Khury PS: I didn’t know any Palestinians growing up, but learning about Palestinians was a really important event in my life. It revealed to me an oppressive world, including revealing the oppression I was experiencing directly. When I came to stand in solidarity with Palestinians, there was an immediate price I paid for it. Friends I had in school became angry with me, and some stopped talking to me. They said, “How can you support those terrorists?” It gave me a sense of how isolated Palestinians must be and feel. There is something about that that was familiar in a way that I couldn’t put my finger on, but looking back, I think, “Well, yeah. I was a Black person experiencing that kind of isolation.” Being Black in the United States, me and my family and people I know are demonized and blamed for the country’s problems. There’s an incredible loneliness that comes with that. There are all kinds of ways that I directly experience oppression, but I think I recognized the oppression of others first—and I’ll put women in this category as well. My conscious disgust with sexism came before my conscious understanding and rejection of racism. So the oppression of other people has been important in revealing to me my own experience of oppression.
