Author: mara.ahmed

stand with kashmir

i know about activism fatigue, but what’s happening in kashmir is terrifying. after 70 years of colonial oppression, modi’s government has scrapped provisions in the indian constitution that guaranteed a measure of autonomy and allowed the jammu and kashmir legislature to define permanent residents (in essence, who could buy land and property in the valley). with this unconstitutional presidential order, we can expect complete annexation and settler colonialism in kashmir, as hindu settlements begin to encroach on and change the muslim-majority demographics of the region. think palestine. all of this is happening under the cover of a complete media and communications blackout that has cut off kashmiris from the rest of the world. what has been most striking though is the reaction from ordinary indians, most of whom have broken into a cheap nationalist dance and can be found, on social media, using the white man’s vocabulary of ‘islamofascism’ and ‘islamic terrorism’ to describe kashmiri resistance to half a million indian troops stationed on their land and the torture, rape, disappearances and mass graves that have come to embody their brutal occupation. there’s something particularly rancid about the racism of people of color. it’s unsettling on so many levels. as we remember toni morrison today, we should pay attention to language and the violence it can enact. from her nobel lecture: ‘it is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind.’ one can feel it. #standwithkashmir

The 21st Century Problem of Anti-Muslim Racism

‘Dominant U.S. social movements often perceive US imperialism and settler colonialism as separate much in the same way that they only tend to imagine racism as a form of violence specific to the domestic United States and as the result of slavery and native genocide and conquest while conceptualizing the violence and killing produced by the global War on Terror as a product of mere political conflict.

It is with this dilemma that we argue that the Muslim Travel Ban, and the anti-Muslim policies that reinforce it, are an outgrowth of U.S. imperial racism that take shape in the context of post-Cold War expansion into Muslim-majority countries. Yet since anti-Muslim racism operates through an incongruous conflation of nationality, race, and religion, we contend that there has been a troubling inability to define, conceptualize, and resist anti-Muslim racism. Indeed, mobilizations against the targeting of persons perceived to be Muslim by the U.S. government have been ongoing, especially those led by Arab, Muslim, and South Asian activists and their immediate allies. Yet much of U.S. progressive and left activism committed to racial and social justice has failed to assert a consistent response, rising up only in moments of emergency, like the widespread national protests at U.S. airports when the Muslim Ban was first announced, and failed to integrate an analysis of anti-Muslim racism into the growing joint struggles against racism in the aftermath of the Trump presidency.’ More here.

WHAT THE MEDIA ISN’T TELLING YOU ABOUT FAR-RIGHT TERRORISM

“If we really want to tackle this ideology, our governments need to take the threat seriously. The media has got to stop inciting against minorities. We have to end America’s wars. We need to stop with the neoliberalism and austerity. And we have to offer a platform to the left. I’m not saying we can win over white supremacists. But we need to offer a vision of inclusion that tells the truth about why the world is the way it is and who is really to blame: Not immigrants, not Muslims, not the other. But a capitalistic system that exploits them and promotes war.”
Watch here.

settler colonialism in kashmir

Hafsa Kanjwal: Article 370 is a part of the Indian constitution and gives special status to Kashmir, giving it some level of autonomy to conduct its own affairs. It is, technically, the only ‘legal’ link that connects Kashmir to India. It has effectively been undermined over the past 70 years. But why is it so important now? Scrapping it marks the complete colonization and occupation of Kashmir.

[…] For Kashmiris, this means that settler colonialism is in full effect. India, of course learns its colonizing strategies from its best friend, Israel, and now we can expect Hindu-only settlements propping up in the region (by the way, the land was already populated with over half a million Indian troops, who had taken over huge swathes of the region with their cantonments, bunkers, etc). The long term plan is to populate the region with enough Hindus so as to make the current Muslim-majority political aspirations for freedom obsolete. #StandWithKashmir

More here.

How a shifting definition of ‘white’ helped shape U.S. immigration policy

Kamala Kelkar: By 1790, a Naturalization Act declared that “all male white inhabitants” would become citizens, a time when the country started enforcing its hierarchy of whiteness.

“Nordic was purest,” Moya said. “Eastern and Southern Europeans were ‘undermining the purity’ of the American stock.”
In 1882, the U.S. passed the Immigration Act, which imposed a 50 cent a head tax for every person who the country deemed “undesirable” and was sent back. That same year, it passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, declaring a moratorium on Chinese labor immigrants.

Public health inspectors would enforce this by making snap judgments at the border, picking out people who they thought looked peculiar, had the capacity for lunacy, criminality, or promiscuity or looked ugly. Italians, Slavs, and Jewish and Irish people were eyeballed for their ability to bolster the economy and either sent back or stigmatized. More here.

James Baldwin on the Empathic Rewards of Reading and What It Means to Be an Artist

James Baldwin: You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. More here.

Who are the antifa?

Ian Layton: If you are uneducated about what “Antifa” is and what it is not, please educate yourself. The president is looking to label anyone associated with “Antifa” or “anti-fascism” as a terrorist. These are scary times.

Fascistic tendencies continue to rise in the U.S. We have seen a rise in hate motivated acts of violence against non-white, non-christian, non-cis, non-straight communities. If the state were truly a tool of ” the people ” then these actions would have been strongly condemned across the board, and these movements would have already been stomped out.

History demonstrates that communities cannot depend on legislators, police, FBI, or CIA to rid our communities of movements that embolden white supremacists. Folks who identify as anti-fascists are taking pro active steps to stop these very violent groups from growing and gaining traction.

Allowing Neo-Nazis to organize and demonstrate in public spaces is not an issue of free-speech, but a normalization of a truly terrifying and violent ideology that leads to real violence. We cannot allow that.

I am Antifa, because I oppose fascism. I am Antifa because I believe in a society free of white supremacy. I am Antifa because I believe all communities deserve to live free of violence and oppression. I am Antifa because the very institutions that we are told work for all of us, are very much normalizing and codifing fascism into law.

President Trump equated them with white supremacists. Here’s why he’s wrong. More here.

the hatred for children

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: I think the most insidious and cruel aspect of US fundamentalist capitalism and Ayn Randian individualism is the hatred for children, prominently now those thousands of caged children in concentration camps on the border.. [but also] the ongoing lead in the water in Flint, in Oakland, in southern Louisiana, the lack of public child care for working parents, and in Syria and Yemen, Afghanistan, Palestine, dead and lost generations of children, refugee children the US refuses to take in, cruelty and hatred of children baked into US socio-political-cultural history, into every institution, the kill-the-children-first in raids on Native communities, the unimaginable horror of enslaved African children separated form parents, no childhood at all, children as property to be bought and sold and groomed for lives of labor. The US is the only country in the world that has not ratified the 1990 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Poverty: The U.S. ranks 30th out of 34 rich countries in terms of child poverty. 21.2% of children in the United States live in poverty. The average for rich countries is 13.3%. Only Chile, Turkey, Mexico and Israel had higher child poverty rates.
The U.S. is the only high-income country not to grant paid maternity leave. The U.S. is also the one country in the world that sentences offenders under the age of 18 to life in prison without parole, which the Convention opposes. How do we, in the US, live with this horror that is the US? We should not be shocked how the USG is treating refugee children at the border, given that it doesn’t treat US citizen children much better.