Anti Racism Activists

"the oppressed — Black people, people of colour — need to get to a point where they take themselves out of their own mental prison and liberate their minds"

"I believe that books play a big role, especially books by Africans, in seeing representation, seeing yourself being written up in a positive light, seeing your existence reflected in the pages of literature"

"I believe that if we can work on empowering those schools, we'll definitely be doing a huge job in society"

"Poverty is a manmade crisis"

"I still lived in a world where every last bit of your life was determined by your race: what kind of opportunities you're going to be exposed to, the kind of school you'll go to, the environment you’ll live in. My entire world still was determined on the basis of race."

"Black children see the diversity of the world around them and understand that just because someone doesn't look like them, that doesn't make them inferior"

"We need to ensure that previously poorly funded schools aren't continuing to be disadvantaged now"

"So, in my journey of finding my voice to speak up against racism I began to decolonise my mind, unlocking the shackles, and unlearning the belief of looking at Eurocentric beauty as the standard for beauty"

"I hope that when children pick up my book it empowers them to feel proud of their existence and their identity and it ultimately empowers their existence and enables them to proudly be themselves"

"Your greatest power lies in proudly being yourself and that awakens a new level of consciousness"

"Representation plays a huge role in prompting acceptance and inclusivity, as well as decolonising what is already represented out there, Whether It Be In Books, media outlets, or television"

"As long as we have not won the war on racism in this country, we have not won the war on hair policies"

"I was 13, 14 years old, a child basically, [and] I was receiving death threats from old white adults"

"I chose to be an activist because I don't want a generation of young South Africans to still be having the same kind of conversations about systemic and institutional racism 30 years from now"

"I chose to speak up because I felt it was an injustice of its own for me to see the reality of the institution and still choose to be silent."

"I realised that you have one of two choices: either you try to speak up and see what the effects of speaking up will be, or you die in silence over the silent war you constantly find yourself in"

"we spoke up about something we were always taught to be silent about"

"I work in these spaces where you're constantly speaking up and you’re always pouring into other people's cups and your cup is hardly poured into"

"I was being forced to assimilate to whiteness and being forced to assimilate to an image that I did not fit into"

"You can't separate any expression of Black hair from Black identity, especially because for Black people it's more than just hair"

"I would like to see a South Africa where young people and the tools to empower them — such as education, literacy and employment — are prioritised"

"The most important message is that bravery doesn't have a size or age"

"Bravery can co-exist with fear"

"Fear, anxiety, self doubt is normal. But at the end of the day, bravery is doing it regardless."

"Zionism, to my mind, can be described as an effort to whiten the Jew philosophically and even literally."

"The particular/universal dichotomy often gets enlisted into a rescue narrative. We cannot forget how colonial discourse often represented colonialism as not simply conquering and exploiting, but also as advancing a universal civilizing mission, rescuing those barbaric people–especially, of course, their women and children–from their own horrible traditions, rituals, and culture. This idealist discourse was framed by the arrogant imperialism that saw itself as bringing light to dark places. This is unfortunately one side of the enlightenment. And addressing the intersection of the Enlightenment metanarrative with colonial discourse does not mean rejecting the Enlightenment in general. The Enlightenment is a complex phenomenon featuring contradictory discourses; what is required, therefore, is to highlight its philosophical contradictions as wells as its imperial dark side “on the ground.” In the colonial context, the Enlightenment often meant cultural subordination and psychic devastation. So the question is, what is a “barbaric practice,” and who has the right to determine what is barbaric? Who has the right to say, “I am the savior of these children?”"

"After World War Two, with decolonization and partitions, life shifted for many communities. There were transfers of populations, wherein one identity was transformed into another identity. A Muslim Indian became a Pakistani. In our case, Arab-Jews became Israelis. All of this happened virtually overnight. These new official identities did not reflect the feelings of the displaced people, and could not translate the contradictions on the ground. This new situation did not necessarily reflect those communities` sense of belonging. Hence, a crucial tension was generated between one`s official documentation and one`s emotional map of identity and sense of home and belonging. I have tried to explain this historical context in order to make sense out of our brutal rupture in the wake of partition. I grew up in Israel as a Jew, in a country that defines itself as a state for the Jews and as a Jewish state, which was presumably a solution for “the Jewish problem.” But for which Jews, and a solution for what? Being schooled in Hebrew in a Jewish state required that I completely reject everything associated with my home: namely, the Arabic that we spoke at home; my Iraqi parents; my Iraqi grandparents who didn't speak a word of Hebrew. The fact is that many people in my community missed Baghdad. But in this context, Iraq and the Iraqis were the enemy of the state to which we now officially belonged. I often describe my experience as a child as one of virtual schizophrenia, where I had to simultaneously live two identities, one outside of the home and another inside the home...The conflict between Israeli Zionism and Arab nationalism generated a situation where we had no place."

