Hello everyone. Thank you for being here
tonight. I'm J De Leon. I'm the
Director of Engagement here at NYU
Skirball. It's my pleasure to welcome you
to tonight's Skirball Talk. Skirball
Talks is our free Monday night speaker
series, organized in partnership with
departments and centers across campus
and we have four more great events
upcoming in April. You can learn more
about them and RSVP on our website, nyuskirball.org Now please join me
in welcoming Crystal Parikh, Professor of
English and Social and Cultural Analysis
and the Director of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
Good evening, thank you all for being
here tonight.
I'm Crystal Parikh, as J said, the
Director of the Asian/Pacific/American
Institute at NYU and it's my pleasure to
welcome you tonight, to tonight's
Skirball Talk featuring Linda Sarsour.
I'd like to thank the co-sponsors for
tonight's event: NYU Sanctuary, NYU Center for Multicultural
Education and Programs, the Islamic
Center at NYU, NYU Hagop
Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern
Studies, NYU Jewish Voice for Peace,
NYU Students for Justice in
Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace - New York City.
And of course, thank you
to our host NYU Skirball.
Give them a hand, thanks.
On a personal note, I'd like to thank the A/P/A Institute staff for their tireless efforts in making tonight's event possible.
I'd also like to take a moment
for us to acknowledge that we are
gathered on the unceded land of the
Lenape peoples. I ask you to join me in
acknowledging the Lenape community,
their elders, both past and present, as
well as future generations. We would also
like to recognize that New York City is
currently home to a 100,000
people who identify as indigenous,
including many peoples from the Pacific.
We at the Institute affirm our
commitment to working to dismantle the
ongoing legacies of settler colonialism
Tonight's - thank you.
Tonight's event is part of the
Institute's year-long thematic focus on
migration, refugees and the politics of
sanctuary.
Our current exhibition, We Imagine
Sanctuary, created by artist Jess X Snow
and APA Institute at NYU Artist in
Residence Ushka, in collaboration with
NYU undergraduates, is on view at the
Gallery at 8 Washington Mews through May
10th and we encourage you to come visit
us there. Ok, I'd like to offer some
guidelines for tonight's event. We know
there may be some in the audience who
might not agree with the organizers or
invited speakers and we would hope that
everyone is able to provide our guests a
courtesy to speak on the theme of
migration, refugees and the politics of
sanctuary. We ask that you remain
conscientious about this topic, which is
of such enormous urgency at the present
moment. We encourage you to listen, learn
and save your questions for the note
cards, which will be collected
periodically from the audience during
the lecture. So please be sure, if you do
have questions, to pass those note cards
to the end of your aisle where they will be
collected. We also encourage you to post
tonight to social media using the
hashtag "#NYUSkirballTalks" and now
without further delay, I'd like to
introduce our speakers this evening
Linda Sarsour is an
award-winning racial justice and civil
rights activist, seasoned community
organizer and mother of three. Ambitious,
outspoken and independent, Sarsour shatters stereotypes of Muslim
women while also treasuring her
religious and ethnic heritage.
As the Palestinian Muslim American and
self-proclaimed
pure New Yorker born and 
raised in Brooklyn, she is the former
Executive Director of the Arab American
Association of New York and the
co-founder of the first Muslim online
organizing platform, MPOWER Change.
Sarsour has been at the forefront of
major civil rights campaigns, including
calling for an end to unwarranted
surveillance of New York's
Muslim communities and ending police
policies, like stop and frisk.
In the wake of the police murder of Mike Brown, she
co-founded Muslims for Ferguson to build
solidarity amongst American Muslim
communities and encourage work
against police brutality. She is a member
of the Justice League NYC,
a leading NYC force of activists,
formerly incarcerated individuals,
and artists working to reform the New
York Police Department and the criminal
justice system. Sarsour co-chaired the
March to Justice, a 250-mile journey on
foot to deliver a justice package to end
racial profiling, de-militarize police,
and demand the government invest in
young people and communities.
She was instrumental in the Coalition for
Muslim School Holidays to push New York
City to incorporate two Muslim high holy holidays into the NYC public school calendar.
New York City
is now the largest school system in the
country to officially recognize these
holidays. Sarsour is also a Senior Fellow
at the Auburn Seminary along leading
social justice faith leaders and she was
a National Co-Chair of the 2017
Women's March on Washington, dubbed the
largest single day protest in US history.
She serves on the Executive Board of
Women's March Inc., where she focuses on
fundraising and direct action planning.
Sarsour has received numerous awards
and honors, including the Champion of
Change from the White House, the YWCA USA’s Women of Distinction Award for
Advocacy and Civic Engagement,
the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination
committee, the Andrew Young Foundation's
Annual International Leaders Award,
the Shirley Chisholm Award by the New York City Council and was recognized by the
NAACP New York State Conference. Sarsour was named among 500 of The Most
Influential Muslims In the World, 50 of
the World's Greatest Leaders by Fortune
Magazine, Essence Magazine's Woke 100 and
featured on Time's 100 list of
the World's Most Influential People.
Sarsour was profiled on the front page
of the New York Times Metro Section and dubbed “Brooklyn Homegirl in a Hijab”
and she's written for and has been featured in
local, national and international media
discussing impact of domestic policies
that target Arab and Muslim American
communities, criminal justice issues,
immigration and Middle East affairs.
Sarsour is well respected amongst
diverse communities in both New York
City and nationally. She is most
recognized for her transformative,
intersectional organizing work and
movement building.
Joining Linda Sarsour on stage after her
talk will be Dr. Paula Chakravartty.
Paula Chakravartty is Associate
Professor in the NYU Department of Media
Culture and Communication and NYU
Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
Prior to NYU, she taught at University of
Massachusetts - Amherst and
the University of California - San Diego.
She was born in India and grew up as an
immigrant in the "Texas of Canada",
Calgary, Alberta. Her research and
teaching span political economy, migrant
labor, social movements and critical race
theory. Her books include Race, Empire and
the Crisis of the Sub-Prime published by
Johns Hopkins University Press in 2013,
Media, Policy and Globalization by
Edinburgh University Press in 2006 and
Global Communications: Towards A
Transcultural Political Economy, which
was published by Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers in 2008. Her recent
publications include a co-written
article on #CommunicationSoWhite and a
special issue on Mediatized Populisms: Inter-Asian Lineages
International Journal of Communication which was published in December of 2017.
Her current research focuses on racial
capitalism and global media
infrastructures and low-wage migrant
mobility and claims for justice. Chakravartty is a member of the NYU Sanctuary
Coalition and the NYU Coalition for Fair
Labor. She serves on the Executive
Committee of the NYU Association for
University Professors and is affiliated
is faculty at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU,
South Asia @ NYU and the NYU Hagop
Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.
So please now join me in
welcoming Linda Sarsour. Thank you.
What up, New York City! I appreciate you.
Thank you, thank you everyone. I
appreciate that.
So, let's just get to it
and I wanted to make one quick
clarification from that fabulous
introduction. When you said that I got
the Champion of Change from the White
House, let's be clear which White House
because you know it wasn't this White
House.
I'm just deeply honored and
humbled to be here today with all of you
and I thank all the organizers of this event.
When I came out you were probably
like, "Really? This lady?" The fact
that somebody like me can just attract
this kind of controversy is really
interesting, but I hope that
my folks in the room who don't agree
with me or think that they don't agree
with me give me a chance and then maybe
afterwards you can ask me the real
questions you want to ask me. We can talk
about all the things that you want to
talk about. I promise to directly answer
your questions, but I have some important
work to do and I hope that we leave here
today understanding that we are in a
very serious situation. Before I get to
the very serious situation that we are
in, I want you to know that I came here
today to NYU unapologetically
Palestinian-American and I came here -
unapologetically Muslim-American,
and many of you know me very well and
you know I'm gonna come here
unapologetically from Brooklyn, New York.
