We’ve been here from the beginning. deploying the police to suppress anti-colonial ideas at the university. Conscientious dissenters were arrested, anti-colonial professors were suspended and “talked to,” and anti-racist ideas were appropriated and used to further colonial violence. The battle against anti-Semitism, which was waged from Warsaw to Crown Heights, is being appropriated to use as a human shield for settler conquest. This allows even the political party, which is full of people who deny the Holocaust and who were just a day ago inciting fear about George Soros, “Jewish lasers,” and the “banking elite,” to be recast as champions of the cause.
In Columbia ’68, France ’68, Rhodes Must Fall, and other films, law enforcement, politicians, and school principals consistently unite and admonish Sarafina’s class against misbehavior. I’m not sure which narratives—from modern media about the appropriate docility of peaceful protest or from 19th-century ethnologist narratives about the obedience of the native people—have persuaded them that this will silence them.
However, apartheid defenders are not claiming that these students have read a poem by Mahmoud Darwish or Nikki Giovanni and “got too woke.” It wasn’t like we happened upon Assata Shakur, Edward Said, or Frantz Fanon and thought, “Wait a minute, this might be injustice.
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