"in recent times, largely because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, there has been a construction in the public sphere of Jews and Muslims as always already enemies. In the media, journalists often appeal to the cliché that “this conflict goes back thousands of years.” But historically that is false; it largely goes back to the late nineteenth century and the emergence of Zionism. For many centuries and even millennia, Jews and Muslims often faced Christian prejudice together...The two stories/histories of Jews and Muslims are often told in isolation, but in fact the two groups were subjected to the same inquisition and continued to live together within Muslim spaces. In my work, I have insisted on the Judeo-Muslim hyphen, because while the Judeo-Christian hyphen implies a legitimate meta-narrative, the Judeo-Muslim hyphen has been elided. Yet, historically the Judeo-Muslim hyphen could be seen as the norm rather than the Judeo-Christian, which is a relatively recent phenomenon, going back to the Euro-Jewish enlightenment and reinforced by Zionist Eurocentrism."

"Intellectual discourse in the West highlights a Judeo-Christian tradition, yet rarely acknowledges the Judeo-Muslim culture of the Middle East, of North Africa, or of pre-Expulsion Spain (1492) and of the European parts of the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish experience in the Muslim world has often been portrayed as an unending nightmare of oppression and humiliation."

"For Middle Easterners, the operating distinction had always been “Muslim,” “Jew” and “Christian,” not Arab versus Jew. The assumption was that “Arabness” referred to a common shared culture and language, albeit with religious differences."

"Although I in no way want to idealize that experience – there were occasional tensions, discriminations, even violence – on the whole, we lived quite comfortably within Muslim societies. Our history simply cannot be discussed in European Jewish terminology."

"Eurocentric historical discourse tends to paint a flattering picture of Europe during the "Age of Discovery" while denigrating the newly colonized peoples. At the time of the onset of colonialism and conquest, Europe was a rather brutal and superstitious place, dominated by a "demonological discourse" (Delumeau). Church-sponsored brutalities towards Jews and Muslims have to be seen therefore on the same continuum as the forced conversions of indigenous peoples of the Americas who, like the Jews and Muslims in Catholic Spain, were obliged to feign allegiance to Christianity."

"The elision of comparative discussion of the Muslim and Jewish situations in Christian Spain is rooted in present-day Middle Eastern politics. The 1992 commemorations reflect present-day battles over the representations of history. Subordinated to a Eurocentric Zionist historiography, they lament yet another tragic episode in a homogenous, static Jewish history of relentless persecution."

"From the very inception of the Gulf Crisis, the dominant US media failed to fulfil the role of independent journalism. Instead it acted as public relations for the State Department, assimilating the language, terminology, and the assumptions of the administration, thereby undermining any critical perspectives upon the conduct of the war. Any attempt to discuss the media's coverage of the Gulf War must examine some of the ways in which it structured identification with the Pentagon's agenda, and the interests of an international elite."

"The same historical process that dispossessed Palestinians of their property, lands and national-political rights, was linked to the dispossession of Middle Eastern and North African Jews of their property, lands, and rootedness in Muslim countries. As refugees, or mass immigrants (depending on one’s political perspective), we were forced to leave everything behind and give up our Iraqi passports. The same process also affected our uprootedness or ambiguous positioning within Israel itself, where we have been systematically discriminated against by institutions that deployed their energies and material to the consistent advantage of European Jews and to the consistent disadvantage of Oriental Jews. Even our physiognomies betray us, leading to internalized colonialism or physical misperception. Sephardic Oriental women often dye their dark hair blond, while the men have more than once been arrested or beaten when mistaken for Palestinians. What for Ashkenazi immigrants from Russia and Poland was a social aliya (literally “ascent”) was for Oriental Sephardic Jews a yerida (“descent”). Stripped of our history, we have been forced by our no-exit situation to repress our collective nostalgia, at least within the public sphere. The pervasive notion of “one people” reunited in their ancient homeland actively disauthorizes any affectionate memory of life before Israel. We have never been allowed to mourn a trauma that the images of Iraq’s destruction only intensified and crystallized for some of us. Our cultural creativity in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic is hardly studied in Israeli schools, and it is becoming difficult to convince our children that we actually did exist there, and that some of us are still there in Iraq, Morocco, Yemen and Iran."

