We are witnessing a wholesale, systematic attack on black and brown people, at home and abroad, and, true to form, much of the white majority either stands by passively or actively colludes, willfully ignorant to the reality that Du Bois described in 1935: namely, that white nationalist reaction is disguised class warfare against the bottom 90 percent of society.

“Are we liberal imperialists who take a knee for antiracism when it’s fashionable, but fall silent when an ethnostate openly conducts a campaign of extermination?” Photo by Daniel Pelaez Duque.

The following remarks were delivered at the “Take Back Our University” Rally held at Cornell University on August 28, 2025.

We are witnessing a wholesale, systematic attack on black and brown people, at home and abroad, and, true to form, much of the white majority either stands by passively or actively colludes, willfully ignorant to the reality that Du Bois described in 1935: namely, that white nationalist reaction is disguised class warfare against the bottom 90 percent of society.

We knew the institutional commitment to racial justice was paper-thin. We knew the DEI regime was a bland half-measure that allowed higher ed to claim social relevance and moral legitimacy. But even the cynics among us marvel at how rapidly craven administrators dismantle the diversity apparatus through which the corporate university once signaled virtue. DEI was the cream smeared on the face of structural racism. Now that it is inexpedient, look how easily it evaporates!

Make no mistake: white supremacy is the force behind the colossal disrespect, the sheer contempt, to which this society and this university routinely subject black and brown people.

What the colonizer cannot comprehend is that white supremacy degrades us all. It convinces us that settler-colonialism is natural or inevitable. It assures us that the concentration camp is built for someone else. White supremacy is the reason we believe a Palestinian child is less precious to her parents than our own children are to us. It allows us to watch a little girl being vaporized on social media while we continue to insist that the situation is dreadfully complicated.

Palestinians, you see, lack the protections of whiteness that their colonizers have mostly acquired, to disastrous effect.

White supremacy says who is expendable. It tells us who may be massacred with minimal opposition. At the same time, it convinces us that drones over Gaza do not prefigure drones over our heads. And yet, imperialism boomerangs. Militarism comes home to roost. One experiments in Gaza to execute at home. Technologies of repression, tested abroad, are deployed against domestic enemies.

Those of us who have experienced colonialism, whose families have experienced colonialism, can never forget this. We know that ANY racialized slaughter is a prelude to our subjection.

Every time we accept the erasure or exceptionalization of Palestinians, we reaffirm a human hierarchy that we disavow in every other aspect of our lives.

What hypocrisy! We decry the targeting of immigrants on our streets while condoning the kidnapping, torture, and indefinite detention of scores of Palestinians. We condemn attacks on higher ed while ignoring the criminalization of students who have somehow found the temerity to oppose a holocaust. Indeed, we let a handful of soulless bureaucrats cast into exile our best and our brightest. (Imagine how utterly hollow you must be, how cowardly…

to keep rolling out new codes of conduct as the children of Gaza, desperate and hungry, are annihilated.)

We lament the growth of a police state on our own soil while denying the transnational and collaborative nature of authoritarianism. Somehow we forget that violations of due process and human rights are the very terms of colonialism and occupation. We fail to realize, until too late, that Palestine is the tip of the spear that now points at our hearts.

You don’t have to be an Ivy League professor to see the links between militarized checkpoints in Washington, D.C., and militarized checkpoints overseas. Perhaps it is precisely the status and privilege of such professors that keeps them from publicly acknowledging the connection.

Remember, fascism feeds on silence. You don’t have to bend a knee for it to thrive. Just shut your mouth. Truth is, ALL that we do here is tainted by genocide. The whole enterprise. Every exchange, in the classroom and beyond, occurs under the pall of institutional and personal complicity.

One is tempted to ask: who are we, really? Are we liberal imperialists who take a knee for antiracism when it’s fashionable, but fall silent when an ethnostate openly conducts a campaign of extermination? Are we self-absorbed scions of the professional-managerial class, destined to lead lives of decadence and indifference? Are we hirelings of the Pentagon and the weapons industry? Are we narrow careerists? Are we mercenaries? Because, if we’re just scared, then goddamn us. We deserve the hellscape that the billionaires are preparing for us.

It’s been almost two years. Starving children are foraging amid carnage and debris. For God’s sake. Do SOMETHING. A humanist acts not because she lacks fear, but in spite of it.

Our silence exposes us. It mocks our professions of enlightenment. It defiles our land acknowledgements and decolonial metaphors and “Be kind” lawn signs. Our hands are drenched in blood. Our hands are drenched in blood. It may not be too late to redeem ourselves, to salvage some modicum of decency and morality. But the sun is setting.

What would it mean to refuse? Refuse to participate. Refuse to lie. Refuse to labor. Today the challenge is simply to declare, collectively and unequivocally, that we are horrified. We are heartsick. We are ashamed. We are ready to act.

I’ll end with a message to the donor class and their retainers in Day Hall. Please understand that we will NEVER abandon the Palestinian people. Solidarity is more precious to us than prestige or rank or any of the petty rewards you may dangle before us. And now that we have found our voice, we cannot return to the shadows of docility and compliance.

Free Palestine. Free Congo. Free Sudan. Free Los Angeles. Free Washington, DC. Hands off Venezuela. Hands off Cuba. US out of Africa. Resist! Resist! Resist!

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