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…
