Category: politics

‘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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Asim Rafiqui: There are many who are sceptical and critical of the current decolonial moment. There is now a widespread backlash against decolonial projects, aided and abetted by this current political moment of politically correct racism, popular authoritarianism and ethnic nationalism. Students who refuse Eurocentric histories, erasure of the Other’s suffering, colonial historical teleologies, concocted knowledge genealogies, the silencing of resistance historical and present, the elision of evidence of non-European scientific, cultural, social and artistic influences and more, are often accused of being ‘sensitive’ or ‘petty’ or ‘spoilt’ and unwilling to accept a ‘hard, tough education’. These critics assume a ‘correct’ set of knowledge, which is precisely what is being questioned. It is difficult to take this backlash seriously, emanating as it is from the pens and persons of the established, the privileged and the cock-sure–precisely the group and structures of thought that decolonial projects take direct aim at. If the first European /Western intellectual reaction to the Other speaking back was Postmodernism, the second European reaction seems to be nostalgia and racism. What these detractors reveal is a profound lack of understanding of the act of critique, which, to quote Foucault, is always “…a matter of pointing out what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest upon.”

[…] But I want to return to this interview [with Ghassan Kanafani], a transcript of which follows. I drifted to this interview while thinking about decolonisation, because it is a vivid example of the Mignolo-ian demand that we always remain cognisant of “…the hidden complicity between the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality.” Here, in this interview, we see how a ‘modern’ discourse of ‘peace’ and a framing of a narrative that places parties into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ opponents, is undermined and taken apart. I have taken the trouble to add some editorial comments to the transcript to help us see and understand what Kanafani is actually doing as he confronts this journalists presumptions and violent words. More here.

‘we have to stop pretending like this sh*t starts and ends with trump’ — learn the facts so we can actually end this. pls watch.

Naveen Minai and Sara Shroff: We introduce yaariyan (friendship), gupshup (a mode of speaking), and baithak (a mode of space) to theorize our queer feminist care as research practices. We use these practices to hold each other accountable and to reorient our research questions, frameworks, and genealogies. We use them to challenge the networks of authority that demand we make gender and sexuality in and from the global south knowable, legible, and visible only on certain terms. We mark Pakistan as a site for theorizing and worldmaking instead of just a site of fieldwork. Ultimately, we are asking the difficult questions of what decolonial means in Pakistan. So while we focus on our yaariyan as a mode of survival, pleasure, and accountability, it also serves as the means through which we find and engage our interlocutors in responsible and respectful ways. Our goal is to think with rather than for, to interrogate our assumptions of authenticity and authority, and to expose the multiple and different forms of power within processes of knowledge production.

[…] To borrow from Sadia Abbas, the global south is seen as a tabula rasa where you can experiment and empiricize – but never theorize (Abbas 2010). As one such site, Pakistan is often marked as a space where gender and sexuality (as categories, as nomenclatures, as theories, as frames) must be introduced, invented, and curated. This is not just about whiteness. This is also about the ways in which racial, gender, and class privilege travels between global north and global south: white saviors, brown saviors. We argue here that the queer, feminist, and trans communities in the global south need neither. We challenge the conditions under which global south knowledges “arrive” in academia as archivable and absolute truths by asking: what are our responsibilities and to whom? What does it mean to put Black queer and feminist epistemologies next to epistemologies deployed by feminist, queer, and trans communities in Pakistan to navigate and negotiate state violence? How do we start to read across different frames to disrupt dominant interpretations of gender, sexuality, Pakistan, South Asia, and global south? What does queer and feminist mean in Pakistan and what do these meanings tell us about colonial legacies, neo-imperialisms, and global/racial capital? More here.

‘The acceptance of Khawaja Sira people in Pakistan has been held up internationally as a symbol of tolerance, established long before Europe and America had even the slightest semblance of a transgender rights movement. But the acceptance of people defining their own gender in Pakistan is much more complicated. The term transgender refers to someone whose gender identify differs from their birth sex. This notion is yet to take root in Pakistan and the transgender rights movement is only beginning to assert itself formally. Now, some third gender people in Pakistan say the modern transgender identity is threatening their ancient third gender culture.’ More here.