Author: mara.ahmed

I have known Ali Sajjad since he was a student in college and am proud of the crucial work he is doing for children’s education. This is the kind of investment in young people that we should all support. Pls consider making a tax deductible donation.

In Faisalabad, the historical city of Lyallpur, a team of socially conscious educators run a school that provides the kind of education we often dream of: meeting local and global needs while being holistic, building critical thinking, teaching science, mathematics, languages and technology, including music and the performing arts in the curriculum, and encouraging extracurricular activities (from sports to debates). It’s a school that focuses on inclusivity, social justice, and democracy as core values both in its student body and its staff.

Broadwood Central School is a testament to what Pakistan’s future can be. On account of its egalitarian/inclusive mission and the scholarships it provides to a large number of students, the school needs support to continue its work in the Faisalabad community. Please invest in the school and its students by making a tax deductible donation here.

More info at www.broadwoodcentral.edu.pk

In Scorsese’s film ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ a strong connection is made between the terror and murder faced by indigenous Osage people (with access to oil money since the early 1900s) and the Tulsa race massacre in 1921 which annihilated Black Wall Street and its wealth.

I want to take these connections further and compare Tulsa to Gaza. Images of the violence enacted on both cities speak for themselves (the first three are from the Tulsa massacre and the last three from the ongoing genocide in Gaza).

There is immense, unbearable loss of life in Gaza right now (more than 5,000 dead, half of them children). There is also an imperial destruction of all fundamental aspects of human life – social, political and cultural structures, housing, commerce, employment, transportation, familial and community networks, etc. This razing of the infrastructure of life, as we understand it, also happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in countless Native villages all across America.

The destruction of human (and non-human) habitats and ecology seems central to capitalism. Large swathes of humanity must be forcefully locked in ghettos of precarity and poverty in order for a small percentage of white elite (and their stooges) to enjoy unseemly wealth and privilege.

Black poet and activist Pat Parker understood this. In ‘Revolution – It’s Not Neat or Pretty or Quick,’ she wrote:

“The rest of the world is being exploited in order to maintain our standard of living. We who are five percent of the world’s population use 40 percent of the world’s oil. As anti-imperialists we must be prepared to destroy all imperialist governments; and we must realize that by doing this we will drastically alter the standard of living that we now enjoy.

…The equation is being laid out in front of us. Good American equals Support Imperialism and war. To this, I must declare—I am not a good American. I do not wish to have the world colonized, bombarded and plundered in order to eat steak.”

When we stand in solidarity with Palestine and other peoples and places being crushed by imperial greed and its technologies of extermination and containment, this is something we must consider.

Thank you Clarissa Brooks for reminding me of these powerful lines during a discussion on ‘Black Feminist Writers and Palestine’ organized by Black Women Radicals.