So I'm grounded in a particular moment
right now and sometimes I'm not sure if
we're all watching the same news and
we're kind of understanding what's
happening around us. So I came here
because I just want to speak some truth
and my truth is not other people's truth
and sometimes the truth makes some
people feel uncomfortable and what I'm
gonna ask you to do is when you feel
uncomfortable by something that I'm
saying, I want you to sit with it for a
second. I want you to ask yourself, what
is it about what she's saying that is
making me feel uncomfortable? We're
living in a moment right now where we
have to realize that we are complicit in
horror and trauma and pain against
communities. You are living in a time
just within the last two years where
this administration decided to target
young undocumented people and rescind
the Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrival program. So there's about
1 million young people who were safer
before they had DACA, because now the
government has their information and by
extension, their 11 million members of
their families are in risk of
deportation. Caging children at the
border, ripping babies from their mothers
and over 1,500 sexual assaults against
members of the federal government on
these young children taken from their
parents. We have a president that calls
the media the enemy of the people.
We have rescinded 200,000 El Salvadorans
from temporary protected status.
60,000 Haitians, Vietnamese, we've done Muslim
bans. Muslim ban one-two-three-four and
now, we went to the Supreme Court and we
lost in the Supreme Court. Now it is the
law that the President of the United
States of America, he or she can decide
at any moment to ban a particular group
of people from whatever country they feel like it.
We have banning trans people from the military.
Reversing protections for LGBTQ people, I
mean I can sit here - 23 million Americans
kicked off of healthcare. I mean you watch this online,
people literally putting out GoFundMes
just so that they can get a surgery or
get some additional treatment that their
insurance doesn't cover. This is all
happening on our watch. We sold the
largest arms deal to Saudi Arabia,
so they can kill poor innocent Muslims in
Yemen.
I mean, there is a lot of bad things that are happening in our country right now and what I'm giving you
is just a snippet. We can talk about
reproductive rights and states across
the country passing anti-abortion bills. I mean,
Brett Kavanaugh in the Supreme Court and
stacking up the Supreme Court with
conservatives that are going to impact
us for the next 40 years.
And so what I'm here to say to all of you is that I don't care who you would have been at
the time of the Civil Rights Movement or
who you would have been at the
time of any horrific moment in history.
The question is, who are you right now?
What are you doing right now? A lot of
times people say to me,
you're Anti-American. You need to go back to
where you came from. First of all, I came
from Brooklyn. Let's just make that very
clear.
And they'll say to me things like,
go back to Saudi Arabia. First of all,
even if I was to go back to where my
family came from, it wasn't Saudi Arabia.
And I don't know about anybody that wants to go live in Saudi Arabia because I sure in hell ain't one of them.
And I say that to say that - they say to me you
know, you're Anti-American, you need to -
you're not a patriot, you don't love this
country and I know why they say that.
They say that because while I don't take
for granted that my immigrant parents
came here from living under the longest
military occupation in modern history to
come here so that I can be born here and
have the privileges that I do have in
this country, that I get to come and
stand on a stage at NYU and speak to
people of all different backgrounds, I
don't take that for granted.
But just because my family came here, to this
country, I don't forget that this country
has caused a lot of horror and trauma
against many communities.
It is not Anti-American to remind us that we live
in a country that was founded on
the extermination of Indigenous people.
It's not Anti-American to remind us that
we live in a country that was founded on
the enslavement of black people,
that we segregated people by race and I would
argue with you in New York City that we
still segregate people by race.
We got the most segregated public school
system in the country. Not only do we
segregate people by race, we also
segregate them by class. So we just add it on.
We're a country that when they said "Muslim Ban", people said, "Linda they
can't do that. They can't just ban people."
We've done that before. The Chinese
Exclusion Act. We passed a piece of
federal legislation that actually said
that this group of people from this
country are not allowed to immigrate to
the United States of America.
We also interned Japanese-Americans. That wasn't a long time ago, that was 77 years ago.
Where we went around and rounded up
Japanese-Americans and put them into
concentration camps on this US soil.
We also live in a country that has had mass deportation programs.
Operation Wetback,
where we've deported two million
Mexicans who did not cross the border,
but the border crossed them.
That was at a time when we did not have all this
technology, where we
did not have agencies like ICE, so what
makes you think that we can't have a
mass deportation program? We had it under
President Obama.
He was deporting a thousand immigrants
per day.
I know you would love to have him back and I'll take him back in a second,
but we also got to speak the truth sometimes.
We also said that we
ended slavery. Everybody's always like,
you got to get over - why did black people
keep talking about slavery, that already,
that was a long time ago. Actually, it
wasn't that long ago.
But also, today in 2019, you live in a country that practices modern-day slavery,
and you're silent about it. What makes me
believe that if you were around a couple
of hundred years ago or even a hundred
years ago that you were gonna be some
sort of abolitionist. You should be an
abolitionist right now.
We have mass incarceration in this
country. That is modern-day slavery.
It's not okay. It's not okay for us to live in
a country where we hold 25% of the
world's prison population. It's not okay.
It's not okay as the country that
doesn't have the largest or most
populated, we're not the most populated
nation, for us to hold one out of
four prisoners.
That makes no sense, but generally speaking, yes there's a movement to end mass incarceration in
this country but guess what? There still
is a quite large silent majority.
And so when I say to people all the time is I'm not Anti-American. In fact, if there was a
photo in the dictionary with the word
Patriot, I would have it, it would be my
picture there, because a real Patriot, a
real Patriot loves their country so much
that they push their country to be
better, to respect every single person
that lives in our country with us. I love
my country. I want my country to be the
beacon of hope, of human rights.
I want our nation to be able to say we
respect everybody in this country. When
people say to me you're a leftist or all -
first of all, I don't ever say about
myself that I'm from the left. I don't
allow people to put any labels on me.
And people will say your ideas are radical
and I always ask people. I'm just really
trying to understand and you can help me
because maybe I'm just confused.
What's so radical about believing that
everybody deserves access to healthcare?
What's so radical about believing that college students
shouldn't graduate with college debt and
be paralyzed for the rest of their lives.
What's so radical about that?
What's so radical about believing that
our undocumented neighbors who live with us,
who sometimes take care of our
children, who are our fellow students,
who are people who live in our communities.
Sometimes they are in our families.
What's so radical about believing that
they deserve to be treated with dignity
and respect in our country? What's so
radical about that?
What's so radical about believing that
LGBTQIA people deserve to be safe in
every space that they're in? What's so
radical about that?
I'm trying to understand what is so
left about that? What's left or right about that?
There's a lot of things that
I - that's right sis, that's what I'm talking about.
She's all in.
So what I say to folks in this room is that you know,
what's so radical about being anti-war?
What's so radical about being against
the military-industrial complex and then
reprioritizing and saying, you know what?
We can do a lot better with that.
With those resources, we can put it back into our crumbling infrastructure,
our mediocre public education systems in
this country. What's wrong with that?
What's wrong with being anti war and
being pro-peace and pro-diplomacy.
That's what I am, so don't tell me about what's
left or right.
I'm pro-human. I'm pro people being able to live and not only survive in our communities,
I want people to thrive in our communities.
There's nothing left or right about that.
People know me very well. I'm not no
representative of the Democratic Party,
in fact if you want to ask people in the
Democratic Party, they'd probably be like,
nope she ain't with us.
I'm a small D,
little small D and I happened to choose
the party that's a little bit better
than another party, at least
from my personal experience and another party may be good for other people.
This is not a partisan conversation. It's about what kind of country do you want to live in.
And so what I say to people in this movement
that we're a part of right now, there's a
lot of people that are talking about
this term that they just heard about
like five minutes ago,
cuz you know everything's a trend. Everybody wants to
be part of a trend and they keep talking
about intersectionality.
And people define intersectionality whatever way they want to, whatever makes them feel comfortable.
That's not how the world works. There is an actual
definition for intersectionality
and it actually came from somewhere. So you
can't - it didn't just pop up.
Intersectionality is a term that was
coined by a black woman scholar named Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw.
When Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw offered academia this term, just to be clear,
she didn't say that intersectionality was black people and the white people
and the Latinos and
the Muslims and the Jews and the atheists
organizing together. That's not what
intersectionality is and if that's what
you think it is then you got a delete
and start over, cuz that's the problem that we have.
Intersectionality is not
about people organizing together or different people organizing together.
It's the idea about organizing at the intersections of oppression. It's about this idea that you can't
organize around gender justice without
also organizing around economic justice
and racial justice and reproductive
rights and environmental justice.
That you can't combat anti-black racism with
or without also combating Islamophobia
and xenophobia and anti-semitism and
ableism, right? And homophobia and
transphobia, because what happens is we
forget that there are people in our
community who live with multiple
identities.
So what if you're a black trans woman? What happens to you?
You have to experience anti-black racism and transphobia, so why are we gonna ask
people to break themselves up into
different movements? And that's why we
have lost a lot of important fights so
let's get into that for a second.
Where
do we go wrong?
Organizing on any issue including immigration, immigrant rights.
We're organizing in silos.
Racial justice people are over here. The folks working
for Medicare-For-All are up there.
Environmental justice people are in the
middle. The racial justice, anti-police brutality, criminal justice reform people are over here.
The LGBTQ rights folks are in the other corner. The
Muslims are over here and then we're all organizing separately.
And what happens when we organize separately? People get left off the table,
or people are asked
to have to pick and choose where they
want to be and what they prioritize
parts of their identity.
Audre Lorde told us there is no such thing as a
single issue struggle because we don't
live single issue lives, so why do the
movement separate us.
And not only do the movements separated the way that we've been organizing has separated us,
which is why we're in this new moment where
people are not coming to terms with
how we're gonna organize when we come
together and bring our movements together,
people will say, but Linda, we've
won some campaigns this way.
The environmental justice people have gotten some wins, the immigrant rights people
have gotten some wins. I always ask
people - labor has gotten some wins -
the question is, who lost when you won?
Who had to lose for you to win?
We've had this in New York many times. Our labor
friends would go in fighting for wages
or some contract, but then when they get
in there they say,
don't talk to us about those undocumented kids who want that tuition assistance. We got you, but you got a -
When the Muslims are fighting
they're like, we'll talk about
stop-and-frisk but don't talk to us about that unwarranted surveillance program.
We need the
surveillance stuff, like we can't come out. We can't do everything.
We'll help you, and oftentimes what we have done in the movement is we've thrown each other under the bus.
I don't want to be part of a movement like that.
I want to be part of a movement where we
either win together or we lose together. At
least when we lose, we lose with
integrity and without leaving anybody
behind.
We need a holistic approach to the way
in which that we organize, to social justice work.
And I want to talk a little
bit about, as someone who is a leader in
the progressive movement, there are some
things that we got to understand.
I don't know about what we're trying to do here
and maybe other people have different
goals, but let me tell you what my goal
is. I'm not trying to be part of a movement
where we all agree on everything,
cuz that's not actually possible. It's actually not realistic so if that's what you're waiting for, it's never gonna happen.
So I'm helping you by telling you
to give up because it's just not gonna
happen and the reason why I say that is
because there's this expectation on the
movement for all of us to be on the same
page but then we're not even on the same
page with people in our families. You
can't even agree with people in your
family and you expect to come to the
movement and agree with strangers?
This is just not how it works, so what I say
to people that my goal in the movement is not unity.
Unity in the sense that we're all gonna come out with one package. We're all gonna agree on all the same policy solutions.
We're all gonna have the same political positions. We're
all gonna be part of the same party.
That's not why I'm here,
because for me, unity is not uniformity.
Unity is not uniformity and it's not
going to be uniformity in this movement
and when I say to people and just to be
a little bit more specific about what I'm saying,
For example, I'm Palestinian.
I'm a light-skinned Arab born and raised in
Brooklyn and one of the movements that
I'm very committed to is - I'm committed
to black liberation. I'm committed to
ending police brutality. I'm committed to
dismantling an injustice system, not the
justice system. The injustice system, so
when I go to the table or I meet people
in New York City who have lost their
children to police violence or I sit at
tables with black-led organizers, I have
never went to a table and said, before I
sit and organize with you, raise your
hand if you believe in a free Palestine.
Raise your hand if you support the
boycott divestment sanction movement.
You do not come into a movement space and
put conditions on the movement.
This is not how it works.
So what happens eventually in the movement,
I'm giving tips to folks here.
Take it, write it down.
The way that I've been able to share my story in the movement is I come to spaces and gave myself
wholeheartedly to those spaces. Gave my
skills, my talents, my passion and my heart
to the things that move me, and what
happens later on is someone turns to you
a few months later, maybe a year later
and says, where did you come from?
And I say what do you mean? I said tell me your
story, and that gives me an opportunity
to say who I am and who I am is core to
who and how I show up in the movement.
I am a daughter of Palestinian immigrants
who came here from living under a military occupation.
My family still
lives under a military occupation
I still see people who look like me who
live in an open-air prison in Gaza.
So when I carry the positions that I have, I
hope that you expect me to have these positions,
and in fact if I didn't have
these positions, you should be quite worried about me.
And so, what happens in
the movement is I'm able to share my story.
I'm able to tell people where I
came from. I'm able to share my pain,
where it hurts for me, and guess what we
all heard? We all have trauma. We all come
from communities where there is trauma.
But we have to be able to be part of building relationships, in order to share
our pain and trauma with others
so we can find ways to address that trauma
together,
and when I say that also, it doesn't mean that anybody in the movement carries a - you know, or stands at
the door and says, "Tell me what your
political positions are in order for me to allow you to be on the table."
That's not how it works in the movement.
Everybody's welcome to the table. Now,
that doesn't mean that when you're at
the table, someone's not going to say
something that is in opposition to a
particular position you have or it
doesn't mean because you're at the table
that you're not gonna feel uncomfortable. Of course you're going to feel uncomfortable.
Because like I said earlier, unity is not uniformity.
If you care about
undocumented people, you're gonna have to
come to the table and say I'm ready to
put it all in for undocumented people.
I'm gonna go all in for the Muslims. I'm gonna go all in for our Jewish
sisters and brothers. I'm gonna go all in for you know, LGBTQIA people, without any conditions to your solidarity
and then eventually
someone will turn to you and say, what is your story?
Where does it hurt?
Tell me, so I can be with you just like
you have been with me. That's how the
movement is and that's the kind of
movement that I want to be a part of and
it's not gonna go well for you if you
think that coming to the movement
requires that you put conditions on the
people in the movement, cuz what happens
is the opposite happens.
And the movement is a place where everybody gets heard.
It doesn't mean that your issue becomes prioritized, but you will be heard in this movement.
One of the things that I'll say to everybody here is that we got to come to terms also with how we're gonna win,
and everybody has a different vision. I'm a visionary. I think about things 20, 30, 40 years from now.
We live
in a country with changing demographics.
There's nothing you can do about that.
We're gonna become a browner country.
That's just life. It's the cycle. It's
just how it is. I'm not out here, I don't
have a clinic or some place, where like,
some lab where we're making more Brown
babies in there. We're really not doing
that. My people are pretty good about
that baby-making business, but it's not
me that's leading that charge. I got I
have three. I stopped. I gave my
contribution to the world.
And I say that to say that, it's okay. I'm actually
really excited about it. I know a lot of
people who are excited about the
changing demographics of our country,
but what we also have to realize is when
there's changing demographics, guess what else changes?
Leadership changes. Influencers change, and now we're watching it right before our very eyes.
We're watching what happens when women of color come into leadership.
Two things happen: I'll talk about the positive for a second and then we'll talk about the negative for a second.
The positive
When women of color are in leadership, they
don't leave anybody behind.
And when women of color are in leadership, guess what? You're like
wait a minute, oh man. Everybody's talking
about health care now? It's not just our
old Jewish uncle Bernie Sanders talking
about healthcare?
Now you have all the women of color
leading on health care, including the
lead sponsor of the Medicare for All bill
in the house is an Asian, an Indian
woman: congresswoman Pramila Jayapal.
