Notes

Have you ever seen this image? It might look like the camera equivalent of a butt dial, but that tiny speck right there?
That's Earth. The photo, taken by the Voyager One space probe, is called the Pale Blue Dot,
and it was the inspiration for Carl Sagan's book of the same name. In it, he marvels at the cosmic insignificance
of everything that takes place on these few pixels: Life, death, joy, suffering,
civilization, war, heroes, cowards; all on a mode of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
Looking at Earth from this 4 billion mile view is a good entry point for understanding a lot of astronomers' attitudes towards our work.
I say "our work" as if I'm still an astronomer, I'm not anymore, these days I just use my Ph.D.
to talk shii---[ERROR SOUND]studying astronomy long enough inevitably leads one to some big existential feelings.
You know, it's space. It's about as far away as you can get from the frivolous follies of humanity.
It transcends earthly things like society and ideology and governments and literally anything else you might blame the world's ills on.
Astronomers are simply neutral observers of a cold, uncaring universe, affecting
nothing, but understanding everything, as incorporeal as we are omniscient.
What could possibly be political about that?? This question is a more specific version of the one that I generally try to explore on this channel, which is broadly
how do social things affect science things and vice versa. And today I'm going to talk about how something as seemingly benign
as a telescope-- the fields instrumental cornerstone-- can in fact, be quite political.
So, yes, this is a video about astronomy and telescopes. But it's also about people.
It's about politics, it's about academic freedom, it's about the very function of universities.
And perhaps most importantly, it's about settler colonialism. What could I possibly mean by that?
Stay tuned to find out!
[upbeat electronic arabic music plays, feels hype, like something building up]
[it's a shame most ppl won't understand this song, its apt af for this vid]
Before we jump into the telescope stuff, I want to provide working definitions for a few of the terms
Introduction
I'll be using throughout the video, because their use varies with context and I want to be clear about what I mean.
Let's start with the big one: colonialism. Wikipedia says colonialism is the establishment and maintenance of one group of people
are superior to other peoples and areas, often for imperialist control and exploitation.
And that's a good start, but let's try to build some intuition for what that entails by comparing it to some related ideas.
I think of the difference between colonialism and colonization as the difference between an ideology and the actions that stemmed from
that ideology. Colonialism is believing you're superior to others and are therefore entitled to them and their stuff.
And then colonization is the process by which you go and help yourself to them and their stuff.
Colonialism is also slightly different than imperialism, the distinction there is that colonialism's
connotation centers the colonies that are overtaken and imperialism centers that empires that are doing the taking over,
but I'll basically be using them interchangeably. There are also different kinds of colonialism. In this video
I'm mostly concerned with settler colonialism, which is specifically when a place is colonized and the indigenous population is replaced by settlers from a colonial power.
A lot of African colonies, for example, were never settled by Europeans. They controlled people and extracted
resources from a distant shore, but didn't go live there in significant numbers. Places like Canada and Australia, however, are settler colonies,
new societies built on top of the ones that were nearly eradicated through genocide. And even though those settler colonies
still exist in the modern day, that's not the same as neo-colonialism, which is when countries that used to have colonial relationships
but don't officially anymore still maintain effectively the same power dynamics. Think of the industries of conflict
minerals that are being mined in Africa for use in technology for the global North.
So that's colonialism in a nutshell. And it will be very important for our discussion today. In Act One,
I'll introduce you to a telescope whose attempted construction has caused one of the biggest controversies in modern astronomy.
I'll give some technical background on the project, describe the historical context of its construction, and outline two sides
of the debate. In Act Two, I'll share what I think are the origins of this conflict. I'll share a case study that illustrates
how certain political opinions are suppressed in American academia, uncover the origins of that suppression, and use all of that
to contextualize my own experience being an astronomer during the peak of the telescopes controversy.
I'll also throw in a connection to current events, In there somewhere, but we'll save that for later. All the sources I use in this video will be cited here in the corner,
and you can access the document with all my references in the link below. And if I have to make any corrections to something I say, I'll also put that there,
so make sure you check it out. So without any further ado, I present to you: why telescopes are sometimes kind of colonial.
[that hype electro-mijwiz music Comes back and the energy's fire]
Act 1: A Telescope Controversy
The 30 meter telescope, or TMT for short, is one of astronomy's most ambitious projects to date.
It's exactly what it sounds like: A telescope that is...30 meters! To be technical, that size refers to the diameter of the primary mirror,
which is nearly three times bigger than the current biggest optical telescope. And I specify 'optical telescope' because different types of telescopes
have different size limitations based on the wavelength of light they're observing. For example, radio telescopes, which measure the specific
wavelengths of light that we call radio waves work kind of like a satellite dish, and their relatively simple
construction means they can be hundreds of meters wide. But optical telescopes like TMT detect light
in the approximate range of wavelengths that the human eye can see, so their basic mechanics use lenses and mirrors in a way more analogous to eyeballs or cameras.
