one of the driving forces behind what has become known as the Arab Spring. Kicked off by a fruit vendor in Tunisia who was harassed and abused by the police, a wave of Arab protests demanding reform began with Tunisia’s 2010–2011 Jasmine Revolution and was followed by 2011 uprisings in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. These popular movements toppled North African presidents who had ruled for decades and triggered the destabilization of Syria’s government through a civil war that has no end in sight. By contrast, there are no military incursions in Brooklyn, yet paramilitary tools and techniques have been increasingly deployed against U.S. civilians. For many, the violence unleashed on peaceful protesters domestically evokes parallels between America and repressive occupied territories, where protesters are routinely met with…