That's what we're talking about right now.
College education, ending the debt in
college. When was the last time that was
a mainstream conversation in Congress?
But it is now.
Immigrants, temporary protective status, right? Now we're going into a new and you'll hear about
it very soon. There's going to be a bill
that's going to start working on
repealing the Muslim ban and the asylum
ban and the travel ban and the Refugee ban.
People of color talking about the
things we've always wanted to talk about.
Housing crisis: Rashida Tlaib recently
introduced the bill about something that
people might have not thought was that
important, but it is important. Guess what?
Being able to get car insurance without
your credit score being used against you
which also impacts mostly poor people
and guess who? Poor people of color. Black people in particular.
So now you have
women of color who are leading and talking about anti-war, anti-imperialism.
I'm not gonna lie to you, when I watched representative Ilhan Omar go after Elliot Abrams-
Having a black refugee who saw
war, who saw people that looked like her
dismembered and had to live in a refugee
camp for four years sit in Congress and
question a war criminal? That is the
American dream right there.
That is what we have been working for right there.
And I say this all the time and many people have heard me say this before about people of color.
It's not that white people don't have important positions.
It's not that we don't want white people
in our movement. White people are in our
movements. They are in all of our movements. Guess who?
When you talk about the pro-Palestine movement, guess who's at the forefront of the pro-Palestine movement?
Jewish people at the forefront of the Palestinian rights movement.
We have our white allies getting arrested in civil disobedience. We have them helping us resource our movement.
They're always in our
movement spaces,
but I always ask people to think about this for one second.
Why not follow people of color?
Because people of color are the most directly
impacted by injustice. So guess who wants justice first?
The people impacted by the
injustice. So I want to follow the people
who are trying to get to the justice
first and that is going to be the people
who are the most pain and traumatized
and broken in our country and they are
oftentimes poor people of color and
members of other marginalized communities.
and so, like I said
earlier, I'm a visionary.
I think about things 40 years from now. I work towards
things that I may never see the fruits
of my labor of and I have seen some fruits of my labor but I want to think about things 50 years from now.
But 2019,
I'm gonna be a little short-sighted.
2020 people? What are we gonna do?
This is not
no ordinary election.
This is not you know, oh I don't know if I like this one
and this one I don't agree with her on this issue.
I don't know about
this guy on that. It's not gonna be about that.
So what I'm gonna say to all of you
is this: pick somebody that you like.
I don't know. Sometimes I think people think the election is like, let me pick a friend. You're not picking a friend.
You really aren't. You're not gonna be having lunch or dinner with these people, so it doesn't matter if you like them.
It's not about if you like them. It's about who is the best in the moment knowing that the election is gonna happen with or without you.
So pick somebody and then when you pick them, participate. Knock on doors, fundraise, excite people, register voters.
Do whatever it is that you need to do,
but when that primary is over because
it's gonna be over. It's gonna feel like
a long time but it'll be over soon.
We got to be on the same team. We got to be
on the same team.
And here's what the-here's the choice that you're gonna have in 2020.
Very simple.
Fascism, not fascism.
That's all. That is really it.
Everything
else is irrelevant
Just saying.
So that's where I'm gonna be focused for the next year or so a year and a half.
Hopefully I want to be able to say, look my country. We were almost going down there but we came right back up.
And we didn't elect the fascist for four more
years. That's all, it's not that complicated.
Really isn't. And it would be a great story for us to have especially as people who claim to be the leaders of the free world.
And I will end by saying this.
I want you to be really really
careful, cuz people will argue with me about this.
About Linda you know, do we
actually live under fascism right now?
Now listen if you're gonna compare our
fascism with other forms of fascism,
obviously there's gonna be a good robust
argument there but just the things that
I've described we're pretty much almost
there and so what I'm saying to people
here in this room is that when 
you're living under kind of an authoritarian, right?
Or someone that it
comes off as an authoritarian, you got to
be really careful about how that
translates amongst our communities.
So you ever wonder why somebody would want
to figure out how to pin up Jewish Americans and Muslim Americans? Who benefits from that?
Who benefits from dividing these communities?
Who benefits from dividing black people from Jews? Who, by the way, there are black Jews. Let's be
clear right?
Who benefits from-who benefits from the divisions? Not us. Not Jewish people, not Muslims.
We don't benefit. In fact, you know what that does? It's divide and conquer.
It actually makes us all vulnerable. So I
don't play into that.
Right? it happens to me all the time. I'm not gonna play into it. Because it's actually not true.
Jews and Muslims in New York in particular.
We've had a long-standing relationship
for a long time before I was even born.
I've talked to many elders. We have
organized on issues here in New York. Black people, non-black Jews have organized for decades together.
So let's be very clear about one thing.
Can we disagree because listen,
disagreement is good.
You got your convictions. I got mine. Everybody does. Can we disagree?
Without dividing our communities. Can we say I don't agree with this lady? It's cool. I'm telling you
I'm not here to convince anybody to
believe what I believe. I just want to
live in a country that allows me to
believe what I want to believe. That's all I want.
So what I'm saying to you when you leave here today, that we are in a serious
situation as a country,
and I have explained many things that our country
has done and that I will say to all of
you in this room. There's nothing that
reassures me that bad things cannot
happen in this country to our community. We've seen it already happen.
Just recently, we've seen it happen.
So I'm saying to all of you here today
let us leave this room understanding
that we have a mission and that we all
agree in this room that everybody, every
single person who resides in these
United States of America deserves to be
treated with dignity and respect and
that we in this country want to be the
leaders in the world, when it
comes to human rights and that in order
for us to be able to critique everybody
else, let's clean up our house together
and then we can worry about everybody
else that's doing and engaging and God
knows what on the other side of the
world. So I want to say that I appreciate
all of you for being here today and even
the ones that don't agree with me, I
appreciate you. I actually welcome you
into the space and I hope that there
could come a time-there's actually a
young man that I'm not gonna call out by
name who's in this audience, who actually
used to be a Trump supporter and he
actually used to troll me on Twitter
like used to troll the hell out of me on
Twitter. I'm serious, it was to the point
where I usually block trolls. Something
in my heart told me there's something
about this guy. I'm not gonna block 'em,
and a lot of my friends who are in this
room and we all started engaging with
him on social media. We would talk to him,
we would engage him, why do you believe
what you believe? What's going on?
Conversation after conversation, guess
what?
He just changed his party and we went
and met for the first time just a few weeks ago.
We were able to have some
halal kosher pastrami sandwiches that
were fabulous but my point is to say
that even this young man who literally
was the ultimate troll of mine, like he
was my troll. Like he was like assigned to
me and now I would consider him someone
that I can engage in a respectful
conversation and he has been able to say
you know what, I see where you're coming
from. It doesn't mean that he agrees with
me and everything. He absolutely does not,
But he was able to see me as a human
being, as a person that he can say I can
agree with you on some things and not
agree with you on other things but you
know what? You're still a human being
that is deserving of my respect and
that's all I'm asking for. That's all I'm
asking for. So thank you for doing that
here today and I'm looking forward to a
great conversation right now.
Okay well, welcome everyone and I think
we're all pretty jazzed to talk to Linda
after that great speech so let's some-
let's give her another round of applause
and thank you for being here.
Okay so let me just go over how this is
gonna work. We're gonna, Linda and I, are
gonna have a little conversation for
about 10-15 minutes. I get to ask her
some burning questions that I have
having been an observer of Linda for
a while now and then I will-we've
asked for questions on note cards and I
will read out questions that have been
given to us from audience members, okay?
So that's how it will work and we'll
go until about eight o'clock, okay.
So Linda my first question has to do really
with the theme for tonight's talk which
is on migration refugees and the
politics of sanctuary and you began with this.
I'd like to start on a more
personal note and ask you for myself as
a daughter of immigrants whose parents
experiences with racism shaped my own
early thinking about immigration and
racism and activism, I'm curious about
your personal experiences as a
Palestinian-American in Brooklyn
and I'd love to hear a little bit more
about how your family, your parents, your
kids have shaped your thinking about
advocating for immigrant rights here in
New York City and also nationally.