But the thing about glass mirrors is that if you try to make one more than about eight meters across, it'll collapse under its own weight.
A neat trick to get around that problem is to segment the mirrors. The Keck telescopes, for example, pushed up to ten meters with 36 segments,
and TMT would take this to the next level by using 500 individually controllable segments to make one massive mirror.
Do you have any idea how big the dome for a telescope with a 30 meter primary
mirror would be? 20 stories! The whole complex would cover FIVE ACRES of land.
This telescope is going to be HUGE! And bigger is better, right? Of course it is!
This is America, goddamn it! We didn't win the space race by thinking small! So how *much* better would this bigger telescope make
our understanding of the universe? Here's an example: Let's say we wanted to determine the mass of SagA*,
the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy. We'd do it by measuring the orbits of the stars closest into it and using the numbers
that describe those orbits to calculate the black hole's mass. Astronomers have already done this, but with TMT we could do it BETTER.
See, when you make a measurement of something, you don't just get a single number, you also have to estimate how certain you are that the number is right.
What's the margin of error? You don't just get x, you get x plus or minus an error bar of Y.
and because the point of collecting data is to develop, support, and or disprove theories, and a big enough error bar can make any data
match any theory, what we strive for is observational astronomers is to shrink our error
bars. And a simple way to do that is to use bigger telescopes. For one, because a bigger telescope means more light collected, which means
brighter images or equivalently being able to detect much fainter things.
It also means an increase in resolving power; better ability to spatially distinguish between two objects.
There are more benefits to using a bigger telescope, but just using those two in our example of SagA*'s mass, increased
light collecting power means detecting more stars close to the black hole, and the increased resolution means more precise measurements of each star's orbit.
The end result is determining a black hole mass that may or may not be that different from the one that was already measured with Keck,
but we'll definitely have a much smaller error bar, and that's the important thing! Because it brings us that much closer to the truth behind all of existence!
This is what a lot of instrumental technical advances in astronomy do: improve measurements of things we've already measured.
In fact, a lot of non-astronomers probably don't realize that making error bars smaller is the central goal of a ton of our research.
A smaller error bar is considered new knowledge, by which I mean it's enough to publish a paper about and that's a much more attainable goal
than discovering something entirely new. In fields where research is actually grounded in utility,
it's really important that your error bars aren't so big that you don't know, build a faulty bridge or create a dangerous drug.
We don't really have to worry about stuff like that in astronomy, but we still really want our error bars to be smaller cause it's better!
It's better science! It lets us better comprehend humanity's celestial origins!
Which is why when you're doing something like designing the next generation of telescopes, we got to go bigger and bigger.
But the telescope itself is not the only thing that determines the quality of the data.
Another big factor is where you put it. When you take a picture of the light coming from something in space,
everything that light travels through on its journey from the object to your telescope also affects your images.
This includes things in space like interstellar dust or the gravity of nearby objects, but
also things like light pollution, weather, or the rest of Earth's atmosphere. And when it comes to the level of detail that affects astronomical
images, these things can vary a lot with location. So if you're going to go through the trouble of building something like a TMT,
you're going to want to put it in the best place possible. The better our telescope site, the better our knowledge of the cosmos.
This is why there are certain sites with tons of telescopes. For example, about half the world's astronomy infrastructure is in Chile,
because the Atacama Desert has that perfect combination of high altitude, cloudless skies and minimal light pollution that is just perfect
for observing. It's no surprise, then, that three of the proposed sites for building TMT are there.
There are a few other sites that I'll talk about more later, but for now, the inarguable favorite
in the American astronomy community is Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Mauna Kea is the Northern Hemisphere version of the Atacama Desert in Chile:
one of those special places on Earth where the sky is just so perfect for doing astronomy that people covered it in telescopes.
And lucky for us, in 2013, the State of Hawaii granted TMT permission to start construction, which they did the following year.
I actually remember hearing about it when I was in college studying astronomy. I was taking an observational astro class at the time and first learning
how to use telescopes, and it was so exciting to learn and hear about all the cool science people would do with TMT
and think like, you know, who knows, one day I might even be able to use it. So that was ten years ago.
But to understand what happened next, we're going to have to go further back in time.
I think a lot of people don't know about Hawaii is how ridiculously
recently it was colonized. Seriously, pause the video for a second and just like, guess:
what year do you think Hawaii became a U.S. state? 1959!
Hawaii, the state, is only 65 years old. Hawaii, the state, is younger than the pill,
MacDonald's, Mr. Potato Head and Fortran. Hawaii, the collection of volcanic islands in the Pacific, was first
settled by Polynesian explorers about a millennium ago. European first contact came in 1750 along with the guns, germs and steel
the continent has been known to introduce to the world. Within 50 years, King Kamehameha of Big Island used European weapons
to forcibly unify the independent islands into a single kingdom of Hawaii. And within a hundred years,
European diseases had reduced the native population by 84%. In this period of time, European settlers started establishing sugar
and pineapple plantations that would become the island's primary industry, and secured high ranking government positions
from which they could spread civilized ideas like Christianity and English to the local population.