"Western media much prefer the spectacle of the triumphant progress of Western technology to the survival of the peoples and cultures of the Middle East. The case of Arab Jews is just one of many elisions. From the outside, there is little sense of our community, and even less sense of the diversity of our political perspectives."

"every child is born into a web of multiple affiliations, intersecting identities, and potential identifications."

"To be a European or American Jew has hardly been perceived as a contradiction, but to be an Arab Jew has been seen as a kind of logical paradox, even an ontological subversion. This binarism has led many Oriental Jews (our name in Israel, referring to our common Asian and African countries of origin, is Mizrahi or Mizrachi) to a profound and visceral schizophrenia, since for the first time in our history Arabness and Jewishness have been imposed as antonyms."

"Hussein as the villain, Bush as the hero, and the US rescuing the victim is typical of colonial narratives...The analogy insists, furthermore, on a Eurocentric approach to Jewish history. In seeing Jewish history through a Euro-American Jewish perspective, the US media have presented Israel simplistically as a Western country populated by European Jews. Reading and watching media images from the Middle East, one is led to believe that there are only Euro-American Jews in Israel and only Moslem Arabs in the rest of the Middle East. One finds few images of Iraqi, Moroccan, or Ethiopian Israelis, even though Oriental Arab Jews compose the majority of the Jewish population in Israel."

"While the celebrations of Columbus' "discovery" have provoked lively opposition, the Eurocentric framing of the "other 1492" has been little questioned."

"The uniqueness and common victimization of all Jews at all times is a crucial underpinning of official Israeli ideology. The genocides of indigenous Americans and Africans are not a point of reference, while the linked persecution in Iberia of Jews and Muslims, Conversos and Moriscos, is rendered irrelevant. This selective reading of Jewish history hijacks the Jews of Islam from their Judeo-Islamic history and culture and subordinates their experience to that of the Ashkenazi-European shtetl, presented as a "universal" Jewish experience. In the Zionist "proof" of a single Jewish experience, there are no parallels or overlappings with other religious/ethnic communities. All Jews are by definition closer to each other than to the cultures of which they have been part. The Jews of Islam, and more specifically Arab Jews, problematize this Eurocentric representation."

"This picture of an ageless and relentless oppression and humiliation ignores the fact that, on the whole, Jews of Islam-a minority among several other religious/ethnic communities-lived relatively comfortably within Arab-Muslim society. My point is not to idealize the situation of the Jews of Islam, but rather to suggest that, with a few exceptions, the agendas of Zionist and anti-Zionist historians have either subsumed Islamic-Jewish history into Christian-Jewish history or ignored the status of Jews in the context of other minorities in Islamic societies."

"Now that the three cultural topographies that compose my ruptured and dislocated history – Iraq, Israel and the United States – have been involved in a war, it is crucial to say that we exist. Some of us refuse to dissolve so as to facilitate “neat” national and ethnic divisions. My anxiety and pain during the (1991) Scud attacks on Israel, where some of my family lives, did not cancel out my fear and anguish for the victims of the bombardment of Iraq, where I also have relatives. War, however, is the friend of binarisms, leaving little place for complex identities."

"Over the past two months, people who are perceived or known to be of Chinese or other East Asian descent have been subject to racist and xenophobic attacks related to the virus."

"Crises like the coronavirus pandemic remind us that we are all connected and that our well-being is interdependent."

"A clear example was the resignation of the home secretary, Amber Rudd,on the first day of my visit. This resignation came amidst the still-unfolding scandal of the gross human rights violations and indignities that Afro-Caribbean British citizens popularly referred to as the ‘Windrush generation’ have had to endure as a result of the so-called ‘hostile environment’ policy introduced during Prime Minister Theresa May’s tenure as home secretary."

"The harsh reality is race, ethnicity, religion gender, disability status and related categories all continue to determine the life chances and wellbeing of people in Britain in ways that are unacceptable and in many cases unlawful."

"I am shocked by the criminalisation of young people from ethnic minorities, especially young black men. They are over-represented in police stop and searches, more likely to face prosecution under the country’s joint enterprise provisions, and are over-represented in the prison system. There can be no question that a pervasive and officially tolerated culture of racial profiling is at work in certain police forces and that racial and ethnic minority children and youth are among the most vulnerable."

"The election of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been linked to incidents of violence against members of Dalit, Muslim, tribal and Christian communities. Reports document the use of inflammatory remarks by BJP leaders against minority groups, and the rise of vigilantism targeting Muslims and Dalits."

"The environment leading up to the referendum, the environment during the referendum, and the environment after the referendum has made racial and ethnic minorities more vulnerable to racial discrimination and intolerance."