Thank You, Paula, so as I told you my parents are Palestinian immigrants from
the West Bank.
My parents came here in the late 1970s. I was born in 1980. It was my birthday actually just this past week,
and my experience you know, I was born
and raised in Brooklyn. I love Brooklyn
like it's a human being, like I love
Brooklyn very much and it shaped who I am.
My parents have that typical story, you know. You come poor to America and you want to work your hardest
to get that American dream. My father
was a small business owner out in Crown
Heights, Brooklyn. My mom was a housewife.
I'm the oldest of seven children.
My mom had seven children in a span of
ten years. When I was ten my mom already
had seven kids and I was the oldest, so
I've been a leader before my time.
I did a lot of things that I probably
shouldn't have been doing at the age of
ten but I was an adult a long time ago,
before adulthood became adulthood, and so
my experience has been you know learning
about where I came from and that's why
it has shaped who I am. I have a
particular immigrant story of a family
who lived under a military occupation
you know and experiences and stories
from my grandmother who was born 21
years before the creation of the State
of Israel and my grandmother
remembers times. I know
about a time. I know what coexistence
with people looks like because my
grandmother told me that they lived in
coexistence and peace with Jews before
the creation of the State of Israel. I
understood that I had the lineage of an
oppressed people in my blood and that my
parents told me that whatever you do,
wherever you go,
they're gonna try to erase us. They're
gonna try to move us out more. There's
gonna be a day where there may not be a
Palestine and my mom said that my role
was and my responsibility of that of my
sisters and brothers is that we carry
Palestine, that Palestine is here in my
heart and it's also in my voice and it's
in my steps and it's in the way that I
show up for other oppressed communities
and so that's who I am and that's my
immigrant story and my parents have
given everything so that I can be who I
am today
and I honor them by defending other
immigrants and immigrant communities in
this country not just those who come
from the same part of the world that I
come from.
Thank you.
You talked a lot in your remarks
about the kind of progressive
intersectional coalition building that
you've been involved in and you talked
about this commitment that you have to
unity is not uniformity, right? You
discuss this in an interview in The
Washington Post recently. You brought it
up today and I just wonder how you
square that because it's a
complicated idea, right? To advocate
publicly and I just wonder how do you do
that in this current moment of
dog-whistle politics and of a media
culture that loves a good fight, right? So
you're advocating something that is
really pushing us to think in complex
ways about coalitions and to think
about differences and coming up with
moments of unity, you know as you're
being trolled relentlessly and as
especially progressive women of color
are attacked viciously so I'm just
wondering how you square that you know
sort of thinking through the antagonism.
The antagonism of the media culture that
we live in right now with this unity and
difference.
I'm like at the center of every big fight. It's basically, I've become a symbol of this intersectionality.
I become the "what we don't want in America" right? We don't want to see progressive Muslim women who are unapologetic about who we are
and are challenging the status quo because
what happens when we do that is we're
actually literally single-handedly some
of us, like Ilhan and Rashida and others
we are dismantling stereotypes and
propaganda that has been built up about
our communities and where we came from
for a really long time and somebody and
some people have spent millions of
dollars on that propaganda and they're
like listen this return investment is
not working out for us, got to figure out
what to do and so the way that the
response is instead of-and I say to this
people all the time-if you have a
disagreement in the movement or
disagreement just in general, you know in
the public, about a particular issue like
let's say let's use this as an example.
Israel Palestine is that issue
oftentimes that comes up. There's a lot
of differences that we have on that.
Whether you should support a one-state
or a two-state. Whether you support BDS,
whether you don't support BDS, all kinds
of things right? So I always say to
people: cool let's disagree.
Why don't you who have opposing views to
mine appeal to the morals and values of
the people? Instead of using your time to
vilify, dehumanize and authorize us for
our positions. That's all I'm saying like
I want to hear you. Why don't you support-what's the what's the reason why
you don't support a Palestinian state?
What's the reason and so I want to hear
it but oftentimes we never have those
conversations because people are too busy trying
to make us the enemy, instead of saying
here's why I disagree with you. Here are
my values and here are what I believe
right and being able to share with that
and being able to have a conversation
like a respectful one where we're not
you know engaging in op-ed after op-ed or
coming to events and heckling but
actually writing somebody an email, no
writing somebody an email which publicly
exists and saying hey I got these
questions for you. I'd like to hear your
answers to these questions. In fact, I'd
be happy to meet you in a couple of
friends somewhere to have this
conversation so what I say about unity
is not uniformity is I say that there's
too much at stake, which is why it's not
that it's not that it's hard to sell.
It's that we have to do it. We got to
figure out how to organize together,
because whatever you and I believe about
Israel-Palestine, that's not gonna get
solved tomorrow or next year or even in
ten years but you know what? There are
people right now in our country are
being murdered at the hands of police,
that are being deported and separated
from their families. There are Muslim
families who are being separated by a
Muslim ban. There are literally fascists
in the White House right now and we're
having these little debates in the
corner with people who have
absolutely no influence on what's happening. I have
no influence on what happens in Middle
Eastern politics but I just got an
opinion about it, just like I do about
everything else.
So for me this idea of organizing
in a movement where unity is not
uniformity just means that when there
are people hurting, you drop everything
and you go to where the people are
hurting and you uplift them. I don't give
a damn who you are, what you believe, if
there's a hurricane in this country and
you're picking up people's belongings,
you're saving people. I don't give a damn if you're a Republican, if you're a
Green Party or you're a socialist or a
communist or atheist. It doesn't matter
to me who you are. Come to the aid of
people who are the most broken in our
country and that's the thing that I
never just understood. It's like why
can't we do that? I never went to a
movement and asked people to fill out a
form and say please tell me all your
political views. That's not how it works.
And so for me, it's not about, I'm trying
to sell this new you know fad to the movement,
we got no choice. There's not
enough of us out here. There's not enough
of us to say these people are gonna do
all the saving and then we're gonna keep
out everybody else. No I need you and you
and you and everybody right now in this
moment and that's why it's gonna require
that we are ready to say we're going to
organize. Look I don't agree with you
lady on these things and Monday, you and
I are gonna have to have a very
important courageous conversation but
for now, I'm gonna meet you at the border
because I want to make sure those people
are safe at the border. That's what I'm
asking for, that's it.
We'll move to the audience questions in
in a few minutes. I have two more
questions for you Linda. One really has
to do with the issue of Palestine that
you brought up and as you probably know
at NYU, student activists have passed a
divestment resolution through the
Student Senate
and I think what is interesting,
you know for me, I've been teaching for a
long time and it's interesting to
see this kind of generational shift,
this generational shift when it
comes to progressive politics,
generational shift when it comes to
talking about American foreign policy
and militarism, generational shift on the
issue of Palestine and I just wonder
what your thoughts are about how the
role of the BDS movement, the role of the
issue of Palestine in the future of US
politics, especially on campuses where
clearly a lot of people are paying
attention.
I mean the statistics - I'm not the researcher. The statistics are telling us that more young people
are becoming more progressive on this
issue and it's actually that framing of
this idea of being more progressive is
weird, right? Like human rights for
Palestinian people? I don't know like why
that's a progressive issue? Why is that
not like a regular issue, like humans
deserve human rights? I don't know, and I
want to be really clear about this whole
BDS thing cuz that's like the
thing that everybody gets me on. It's
like a "gotcha!" moment like, she supports
BDS! That's it, and it ends there and it's
like - it's really interesting.
You know, the Palestinian people are not like so
profound that they woke up one morning
and we're like we're gonna start some
new thing that nobody ever did before.
Boycott Divestment Sanctions is
actually tactics. It's not an
organization. These
are tactics that have been used before.
BDS has been used, you know, to end South
African apartheid. Like that's not - we
didn't come up with that. It's not a
thing that we just created or the
Palestinian civil society created. They
called on people to engage in Boycott
Divestment Sanction. I'm gonna offer you
something here.