This increasingly de facto colonial rule formalized itself in 1887,
when a constitution written by the descendants of American missionaries and put in place by an armed militia established the Hawaiian Kingdom
as a constitutional monarchy, just like the UK. And while this kingdom was still symbolically headed by native Hawaiians, its new constitution
largely functioned to further consolidate voting power among European settlers. I guess even this Hawaiian-led knockoff- Britain wasn't satisfying enough for the
colonizers because just six years later, it was illegally overthrown by a bunch of white businessmen who felt their tariffs were too damn high.
Fun fact: The first leader of Hawaii after the monarchy was a guy by the name of Sanford B Dole, whose name might sound familiar
because his cousin James Dole started the Dole food Company. Less fun fact: the Dole food company was made possible
because Dole bought a whole island to build a pineapple plantation. Even less fun fact: today, that same island is 98% owned by a different white guy.
The more things change, the more they stay the same, right? From here, it was only a matter of time until the U.S.
absorbed Hawaii entirely. In 1898, the US annexed it as a territory to help fight the Spanish-American War,
and this military asset in the Pacific proved invaluable during World War Two in the forties.
It was around that time that thousands of acres of land was seized from native Hawaiians and given to settlers.
And shortly thereafter, when the now predominantly settler residents of Hawaii voted it into statehood.
By that time, the native population had reduced somewhere between 88 and 98%,
a death rate so high it's comparable to that of recognized genocides. I know we often think of these colonial histories
as existing in the past, but the convenience and profit of settlers is very much still prioritized over the remaining indigenous population
in Hawaii today. Basic necessities cost a fortune because of a shipping law that protects American trade interests.
Investors abusing the lowest property taxes of any state have created one of the highest rates of homelessness in the US.
Overtourism is so bad there was a water shortage in Maui that led to water rationing for residents punishable by a $500 fine.
And, of course, the military presence continues to be a huge source of problems. From rendering an entire island uninhabitable through extensive bombing
practice to building bases that would create what is today one of the worst sex trafficking demand problems in the country,
it is mind boggling how much colonization reduced the land and people to literal resources for building empire.
And in case it wasn't obvious, These modern problems generally impact Native Hawaiian communities
the hardest. As such, a Hawaiian sovereignty movement emerged in the 1960s and seventies
to fight for indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, with a lot of the issues I just mentioned being core to their struggle.
Crucial to this movement was the concept of 'Aloha Aina, or a love of the land which centered the earth and the interconnectedness
of all life it sustains in Hawaiian patriotism, contrasting themselves starkly from the colonial perspective of their land as capital.
And while you could probably guess that a decolonial indigenous sovereignty movement would be concerned with things like poverty and violence,
you might be surprised to hear that one of their key issues is that of telescopes on Mauna Kea.
For some context, Mauna Kea is a massive volcano in the middle of Hawaii's biggest island that is technically the world's tallest mountain.
It's also a highly revered sacred site in Hawaiian traditions that, to this day
is considered to be a home to gods and a shrine for worship. It's also also a part of Hawaii's conservation lands
and home to native flora and fauna that aren't found anywhere else on earth. It's also also also a place that American astronomers
have just kind of assumed that they have the right to use however they like. Construction of the first telescope on Mauna Kea
began in 1968, just ten years after Hawaii became a state,
when a University of Hawaii physics professor named John Jeffries decided he could do some cool research up there.
It was actually Gerard Kuiper of Kuiper Belt fame who first pitched building telescopes on Mauna Kea,
But NAsA ended up giving Jeffries the contract, to which Kuiper said "his mountain" had been "stolen" from *him*.
Colonizer entitlement, man, it's something else. So the state leases all of the land above 12,000 feet to the University of Hawaii
until 2033 with the terms that they can do whatever they want up there, so long as the land would be returned in good order and condition.
And for some people, this was great. NASA and the university were jazzed about the science they would produce up there,
and the settler run Hawaiian government was anticipating an economic windfall for the state.
However, the deal was opposed by native Hawaiians and environmentalists who were concerned
about preserving Mauna Kea's cultural significance and unique ecology. Here's how Jeffries made sense of this opposition:
"The Big Island is a rural community and there are a lot of people there who are not very sophisticated, as you know.
They feel--in some cases I've had this said to me--that they are going to lose all access to the mountain just because of these telescope programs.
The federal government is going to come in and it's going to slowly move down the mountain, digging more and more of the mountain as more and more programs go up there
and no one will be able to get there. It is very hard to fight fear of this kind of formless, baseless concern,
except through the same kind of backwoods interaction at a grassroots level." A "formless, baseless concern" was astonishingly
bold, considering what came next. Can you guess what came next? They built more telescopes of course!
Then they built another one, and another one. and then another and another, and another and another,
and then a second one to go with that one, and then another and another. And these aren't like, little Costco telescopes,
these are enormous, multi-story BEHEMOTHS of telescopes.
