"In the five days of my university’s camp, I met more students and faculty (especially people of color) than I had in the previous five years. Outside of my classroom, the Liberation Zone marked the only five days I have felt welcomed or connected to people anywhere on my campus.
I’ve also met more caring, compassionate colleagues at their camps than in any other venue over my years in Chicago. The shared goals of these encampments—to divest from an apartheid state and end the genocide in Gaza—are not anything to be ashamed about. They are moral and righteous desires. Nor are these fringe positions; they are desired by the majority of the people on this planet.
In the four encampments I have visited, it has felt so good to not have to pretend—as so many universities, publications and politicians seem to want us to—that everything is fine and we must just get back to normal by pretending what is happening isn’t happening. Everyone knows police could come in at any second and beat the shit out of them; but they know what’s happening in Gaza is far worse, and so they’re willing to take the risk.
As a professor, it has felt good to pick up trash with my students, and to learn about how to roll a keffiyeh or sing Pesach songs with them. For all four encampments I visited erased a lot of divisions: between young students and old teachers; between faculty and staff; between Jews, Muslims and Christians; between formal members of a university community and our neighbors; between students of different universities (and their peers who don’t go to college).
Like the the Poor People’s Campaign Martin Luther King was planning when he was killed in 1968 (which was supposed to be a shanty town encampment of white, Black and Chicano poor people on the National Mall) the Gaza solidarity encampments have been a taste of what might be possible when everyone freely gets what they need—and when people unite across divisions to share shabbat, salah, and a demand to end war."
~ Steven W. Thrasher
No comments:
Post a Comment