I'm getting to you, don't worry ma'am. I
got you. I got you, sis.
BDS, let's be clear about boycotting or
the call to boycott and divest from the
State of Israel, is a non-violent
movement. That's what it is, so hold on.
Hold on, hold on. So there's nonviolent
resistance, nonviolent resistance then
there is armed resistance, right? Listen
to me. There is armed resistance and
there's nonviolent resistance. Young
students, there are young students who
have decided that they want to be in the
spirit of people like Dr. Martin Luther
King and those who worked against South
African apartheid, decided to be
nonviolent activists and resistors and
that is why they support the Boycott
Divestment Sanctions movement. So all I'm
saying, all I'm saying is in order to
hold a state accountable for human
rights violations, when you tell people
not to engage in Boycott Divestment
Sanctions, what other alternative are you
giving people? What other alternative is
there? I am very proud as someone who's
trained in Kingian non-violence to
support a non-violent movement that
would not need to exist if Israel was
not engaging in human rights against,
violations against the Palestinian
people.
So instead of saying, instead of us saying
stop "BDS-ing", why don't we say end
the occupation of the Palestinian people?
Lift the siege on Gaza?
So anyway.
So I just want to say to the students in this school, I'm very proud of the work that you are doing and don't ever
feel intimidated and in fact, this kind of
response to you is actually what
keeps fueling you to do the work more. So
actually, I didn't pay these people to be
here but that was just for you, you know
like - if you didn't have
opposition to what you were doing, I'd be
really worried about you. If people weren't
opposing you because let me just be
clear and I'm gonna say this and just -
there has never been a moment in our
history, ever, where there was a
truth-teller or an effective organizer
or a leader in this country that has
never been vilified or demonized.
You can look up Dr. Martin
Luther King 50 years ago. The most
dangerous Negro in America. He was
working with organizations, blacklisted
by the US government. He wrote you a
letter from the Birmingham Jail, not from
the ivory towers of Congress. He was a
victim of police brutality. At the end of
his life, 18 months before he was
assassinated at the age of 39, which is
how old I am. He was assassinated, right?
For what he believed in, because he went
into exactly what you were saying.
He went from specifically focusing on the
upliftment and the rights of black
people, specifically right? On these wins
that he wanted, to get your voting rights.
Let's stop segregation. Then he realized
it was much bigger than that and then he
started saying, whoa whoa militarism and
then he started saying, wait a minute.
It's not just black people, it's poor people
to all poor people. So he started
building a coalition, started bringing
people together, started building this
transformative movement and guess what
they did? They knew it was gonna be
powerful, so he killed them. So there has
never been anybody in history, Malcolm X -
you can name the leader in other parts
of the world. When you become an
effective organizer that brings people
together for common cause and you got
just a little bit of charisma. They want
to end you and that's just what it is so
for me, I don't want you to be worried
about me. I know my history. I know how
this works and I always say this to
people right now. They could say anything
they want about me right now, but 50
years ago - 50 years from now, you will
look back at this moment and you will be
like, oh we remember who the truth
tellers were and also, you will be
walking down Colin Kapernick Boulevard.
Imma tell you that that's really gonna be happening.
I'm gonna get to a few questions from the audience here.
The first one is it's probably something
that's on a lot of people's minds and
the question is given recent events in
New Zealand but also the Ilhan Omar
controversy,
what does better Muslim Jewish activism relations look like and how can we
show each other how to build a movement
together?
So to be clear, there have always been Jewish Muslim relations
particularly in this country and even in the Muslim world.
Although, others want to tell you otherwise.
This past week was a great example of
what that looks like and I don't know if
people remember right after the
Pittsburgh shooting, where eleven
innocent Jews were literally massacred
in their synagogues, it was the Muslim
community who stood up first for our
Jewish sisters and brothers. We went to
synagogues all across the country and I
don't - I'm just gonna say this here
because technically if I tell you this
as a Muslim I believe that all my good
deeds just got erased, but I'm just gonna
say it here, because when you do good,
you don't do good
for public to say that you did good.
You did good so that God can see that you
did good, that you did it for the right reasons.
But right after the Pittsburgh
shooting, I raised over $205,000 for the Jewish
victims in the synagogue
and I want to tell you just a little bit of a story
about that. It's not about the money,
because one of the things that the
Muslim community, I will say about my own
community, we are a generous community and
we will always show up when needed and
we've done it many times before. But
there was a good story that went along
with that. Of course there were people in
the opposition that wanted to even make
a controversy about that but this is
what they didn't know happened.
So some folks in some parts of the media,
more conservative media, wanted to say
because when we did a contract with the
Pittsburgh synagogue, "The Tree of Life", to
transfer the money. We raised the money
on LaunchGood, which is a Muslim-led
fundraising platform and as folks who
have raised money on these you know,
GoFundMe and Crowdrise, you don't get the
money right away. So you could raise a
million dollars in the day. You're not
gonna get the million dollars tomorrow,
and we knew based on similar traditions
in the Jewish faith and in the Muslim
faith, around how people have to be
buried in a particular time frame.
We had to figure out how to get the
money as soon as possible.
So what happened? The Islamic Center of
Pittsburgh, which is the neighbor of the
Tree of Life called us up and said, "I
know that you can't get that money right..."
"...away because of the way that this platform is set up. We will transfer right now $185,000 to the Pittsburgh synagogue."
That's what happened. So what did we do, the Muslims that did the fundraiser?
We then ended up transferring the money from the LaunchGood campaign to the Islamic Center,
because they're the ones that put up the
money to the Tree of Life and
then what the people say?
"The Muslims stole the money."
I'm serious! There were members, some
members of the Jewish community that
literally accused the Muslims who stood
up, who put their, not "thoughts and
prayers" but put their money on it,
because that's how much solidarity - we believed solidarity is not in words,
it's in actions. And when a small
Islamic Center figured out and said,
"We have whatever operating money we have in
our and we know we're gonna get it back..."
"...So we trust you. We're gonna transfer the money."
This is solidarity. This is the kind of
relationship that Jews and Muslims have
and should have in these United States
of America. After the New Zealand
shooting, Jewish members of different
congregations went and stood outside
including here outside the Islamic
Center of NYU, greeting those who came to
pray, showing messages of solidarity. This
is how we're gonna - not only how
we're gonna win. This is how we're gonna
protect each other, like the government
is not here to protect any of us. They
couldn't protect those 11 innocent Jews
in the synagogue. They didn't
the people in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. They
didn't protect the nine black
parishioners in Mother Emanuel Church.
They didn't protect the mosque yesterday
in San Diego that was arsoned in what they
said was clear homage to the New Zealand
attack.
Who's gonna protect us but us?
And so, when you come to protect me or if I
come to your synagogue to protect you,
you don't gotta worry about what I care
about: Palestine is real or if I care if
I believe in a two-state solution, one
state - we gotta learn how to understand
that sanctuary is not a policy. I don't
believe in - there are plenty
sanctuary cities like in New York City,
our mayor supposedly says we got a
sanctuary city. Guess what? We've been
arrested in New York City by NYPD and
DHS in New York City. For those that were
at the rally when Ravi was in detention
centers, you remember. They were wearing
Department of Homeland Security.
I thought you said we were a sanctuary
City. I was the one that took that video.
I was like, DHS NYPD together. That's the
point of sanctuary, that you don't work
directly with federal contracts with DHS.
That's literally the whole definition of it.
So what I say to people is that I don't believe in sanctuary policies in the
same way that others do.
What I do believe is in a sanctuary mentality.
Sanctuary means, how do you set up a community where we are all safe?
And so, when something bad happens, I want to know how my neighbors gonna protect me, right?
I want to know what the role of the guy on the street, the one that owns the bodega on the corner, is he with me?
Could I hide in his facility? The guy
that owns the building that got a great
basement that we could go all hide in?