Today, the summit of Mauna Kea is covered in these telescopes used by professional astronomers all over the world.
That's actually a little hyperbolic, like, two are foreign operated and there are a couple international collaborations,
but most of them are run by American institutions. Vecause Hawaii is America's, of course! But the point is that today,
this mountain that is sacred to native Hawaiians who remain on their land despite their population having been decimated by colonization,
is covered in big-ass telescopes that exist for the benefit of a bunch of predominantly white astronomers in faraway places.
And enough time has passed now that the "formless, baseless concerns" of the "backwoods" natives have proven extremely prescient.
Besides, you know, just turning the summit of a revered mountain into a series of science complexes, an audit conducted by the state in 1998
found that the University of Hawaii kind of dropped the ball on the whole 'take care of the mountain' promise, citing
abandoned equipments and trash, inadequate control over public access, and a local bug species being driven to the brink of extinction
as examples of the astronomers' negligence. As the state and university continued to develop the mountain
with little involvement from the local community and an obvious disregard for the terms of their lease agreements,
a "Save Mauna Kea" movement emerged in opposition to defend the local heritage and environment. And this movement had some real wins:
for example, in 2002, when NASA wanted to add some outrigger telescopes to Keck, the office
of Hawaiian Affairs successfully sued them for not addressing the environmental or cultural impacts of the proposal, and the project was scrapped.
This legal approach has also been used to varying degrees of success by Indigenous communities in the continental
United States, like at Kitt Peak National Observatory, built on Tohono O'odham land, or Mount Graham International Observatory on Apache Land.
That, to me, is the best example of what decolonizing astronomy might look like.
Decolonization, which theoretically means the undoing of colonization,
is often used in academia to refer to things like reading lists about colonialism or symbolic nods to indigeneity. 395 00:21:56,214 --> 00:21:59,384 The astronomy version of this is naming space
things using words from Indigenous languages. And while I can appreciate intellectual expressions of decoloniality,
like examining the way we talk about and teach astronomy, when it comes to settler colonialism like that of Hawaii,
decolonization is necessarily about land. And you might be thinking: "wait,
if she's calling the obstruction of new telescopes decolonization, then isn't she implying that building telescopes...is colonization?
That's absurd, because they were built after Hawaii was already colonized, right?" Well, to the people whose brain reflexed to that position,
here's a question that might help you decolonize your understanding of colonization.
Is there an end point? Is there a clear line before which settlers
building stuff on land inhabited by indigenous people against their will is doing colonization and therefore bad,
but after which, the land is justifiably controlled by settlers who can reasonably tell remaining indigenous people
sorry, no backsies. Is it when the first settlements are built? Is it when a settler government has been formally established?
Is it when the government is recognized by the international community? Is it when settlers outnumber indigenous people?
Is it when there are no Indigenous people left on their land at all? My point is that I think it's more useful
to view colonization not as a binary, but as a process. This makes it easier to identify current manifestations of it,
and not just open and shut historical cases. Here's one telltale sign of real time colonization:
colonial power being wielded to suppress indigenous dissent of something.
Think of the Dakota Access Pipeline: when it was going to be built close enough to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation that it would inevitably contaminate their water supply,
indigenous communities and comrades organized to defend the land through protest, and the pipeline
people protected their interests with attack dogs, police and the military. An oil pipeline is not inherently colonial, it's just a tool,
but when you have to exert state sanctioned violence to deter indigenous people from opposing its construction, you're doing more colonization.
Similarly, a telescope is not inherently colonial. It's just a tool. But while building one is not automatically doing colonization,
depending on the context, it could be. So let's take a look at the Hawaiian context of TMT.
So we've talked
about how TMT will be the biggest, coolest telescope ever, and we've learned about Hawaii's colonial history
and how the Mauna Kea telescopes fit into it, so I think we finally have enough information to understand
the main tension I want to explore in this video: building TMT on Mauna Kea.
We'll go through the scientific argument first, and then look at the response from native Hawaiians.
First, the scientists take. Depending on who you ask, Mauna Kea is either equally good as any other potential site
or just a hair better in certain situations. And I'm an exceptionally good person to ask
because I've literally published papers about the testing of astronomical instruments on Mauna Kea specifically.
Not to flex or anything, but...it's true. The short list of locations are Mauna, Kea, three places in Chile,
Baja California in Mexico, La Palma in the Canary Islands, and a site in India. I think there's a fair argument to be made against putting the telescope in Chile
because they're already building a very similar telescope there currently. And it would be nice to have an extremely large telescope in both the Northern
and the Southern hemispheres to get full sky coverage, we can strike those options. I also won't talk about India because I just couldn't
find enough information on it to do a comparison, so let's also assume it isn't suitable.
This leaves Mauna Kea, Mexico, and the Canary Islands, so let's see how they stack up astronomically.
