We have always been here. At the university, mobilizing the police in its persecution of anti-colonial thought. To the suspensions and “discussions” of anti-colonial professors, to the arrest of conscientious dissidents and to the pimping of concepts of anti-racism and their use at the service of colonial violence. By appropriating the fight against anti-Semitism, forged from Warsaw to Crown Heights, to make it a human shield for the conquest of the settlers, so that even the political party full of Holocaust deniers, who only yesterday sowed fear about George Soros, “the Jews” “Lasers” and “banking elite” can easily be turned into crusaders against anti-Semitism.
I’m not surprised that my alma mater, as they say, is a central campus in the battle between universities and protest. I am also not surprised that my mentors and my thesis advisor remain in the crosshairs of settler power.
Like many, I chose Columbia University for my graduate studies not because of its Ivy League stature or illustrious reputation; and certainly not because of a “legacy admission”. I knew little about these things.
I chose the school that had the most dangerous academics, according to a list generated by famed “right winger” David Horowitz that I reverse-engineered and used as a “Guide to America’s Best Colleges.”
If the man who was going to call the “I Can’t Breathe” protests a “race hoax” thought a teacher or school was “dangerous” to his cause, I was there. What were the academic programs most hated by those who trivialize our lynchings? Sign me up. Who were his most hated professors in master’s and doctoral programs? I sought them out as my advisors.
This crowd which campaigns for political and historical illiteracy, which rushes the truth into oblivion, which has punished black students and banned books from plantations, prisons and school boards, will always point at our wise men with their pitchforks .
I am one of the other former students. Second class students. Of those who cannot threaten to withhold their donations unless you quickly quell the Soweto uprising. The old tokens you recruited for the webpage that ultimately aren’t just dull smiles that only exist in brochures as evidence of progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion . Those who are not appeased by the games of “decolonization of programs” and who see your inclusiveness hiding in sheep’s clothing. Who are not the recipients of your mass emails, assuring everyone that dissent is contained.
The purpose of education has never been to claim the laurels of an institution but to be seen as dangerous to the type of people who try to portray the brutality of the colonized as a racist hoax. It is not a question of thinking about perhaps one day having the chance to wander around institutions in the hope of obtaining a position, an enviable scholarship and a room with a view.
It’s not about waiting for the promised security of tenure and, with those emancipation papers in hand, starting to tell the truth. We should not expect to receive flowers from a university administration that turns out to be indistinguishable from Bull Connor the moment we discover that students believe that “decolonization is not a solution.” metaphor“.
The goal of education is not simply to interpret their world but to unmake it. To shake its genocidal foundations and the ease with which “the necessary carpet bombing of the indigenous sector” is swallowed by everyone. In other words, it must be what the colonizers would call “dangerous.”
There has been a willful incomprehension of the colonized student to whom the billionaires order to return to class, to stop behaving privileged and rebellious, to open their doors. Afrikaans textbooks and learn to accept “both sides” of their bombings.
In Columbia 68, France 68, Rhodes Must Fall and elsewhere, the police, politicians and principals always fold arms and tell Sarafina’s class not to be mean. Whether it was 19th-century ethnologists’ accounts of native docility or contemporary media accounts of the appropriate docility of peaceful protest that convinced them that this would silence them, I cannot say.
But these students didn’t just read a poem by Nikki Giovanni or Mahmoud Darwish and become “too woke,” as apartheid apologists claim. We didn’t just come across Frantz Fanon or Assata Shakur or Edward Said and say, “Wait a minute, that might be an injustice.” »
We are among the people who can be attacked. Who are forced to watch race riots unfold on our family’s block in Tulsa, or in Washington, D.C., or on our houses in Lydd or Huwara, and we are told that our bleeding is not the main thing. Let our bombings belong in the footnotes. That we must recognize the White Man’s Country’s right to exist. These are firm security operations. Let him hunt the Mau Mau terrorists. That we shouldn’t care about the camps, the victims, the lynching chants. This is not ethnic cleansing.
But what we are witnessing, from George Floyd to Gaza, is that the colonized are neither intimidated, nor cowardly, nor, in fact, colonized. That we have not signed any treaty which orders us to enter gently into the good night of our extermination. And that we do not recognize anyone who does it in our name.
What white power doesn’t understand is that we don’t acquiesce, we don’t cede territory, we’ve seen all your Dylann Roofs, Lothar von Trothas and David Ben Gurions – the natives, the blacks, the sans -papers won’t go anywhere. .
So we meet again. At the predictable peak of this moment of colonizer versus colonized – everywhere. Even if the colonizing media strongly deplore that fascism has regained control of the “West” or that “democracy” has experienced difficult times in the “global South”, we who are not published, to whom we are not don’t ask how we feel, the latter, the forbidden ones, who saw the anti-racism that we invented turn against us, unsurprisingly, are still there. Here on the ground were visits from Selma to become Selma.
We have always been here. Against all pogroms. Against all the Kristallnacht, all the Nakbas, all the bombings of Sétif, all the indigenous prisons, all the trails of cornered tears. No supremacist, no puritanical fantasy will ever materialize. The future is not persecuted. It’s anti-colonial. It belongs to reservations, hoods and native quarters. And every rusty, rehashed, recycled white supremacist ideology will end up where it belongs.
There is no definitive solution to the colonial problem. Not even DEI.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