Are you ready to take in undocumented
family, if god forbid there came a moment
where agents were going around the
country just picking up on documented
people like they are right now? Going to -
We've seen them in New York. There's a
lot of friends of mine here that work in
legal aid. They come to housing court and
pick up immigrants there. Are you ready
to open your home to undocumented people? That's what sanctuary means.
Sanctuary's meaning is not about the mayor saying that we're a sanctuary city of any city.
It's not about what people in power think.
It's about us and what we're willing to
do for one another and I have already
proved what I'm willing to do.
My life is on the line. I'm ready for it. I'm cool. I'm not asking anybody to feel bad for me.
I've made a decision
that I'm ready to die for the things that I believe in.
The question is are we
all ready to die for the things that we
believe in? And that means that not
allowing any more human beings to suffer
while we watch in these United States of
America.
Okay, the next question moves to
the Women's March issue.
Handwriting is a little messy, people but okay. I'll do my best.
There is a hierarchy of oppression in this country
and many white women march for the first
time in January of 2017. Are the most
oppressed really supposed to join the
second least oppressed in the hopes that
they suddenly will see the
disinterested masses march for them too? I think it says disinterested here.
I get the point. I get the gist of the question.
So yeah that's a good question.
The white ladies when they leave you behind like they've done before and you want to know why we should, we go -
you know, I get it. I know. I was there with
you too. I was asking myself the same question.
Let me quickly take you back
and take you forward because this is
really important. A lot of people who
went to the 2017 March and
they said you know, most people
they took their grandmother, went with
the daughter and the granddaughter and
it was really inspiring and people, it
was the largest single-day protest in
American history, that's bottom line.
So when the Women's March originally
started as you know, its started by a
woman started a Facebook page. That's
really literally how this started. Let's
just be clear about what these people -
this is very important in the movement,
because sometimes people get credit for
things they didn't actually do. The white
lady started a Facebook page. That's what
happened and it was actually called the
Million Women's March and then the women
of color went in there were like,
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. There was already a Million Women's March and it was led by Black women in Philadelphia in 1997."
And then, our Black sisters before the women of
color went in, particularly black women,
were like are you sure you want to go in
there? They're like, what's different now?
Our mothers have done this before. Our
grandmothers tried this before. We
marched with them during the suffrage
movement trying to get the right of women
to vote, but guess what?
We were there but we didn't get the
right to vote and nobody cared of us
afterwards. Black women still didn't get
a right to vote 'til like decades later.
So there was a lot of criticism from
women of color of whether or not we
should join with white
women in the Women's March.
So here's what our philosophy was as women of
color who went in. There was gonna be a
Women's March with or without us. That's
just the bottom line and we weren't about
to let there be a moment where white
women, majority of them who by the way
the ones that are in the organizing
are now my friends, so they know this and
they'll tell you this themselves. They
never organized a day in their lives.
They didn't even know how to put a march
together. Literally, they told us that.
They were entrepreneurs. They were
fashion entrepreneurs. They worked in tech.
They were yoga teachers, social workers.
I'm serious, that's who they were and
all of a sudden Donald Trump becomes
president and all of a sudden everyone's
outraged. They realized we had
racism in America and there was misogyny
and sexism and oppression. Seriously like
you saw it! It was like despair. People
were crying, it was like - and the rest of
us were like welcome to our world, like -
and so that's why I always make this
controversial statement that I'm gonna
make here at NYU which is Donald Trump
there's a blessing in it. If it required
Donald Trump to be President for
everybody to realize all the hurt and
pain in our country, then you know what?
We'll figure out how to deal with him
for another year and a half.
Anyhow to your point is, we went into the
Women's March as you know, we put
together these unity principles. It was
women of color who put the unity
principles together. Let me tell you why,
because everybody wanted to march
against Trump. It ain't about Trump!
Trump is just literally a manifestation of the
centuries of oppression in America.
He just brought it to the light in a way in
modern time, in a way that no one
else has and so for us, we were like well
oh no no. We don't march against one man.
We stand for things. We believe in things.
So we put together unity principles, then
when you went to the 2017 Women's March,
you remember mothers of the movement.
Trayvon Martin's mother, Tamir Rice's
mother right? Lucy McBath, Jordan Davis's
mother who's now in Congress.
Undocumented women from I had a
young Pakistani Muslim girl, many of you
know her, Hina Naveed, from Staten Island
came to the March. We had Black trans
people. We had different kind of Muslims:
Black Muslims, Arab Muslims, South Asian
Muslims, so that people know we're not all
the same. We had people from Flint come.
So we've created a program of literally
the most broken people in America and
gave them a platform at the march. Let's
be very clear: that's not what would have
happened if it was only white women
organizing that march. In fact, the white
women wanted to do a march about Trump
and reproductive rights and equal pay
and when we said let's have a courageous
conversation about this, I said to them:
okay cool equal pay important I'm all in
for equal pay but did you know that even
Blacks - while you want to get paid the
same as the white man in America, Black
women still don't get paid the same as
the white woman and the immigrant woman
doesn't get paid the same as the Black
woman and the white woman, so we can't
have a march but that doesn't include a
conversation about racial justice and
then when we started talking about
immigrant rights, they were like but what
does immigrant rights got to do with the
women's rights?
What is criminal justice - I'm serious and it was
fine. I was very happy to do the labor in
that moment to explain this
intersectional type of movement that I
wanted to be a part of. Like when you
bring a woman from Flint to the stage, it's important
for people to understand why a woman
from Flint is still part of the women's
rights movement although she's talking
about clean water because guess what?
Women and everybody deserve to have
access to clean water. It is a women's
rights issue. So for us, we went there
because we felt like it was an
opportunity and I call me a hopeful
optimist, because they told us it wasn't
gonna work and to be quite honest to you,
I still question today if it's gonna
work because what has happened in the
Women's March is that whenever some
white woman gets uncomfortable with us, the immediate response is
like, if we don't like it, if we're
feeling uncomfortable, we're going to destroy it.
We're going to bring it all down, burn the whole house down.
This is just historically how
feminism has worked in this country. That's
why we don't have an intersectional
feminist movement in America. Did anybody
ever wonder why? It's because it just
never worked and we thought we could
make it work and guess what? We're still
trying and what I'm asking people, when
you look at the Women's March: we're
flawed leaders. We're a flawed
organization. We've only been around for
two years. We're a start-up. If you want
to make the Women's March better, join it.
Come to the table, organize.
So that's all I'm saying is that this is a hard
movement. It's not going to be easy.
Again, unity is not uniformity. You're not
coming to a movement where you're gonna
agree with everyone and we have
different experiences, and we also come
from complicated communities. Everybody
comes from a complicated community.
We have complicated, complex identities
but we got to figure out how to organize
together so if the women's movement,
that's the current movement goes down,
it's just gonna be a perpetual story
that white women and women of color
can't organize together. Unless you want
to break the cycle. I'm a cycle breaker.
That's why I'm still here. I'm taking all
the stress. I'll take every headline.
I'm still moving forward and I hope you join
us and I hope when we do do something
that makes you feel uncomfortable, you
come talk to me about it, so have a
conversation about what makes you feel
uncomfortable because that's not what's
happening and I think there is still a
little promise. The real test is gonna be
for the women's movement is gonna be
2020, because the reason why we got into
this situation in the first place is
because 53% of white women voted
for Donald Trump. Let's just be real. So
when 2020 comes around,
we're gonna look at the numbers and what
I asked my white sisters to do is don't
worry about what we're doing. Go talk to
your white sisters. Go talk to people in
your family that may live in parts of
the country where they may live in a
more conservative spaces and have these
hard conversations. Get disinvited from
Thanksgiving and from Christmas, like if
that's what has to happen but we
cannot allow it to happen again and
that's what I'm waiting for. I'm hoping
2020 is the moment where we get to say
the women's movement and the women's
vote is what actually allowed us to
defeat fascism in America.
Okay the last question from the audience. This is a question actually that looks more internally.
It asks, how do we address anti-blackness and racism within Muslim spaces? And I think that's a good
question.
Absolutely.