A five year comparison study of the sites in Hawaii, Mexico and Chile found that there was no single best or worst site, with different locations
performing better in different metrics. You can read their whole detailed analysis if you like, but I just want you to burn this one line from their conclusion into your brain:
"The final site selection can safely also take into account other considerations without compromising the expected scientific output of TMT."
So Mexico and Hawaii have comparable potential for scientific output. Cool. On the other hand, the evidence that does suggest that Mauna Kea is
the superior site doesn't show *that* much difference. For example, the La Palma location
in the Canary Islands, which is generally considered the first back up option to Mauna Kea, does have measurable differences in several key parameters.
Some of them, like the difference in atmospheric seeing, don't really matter that much because the telescope will have instruments that correct for most atmospheric effects
anyways, but some of them could impact the scientific bottom line. Not really in quality of data, but in efficiency of data collection.
One analysis, for example, found that to get an image from a la Palma TMT of equal scientific quality to an image taken by a Mauna Kea TMT,
the exposure time for the La Palma image would have to be, on average, 15% longer.
So if you took a cool space picture on Mauna Kea and let it expose for 1 minute, to get the exact same quality image on La Palma,
you'd have to let it exposed for a minute and 9 seconds. That extra 9 seconds of wasted time is the single most compelling argument
I've been able to find that Mauna Kea is scientifically better for TMT than any of the other sites. And I really want to emphasize this point:
the science produced on Mauna Kea wouldn't be any better, it's just that you could get slightly more of it there.
And like, 15% increased efficiency isn't *that* much. It's certainly nothing compared to the jump
we're making from a ten meter telescope to 30 meter telescopes. But it *is* technically an opportunity for more data,
which *does* ultimately mean it could help astronomers in their never ending quest to shrink their error bars smaller and smaller.
So if we're going to build something like a TMT, the thinking is that we might as well put it in the place
where it could do the absolute maximum amount of science possible. Like, Mauna Kea might not be *much* better than the other sites,
but there is *some* evidence that it is objectively more efficient, so surely the rational thing is to put it where we can get
as many photons as possible! So that's the scientific argument,
and it's all very rational, very data driven. Here's how people responded in Hawaii.
In October 2014, the TMT project held a groundbreaking ceremony to mark the beginning of construction,
and that same day, the organization Sacred Mauna Kea put out a press release announcing a peaceful protest against the astronomy industry and TMT.
That day, dozens of protectors, as they called themselves, picketed, chanted, and laid down in the road to block the TMT caravan from going up
the mountain, successfully shutting down the groundbreaking ceremony and briefly delaying construction.
"All these others are illegal. For what? For your greed to look in the sky?
You guys can even take care of this place!" This tension escalated the following year, when the TMT
project quietly began moving equipment up the mountain. And in response, organizers mobilized again, with over
100 protesters setting up camp on the summit to blockade crews. And in response to their response, the police were brought in
and subsequently arrested 12 protectors at the mountain's visitor center and 11 more at the summit.
Significantly, many of those arrested were kupuna, or native elders, some of whom were born before Hawaii even became a state. "Shameful!
I'm 70 years old, and you're handcuffing me like I'm a criminal." Of the wildly disproportionate response to peaceful demonstrators,
TMT's project manager Gary Sanders said: "We regret that police action had to be taken to enable
our legal access to the project site. TMT respects the rights of everyone to express their viewpoints.
We also respect the laws of the state of Hawaii and the seven year public process and authority
that granted us permits to build the TMT in the Mauna Kea Science Reserve's Astronomy Precinct."
So respectful! Shortly after Hawaiian Governor David Ige called for a temporary pause of construction, at which time hundreds of people protested
in the streets of Honolulu and on the University of Hawaii's campus. Concurrent to the growing movement to protect the mountain in this pause,
the TMT project listened to feedback and took accountability and hired some PR people to run their social media.
And I guess the website they made was really compelling or whatever, because a few years later, in July 2019,
Governor Ige announced that construction would begin again. This time around, organizers were ready.
Within days, the Royal Order of Kamehameha and the Mauna Kea Protectors established a pu’uhonua,
or a space of protection by the access road to the summit to support protectors of the mountain, something like a camp to set up long term resistance efforts
with medics, food, education and cultural practices. Pu-uhonua at Pu’uhuluhulu
is actually a really beautiful example of what sustained direct action supported by community care looks like,
so I recommend checking out that short film that B-roll is from to learn more. But once again, protectors of the Mauna blocked
the access road, this time provoking the observatory to evacuate their personnel before bringing in the police.
Within the first days of the blockade, another 33 kupuna had been arrested, and as people across the islands watched everything unfold, opposition
to the telescopes continued to grow, with thousands marching in Waikiki. The TMT blockade went into the next month, keeping observatories inactive for weeks
and ultimately pushing TMT to pause construction again. At time of recording in January 2024, construction of TMT has still not begun. TMT
the project is still happening; people are still working on things like instrument design and fabrication of parts that will eventually go somewhere,
but construction of the site itself has not begun anywhere. The most recent development I'm aware of was the creation of a state
appointed oversight board for Mauna Kea last July that's supposed to bring native Hawaiians and astronomers together in shared stewardship of the mountain,
which sounds like it could be a step in the right direction, but it is too early to say if this is anything but another attempt at improved
PR to soften the obviously bad optics of the project so far. Because if there's something that can't have bad optics, it's telescopes lol
However, based on TMT's super inclusive and culturally sensitive website, Mauna Kea still seems like the plan.
