Black feminists in defence of Sarah Jama and Palestinian human rights

2023/10/24 Leave a comment

Remarkable demonstration of willful blindness and ideological blinkers. Not a word about the Israelis slaughtered by Hamas. And how can self-styled feminists be supportive of the Islamist and anti-feminist Hamas?

Most other commentary criticizing the Israeli government’s response to the Hamas attacks acknowledges the brutality of the Hamas killings and kidnappings.

Even the equally biased message from TMU law students (since taken down), “condemned Hamas’ recent war crimes killing 1300 Israelis” but then reverts to form by stating “Israel is therefore responsible for all loss of life in Palestine.”

That three academics at UofT failed to do so acknowledge Hamas’s brutality, will legitimately be used as an example of the “rot” in academia.

Sad:

We are Black women scholars writing with the strongest concern for the possible censure of MPP Sarah Jama at Queen’s Park. As Black women, we live with the enduring legacies of slavery and colonialism. We feel a responsibility, like many Black women before us, to oppose all forms of racist dehumanization.

We are outraged that Sarah Jama, a Black woman and Hamilton Centre MPP, may be silenced — unable to speak in the provincial Legislature — for the duration of her elected term. Jama has been targeted by Premier Doug Ford, and reprimanded by her own party leadership, in response to a statement in which she called for a de-escalation of violence.

The attack on Jama comes amidst deepening government repression of those who speak out in defence of Palestinian life.

Jill Dunlop, minister of Colleges and Universities, has named and condemned university students and faculty who authored or signed statements, even those who have defended Palestinian human rights on social media, calling for them to be disciplined for “supporting the atrocities that have been committed against innocent civilians.”

Are Palestinian civilians not also “innocent?”

We mourn the loss of all civilian life and we also stand with those who speak out in support of Palestinian human rights and against government efforts to intimidate and silence dissenting voices.

The siege on Gaza is a humanitarian disaster, described by UN experts as “collective punishment” and “ethnic cleansing”. Since Oct. 7 and of writing this article on Friday, the Israeli army has dropped over 6,000 bombs in Gaza, killing 3,478 people, with one Palestinian child killed every 15 minutes. Israel has launched 136 attacks on health-care services across Palestine, killing 28 medical staff. Over a million Palestinians have been displaced, with corridors for humanitarian aid closed. Human Rights Watch has documented the use of white phosphorus, a chemical that “burns at temperatures hot enough to melt metal.”

On Oct. 9, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced “a complete siege … no electricity, no water, no food, no fuel,” saying, “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” In a since-deleted tweet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the siege on Gaza as a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” These statements justify the ongoing attack on Gaza, constituting what Israeli Holocaust Scholar Raz Segal deems “an intent to commit genocide.”

Black people too have often been likened to animals and relegated to the realm of darkness and “the jungle.” Sarah Jama’s words emerge from a long tradition of Black women standing in support of Palestinian human rights and against apartheid, from Toni Morrison to Audre Lorde, Angela Y. Davis, June Jordan and Dionne Brand.

On our campus and in our movements, we work from Indigenous lands and across geographic and socially erected borders, with scholars of all backgrounds — including Palestinian, Indigenous and Jewish — to stand for justice and against dehumanization. Black feminists have not only the right, but the duty, to take a stand against genocide, militarism, and occupation, and to challenge the Canadian government’s complicity in it, whether in the current attack on Gaza, its initial failure to condemn South African apartheid or its leading role in the destabilization of Haiti.

Nobody should be censored or disciplined for condemning what the UN and Amnesty International have documented for decades: that Palestinians have been subjected to Israeli military occupation and apartheid and that Gaza has been under siege since 2007.

We cannot allow Sarah Jama to be silenced and we will not be silent or complicit with genocide. Our voices echo a global majority that supports an immediate ceasefire, as well as an end to the conditions that have been at the devastating heart of this issue: an end to apartheid and an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Robyn Maynard, Nisrin Elamin and Alissa Trotz are professors at the University of Toronto.

Source: Black feminists in defence of Sarah Jama and Palestinian human rights

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Confronting Canada’s ugly record of anti-Blackness

2017/10/02 Leave a comment

A needed counterpoint to the sanitized version of Canadian history. However, the arguments might be stronger if the book was not only”grounded in the work of countless renowned Canadian anti-racist scholars and activists,” but included a wider range of scholars:

In the early 20th century, the Canadian Department of Immigration went to great lengths to dissuade Black Americans from immigrating to Canada. Working with doctors, they provided them with monetary rewards for turning Black migrants away at the border and mandated that these medical professionals inflict invasive and unnecessary examinations as deterrence from entering Canada. The government also sent doctors to Oklahoma and Kansas to spread propaganda to Black Americans around the unlivable weather conditions of Canada—some even going as far as telling Black men their daughters would be vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation.

This was done alongside two things: active courting of white settlers and a deep investment in the public appearance of a polite and welcoming neutrality, set apart from the outward race-based discrimination of the United States. This is just one of hundreds of seamless historical examples cited in the new book Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada From Slavery to the Present, written by Black feminist writer, activist and educator, Robyn Maynard.

Maynard plainly corrects and downright disrupts the friendly, welcoming and multicultural narrative on which Canada’s national identity relies. Her book examines anti-Black racism alongside every historical moment that Black people have been present in this country, starting from settler colonialism to present day. By characterizing Canadian nation-building as settler colonialism, Maynard effectively calls out the white theft of Indigenous land in the building of Canada and traces it through to a white-dominated hierarchy that exists to this day. It is grounded in the work of countless renowned Canadian anti-racist scholars and activists.

Maynard traces the 200 years of slavery in Canada, often erased or downplayed in the study of our history, noting the same dehumanizing and violent treatment of Black bodies we see in accounts of slavery in the U.S. Anti-Blackness through segregation characterized the post-slavery abolition period, an era often reimagined in Canada as purely positive.

Maynard recounts “Canada’s Jim Crow”, government-enforced racial segregation that had an impact on housing, employment, education and immigration for Black people in Canada. “Racial segregation—a form of violence in and of itself—entails the enforced (rather than voluntary) confinement of racialized populations to particular spaces (e.g. particular neighbourhoods, schools, public spaces, and businesses),” she writes. “The segregation of Blacks—which, like slavery, was a form of controlling Black movement and institutionalizing subordination—was based on the idea that Black people were both inferior and a danger to whites. Formally and informally, segregation was one of Canada’s foremost strategies for maintaining white dominance across all aspects of society after slavery’s end.”

Source: Confronting Canada’s ugly record of anti-Blackness – Macleans.ca

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