Let me just be very
clear. About seven years ago, maybe eight
years ago, I worked on a campaign with an
African American Imam from Detroit,
another Arab American sister from Syria,
another brother who's Lebanese American,
and we started a campaign called
"Drop The A Word." There's a word that we
use in Arabic that's used often and it's
the word that translates into slave and
people use it sometimes to describe
black people and a lot of young children
of immigrants actually use it thinking
that it means black people, especially if
they're not fluent in the Arabic
language and so this campaign was an
opportunity for us to start a real
courageous conversation within the
Muslim American community about anti-Black racism. It exists and I'm not gonna
deny it and I'm not gonna try to defend
the reputation of the Muslim community
because anti-Black racism exists
amongst all communities. It's amongst the
Jewish communities, it's amongst Muslim
communities, it's amongst Arab American
community, it's amongst Latino
communities, it's amongst Asian American
communities, amongst all of our
communities and that's one of the
reasons why I have committed myself and
I've said this all the time and I've
said this many times before, as a Muslim
American - like I always say to Muslims, I
didn't need Black Lives Matter hashtag
like five years ago to tell me that
black lives matter, I follow a faith
that's actually an anti-racist religion,
so anti-Black racism is actually not natural to Muslims or to Islam.
It's colonialism. We've been like trained to be anti-Black,
because of the way in which the
world has, in particular the United
States has, treated the concept of race
and so we have to take responsibility by
unlearning the racism that we've been
taught and sometimes that requires us to
do many things. Number one to acknowledge
that anti-Black racism is a thing.
Number two, to commit to addressing it, which means
sometimes like I'm not asking people
to start campaigns. You got to call it
out when you see and when you hear it. If
you hear it in your family, if you hear
it at the MSA, if you hear it amongst a
group of friends, you gotta stop it right
there. You got to intervene on the spot and that's really what it is to combat any form of racism.
You got to recognize that it exists and you gotta
call it out immediately. You can't just
let it fester and you can't say well
that's my sister, that's my cousin. It
doesn't matter, in fact the ones that you
love are the ones that you should be
able to have the conversation with much
more effectively and so that's why as a
Palestinian-American
in this country and this is for
everybody
when Black people are free in America,
you're gonna be free.
Women will be free,
indigenous people will be free, Latinos
will be free, everybody. Muslims will be
free, Jews will be free, we will all be
free and so - and I want, can I just
address this woman's question? So let me
let me address the sister's question in
the back. She has a very important
question. So her question is and this is
very important because this is why we
need come to these spaces. I'm not here
to preach to the choir. I could do that
all, I mean -  it doesn't do
anything for me to speak to people who
already agree with me. Her question is
what about Muslim women in the Muslim
world, right? So let me make some
clarification because that's a great
question and that's an important
question for us to talk about. So I want
to use a specific example to illustrate
her question and also illustrate my
answer to the question.
I choose to wear hijab.
I have agency over myself and my body to choose to wear hijab.
But we also have women who are Muslim in places like Iran
who are being forced by their government
to wear hijab
and in fact if they protest the government, many of them are arrested and punished in very severe ways.
That is unacceptable and outrageous
and all of us should be standing against
any government who forces women to do
anything that they don't want to do.
So let's hold that for a second, right? So
let's hold that truth right there.
Governments like Iran who force women to
wear hijab and punish women for taking
off their hijab is absolutely
unacceptable and outrageous and we
should all be outraged about this, so
that's one. But if you're gonna be
outraged over women in Iran who are
forced to wear hijab
then I hope that you are also outraged
at countries like France, right?
Who banned women from wearing hijab in
public sector jobs, right? In universities,
right? So women who wanna go to
universities in France are not allowed
to wear hijab. We, for god's sake, we
can't even go to the damn beach and wear
burkinis, so all I'm saying to people, if
you're gonna act like you're the, you
know, the voice of the oppressed
Muslim women in Iran, then you better be
the voice of all oppressed Muslim
women all over the world in different
ways and that's all I'm saying.
I am consistent in my, I am
consistent in my outrage and the problem
with those who are in opposition to me,
they are inconsistent in their outrage.
There are 600 people about or so in this room.
Guess what, sister? If you are really passionate about something,
if something
really moves you, why don't you start a
campaign? I'll be happy to join it. Also the issue here is -
This is the issue - I'm one person.
I got laundry to do when I get home. I also got,
by the way. I also got three kids, two of
them who are college students. So this
idea that I'm supposed to be the
champion for everybody in the world is
unrealistic. It's unrealistic, I can't be -
There were 134 Malians were massacred,
did you say something about that? There
are people in Brazil and political
activists being massacred and murdered
by the government, right? Like Marisa, right?
Marielle Franco, where is
everybody when these things are
happening? We have human rights
violations in places like North Korea.
We have a Saudi government who engages in
human rights violations every single day
and guess what we did in the United
States? We sold them the largest arms
deal to kill more Muslims, how about that?
So my ask and desire always for people is this:
Stop waiting for me to do
everything. Stop worrying about what I
say, when I say. I'm one person. You are
passionate about something, why don't you
get up and do something? You have the
power just like I have the power.
We all have ways to support. There are
organizations supporting Iranian women
and doing legal services, fund them. There
are women who are supporting women all
over the world. People in Somalia and
Sudan. There's currently an uprising in Sudan.
Everybody needs to stand up and
support. There are Syrian refugees. There
are people, refugees at the border who
need your support, asylum seekers that
need your support. There are people dying
without healthcare. There are people in
our societies worrying. There are victims of
all kinds of violence, whether it be gun
violence or police violence.
Everybody has to get up and do something.
With all these wonderful people who have come to support and to listen to you talk,
A/P/A who organized organize this talk
and the Skirball Center who hosted you, so we thank everyone for making this possible.
My question to you is this, which is in these dark times of rising white supremacy, of as you said a fascist in
government, not just in this country but
around the world, we have hard right in
power in so many places. What gives you
hope? What makes you so optimistic?
As you said, in such dark times.
I love that question because I think a lot of times when people are asked that question
they say that hope fuels them, that they have - I'm actually, hope is not what fuels me to do this work.
It's love
I love my children. I believe that my
children deserve to be in a country and
live in a country that loves them and
respects them and that allows them to be
everything that they are and so for me, I
love my community. I love the community
that come from. I love my allies. I love
my friends and I love the work that I do,
so for me, what fuels me is love and the
reason why I love is because love is
something that like you don't stop
loving your family. You don't stop loving
your children so that means that I'm
going to have that for a really long
time and that's what fuels me to do this
work and what gives me the hope in the
way that you framed it is these
students give me hope like when I think
about this generation after me, when I
watch and I'm looking. I'm actually
looking at the audience and I see
young black Muslim, I see people of all
different shades I know there are some
Palestinians, Africans, African Americans,
Latinos, Asian Americans. I see white
Jewish allies including from within the
school and outside the school. This is
what gives me hope. This is what people
don't want. People don't want to see us
organizing together and building
together and building power together and
being progressive and standing up for
one another. So that's what gives me hope
every day when I go out into the
movement and I see us organizing,
building, learning each other's stories and
then for me, when I wake up in the
morning, my kids know what I'm doing when
I leave the house every morning. They
know I'm gonna fight like hell with
everything that I have for them and
that's what - when I have to face somebody that you're responsible for,
that's what fuels me to do this work. So we're gonna win. It's inevitable that
we're gonna win. It may not be as fast as
we want to but the idea here is that we
have to do everything that we can to
love and protect one another and not
allow anybody to divide us because the
divisions is what's going to make us even
more more vulnerable than we already are
right now and eventually these types of
folks, they're gasping their last breaths.
They're losing power and they're taking
it out on me and that's okay and I'm
happy to be that. I'm happy to be that.
If that makes you feel better, if
trolling me online makes you feel better,
if writing an op-ed so you could put out
your pain and trauma about how your
country is moving in a different
direction than you are or that you're
losing your position is not the
mainstream position and taking it out on
me is the way to go, I'm in. I'm cool and
I'm happy to be of service.
Thank You Linda and thank you everyone
for coming.