Their about section literally has a page titled 'Our Story in Hawaii' and they haven't even built anything there yet.
Like Kuiper back in the sixties, the TMT project seems to be operating under the wildly baseless assumption that the mountain is theirs,
that they're self-evidently entitled to the nigh unmatched observation of conditions that the Mauna provides by virtue of how valuable it is to astronomy.
I've done a lot of research and asked around to friends who are still in the field and despite the years of local opposition in Hawaii and the eagerness
of the communities in alternate sites, I have found no reason to think that any of them are being seriously considered.
It appears, then, that despite repeated attempts by native Hawaiians to protect it from continued desecration,
astronomers are still set on Mauna Kea as the spot for TMT. And I should point out,
I don't want to represent native Hawaiians as a monolith or anything. There are differing perspectives among the population,
with different opinions as to how many telescopes is too many, or should there be any telescopes there at all,
or if there are what obligation do astronomers have to the community. An especially heartbreaking tension
was that many of the police in Hawaii were themselves native. I heard stories of cops in tears as they arrested their own elders,
conflicted by their obligation to their employers and their responsibility to their community.
But even with variation in how native Hawaiians related to the conflict, the whole thing was objectively a mess.
Like, surely any remotely ethical person could look at the suppression
of indigenous people demanding an end to the continued desecration of their sacred land to benefit people empowered by the government
who colonized them, and see that even though there might indeed be a little bump in efficiency if they build it in Hawaii,
the obvious choice would be to build TMT somewhere else. Surely we as a species could just take the L with that 15%
longer exposure time for PICTURES of SPACE. SURELY.
When I originally thought of making a video about TMT over a year ago,
I was planning to just explain basically what I've already explained here and just like, marvel over how absurd the astronomer logic is. You know, like,
just how thoroughly up your own ass do you have to be to think that the extra few photons you can get to shrink the error bars on some absolutely non-essential research
is somehow a reasonable thing to prioritize over the self-determination and right to land of a native population that has been decimated by colonialism?
Because as I will expand upon later, that is what I understand to be the generally held perspective in the astronomy community. Or at least
it was in my experience, and in defense of my experience being informative, I was doing my Ph.D.
in an astronomy department at one of the main TMT stakeholder institutions during the 2019 conflict.
Tea will be spilled, so stay tuned. But like, as fun as just shitting on astronomers
for being wildly out of touch is, I think there's actually more to say about why this blatantly ridiculous logic is the status quo
take in the field. I think there's actually something bigger going on here than just nerds ego
tripping so hard that the experiences of real people with real lives in the real world are just completely incomprehensible to them.
But before I tell you what I think might be the roots of this phenomenon, we're going to have to go on a little colonialism side
quest. So I want you to take that feeling you probably have right now of sympathy
for indigenous people who have been colonized by Western settlers, and hold on to that feeling while we talk
about Palestinian liberation. [A new song plays, a woman raps in Arabic like she's got a bone to pick]
An Aside on Palestinian Liberation
Damn, I'm terrified of doing this.
Also, this watermelon doesn't have seeds. The visual metaphor barely works. My hands are sticky now. So while I was writing this video, this happened, and it inspired me
to offer a little content warning slash disclaimer. And while, to me, this is just
modern McCarthyism that protects American interests in Israel, I do want to address the anti-Semitic elephant in the room.
I really appreciated the framing offered by Bernie Steinberg, a former director of Harvard Hillel
in a recent op ed: "Let me be clear. Anti-Semitism in the US is a real and dangerous phenomenon,
most pressingly from the alt right white supremacist politics that have become alarmingly mainstream since 2016.
To contend against these and other anti-Semitic forces with clarity and purpose, we must put aside
all fabricated and weaponized charges of anti-Semitism that serve to silence criticism of Israeli policy and its sponsors in the U.S."
So antisemitism is a very serious problem, AND, the conflation of anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel
makes it harder to fight far right extremism around the world that oppresses Jewish people and Arab people and Muslims and just about everyone else.
After all, that resolution was written by and nearly unanimously supported by Republicans, who, as we all know, are very, very opposed to antisemitism.
But I do know enough about how anti-Semitism actually works to know that any issue involving Jewish people is an opportunity
for the legitimate anti-Semites who exist in all communities to hijack good faith arguments for far right purposes.
So I wanted to offer some resources to learn about antisemitism and how it operates in modern political movements.
The TLDR is that anti-Jewish oppression is different from most kinds of bigotry today in that it often presents Jewish people
as extremely powerful rather than inferior. Think 'Jews secretly run the world' type shit.
This myth distracts from the real and oppressive power structures that actually run the world,
things like white supremacy and capitalism, and explain away social advances other minority groups make as Jews facilitating white genocide.
If you don't have a working knowledge of not just what antisemitism is, but how it works, I urge you to read this pamphlet which explains anti-Semitic
traps in leftist organizing in general, and pro-Palestine work in specific.
Philosophy Tube also did a great analysis of antisemitism that hits a lot of the same points. So please educate yourself about the topic if you haven't,
and let me be clear that even though this is a video about a telescope that can project artificial stars onto the sky and the Zionist colonization of Palestine,
there will be no talk of Jewish space lasers here. Take your bigoted conspiracy theories and somewhere else. That said,
I don't believe criticizing Israel is inherently anti-Semitic any more than I think criticizing American Christian nationalism is anti-Christian,
or criticizing Saudi authoritarianism is Islamophobic, or criticizing Indian Hindu for fascism as anti-hindu.
The religious tensions of the conflict are important to be conscious of, but it is not, at its root, a religious conflict,
and even though Western mainstream media frames it as Muslims versus Jews, please keep it straight:
The only us versus them that fits into my understanding of history is the forces of anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, white
supremacist imperial power against everybody else. We are not mad at Muslims or Jews here.
We are mad at the British Empire and the US military industrial complex. Got it?
Finally, I want to address Jewish viewers specifically. I can't understand the complexity of having your religious identity
tied up in the state of Israel and watching current events and trying to make sense of them along with the horrors
of the past and legitimate fears of the future. And depending on where you are in your own journey, the following conversation,
which will explicitly center the perspective of Palestinians, might be triggering for you. If you're open to it,
I'd recommend checking out Jewish Voices for Peace, a progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization
that does incredible work for Palestinian solidarity that can speak to that complexity much better than I could.
I also wanted to share this video series a friend of mine made about her recent experience unpacking her Zionist education as a white American Jew.
It's been unbelievably heartening for me to witness such compassionate and frankly,
brave introspection and transformation from people I'm in community with.
And I hope that her vulnerability will be valuable to you if you find yourself in a similar situation.
So with that, let's all take a big breath together. Inhale...
and exhale... And here we go. I'm recording this on January 31st, 2024, 116 days
into what most news outlets in my country are calling the Israel-Hamas war, which Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu announced the beginning of on October 7th
in response to a deadly, multi-front attack on the country that's generally attributed to the political and military organization
Hamas that governs the Gaza Strip. This attack, which resulted in the death of hundreds of Israeli civilians,
the injury of over a thousand more, and the taking of some 250 hostages,
has since been responded to with what can only be described as a genocide of the Palestinian population remaining in Gaza,
with over 30,000 dead and nearly 2 million more displaced, a quarter of whom are living in famine like conditions.
I'm not going to argue that what Israel is doing to Palestinians is a genocide, frankly, I don't think that's up for debate at this point.
See: South Africa's case for the International Court of Justice or this video by John the Duncan.
Instead, I want to look at the history that led up to October 7th through the lens of Israel as a settler colonial project.
I'll also be addressing a few of the talking points in the Israel- Palestine discourse that I find...
concerning. And to head off any accusations of being biased, of course I'm biased.
I'm a human. Academically, I'm coming from the perspective of Middle Eastern studies, which I have a bachelor's degree in,
and my main research collaborator for this section is doing a master's degree in history with a focus on statelessness, refugees and humanitarianism.
Shout out to Last Futures, go check out his videos if you're into history, anime or Middle East politics.
We're also both children of Arab immigrants to North America and have grown up with a consciousness of Palestinian liberation
from that cultural perspective, but I'll talk more about that part later. Because right, now we got some history to learn.
Contrary to the popular Zionist aphorism that refers to Israel as "a land without a people,
for a people without a land", the land Israel inhabits today most definitely had
a people: Palestinians. From Herodotus writings of Palestine in the fifth century
BCE to 15th century legal records of an Arab state of Philistine,
there is a long historical record of a nation of Palestine, and while the people of this land have been predominantly Muslim
since the seventh century, a defining feature of a society from about the 12th century onward was the peaceful cohabitation
of Muslims, Christians and Jews, who all consider it holy. I won't pretend that things were perfectly egalitarian,
for example, under the Ottomans, non-Muslims had to pay a tax, but it's a far cry from the treatment of Jewish people across Europe
since the Middle Ages. So Palestinian Muslims, Christians and Jews shared a land, a national identity and a common language of Arabic, and concurrent to that,
the British Empire was trying to take over the world. In their defense, they had to do it before all the other imperial powers did first.
By the 1800s, they had colonized most of the Americas, by the 1900s, they'd divvied up most of Africa,
and when the Ottoman Empire fell in the early 20th century, the Middle East would be next in line to be carved up and sold for parts.
Which is about to be important because it was the imperial context that set the stage for the UK to begin the colonization of Palestine.
But there's a lesser understood ideology involved here besides colonialism, and that's Zionism.
So unlike the Middle East, Europe has a really long history of antisemitism.
in the late 1800s, after centuries of restrictions, pogroms, and ghettoization, people were understandably starting to wonder
whether or not it was possible for Gentile Europeans to like, notttt do that.
This sparked a huge debate on the status of Jews in Europe that's referred to as "the Jewish question", one of the less immediately horrifying solutions to which was Zionism.
In 1896, father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, published
Der Judenstaat, proposing an independent Jewish state as a refuge from anti-Semitism in Europe.
Ideally, he said, the state would be in Palestine because of its historic ties to Judaism, but he also considered Argentina, Cyprus and Uganda.
Curious how those timelines went. A controversial implication of his solution is that
Europeans are patently incapable of not oppressing Jews; he wrote that the mere presence of Jewish people causes their persecution,
and that this "will inevitably be so everywhere". Many Jewish activists called out the danger of this concession,
like journalist Lucian Wolf, who condemned it as a "comprehensive capitulation to the calumnies of anti-Semites". And like,
I guess I can see how Herzl landed there, having grown up in Europe. If only he had a counterexample of a place where Jews and non-Jews
lived together amicably, like, I don't know... Palestine??? The European origins of Zionism also inform
its relationship to white supremacy. From Herzl's proposal of the Jewish state as a "outpost against barbarism"
to Zionist philosopher Abba Eban saying the movement should civilize Arabs
"rather than allow them to drag us into unnatural orientalism". The racialization of Zionist settlers as white and indigenous
Palestinians as a racial other has been a consistent feature of this ideology. And I say "racialization" rather than race, because there are white
looking Palestinians, there are Arab Jews, there are black Israelis, there are other demographics that complicate any clear line of white,
white and nonwhite, but a lot of media narratives will frame it that way anyways,
because it fits very nicely into the world view of white supremacists, intentional or otherwise.
I should also mention that there are different things that people call Zionism, but the only one I'm concerned with right now
is right wing nationalist Zionism, because that's like, the one that happened. This flavor is generally attributed to revisionist Zionists and Vladimir Jabotinsky,
who inextricably tied Zionism to colonialism in his 1923 essay, 'The Iron Wall'.
While Herzl had proposed a return to Zion via Jews purchasing land in Palestine, Jabotinsky argued that,
because Palestinians would never give up their land willingly, the only option was a forceful colonization under the protection
of a foreign power, "an iron wall which the native population cannot break through".
So Zionism is: kind of anti-Semitic; adjacently white supremacist; inherently colonial; and most importantly, not the same as Judaism,
any more than Manifest Destiny is the same as Christianity. And it was cooking in the background in Europe, as World War One was coming
to an end.
So the British were fighting the Ottomans and they wanted help from the Arabs that lived in the Ottoman Empire,
so the British tell them if you help us win the war, we'll recognize your independence. But the British are lying imperial bastards, because not only were
they secretly divvying up the soon to be spoils of the Ottoman Empire with France, they also promised some of the Arab's land to Zionists.
The 1917 Balfour Declaration, formalized British support for a Zionist project
in Palestine, promising to support the creation of a "national home for Jewish people" and avoid damaging
"the civil and religious liberties of the existing non-Jewish communities". In hindsight, they really nailed half of that! While this maybe seems like
the British were just super sympathetic to the plight of Jewish people, I want to remind you of the long history of antisemitism in the UK
as well as the tactical benefits of having a proxy state in the Middle East. See Churchill's 1920 article Zionism versus Bolshevism,
in which he distinguishes between "good and bad Jews", meaning the Jews who assimilate to Gentile British society
and the terrorist commie Jews coming out of Russia, of course. In positioning them as antithetical to Bolsheviks,
Churchill framed Zionist Jews as uniquely worth supporting, making the creation of a Jewish state
a moral duty that just so happened to be "especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire".
So Zionists and the British government find some common ground, and this collaboration was solidified in our first map: Mandatory Palestine.
Mandates were a system used to legally give some countries control of other ones,
you know, so they could help them get back on their feet after their old empires fell. In reality, the mandates were a means of colonization in the Middle
East, Africa and the Pacific to benefit Western powers because, of course. What made Palestine's mandate unique, though, was that it
didn't just put the land under British control, it also included the Balfour Declaration, solidifying the
promise of a Jewish state in Palestine. So in Mandatory Palestine, which operated from 1920 to
1948, only Jewish people had national rights. The mandate included preferential immigration laws, enshrining
Jews right to enter, but denying Palestinians the right to return, meaning if they leave their land for any reason, they can't come back.
Jim Crow-esque segregation also emerged, with segregated schools and the criminalization of marriage between Jews and non-Jews.
Unsurprisingly, Muslim and Christian Palestinians opposed the Balfour Declaration, but the British ignored the Palestinian Congress
and put a complete ban on Palestinian political activity, so when they resisted with demonstrations, strikes and riots, the British repressed
the hell out of them with the same tactics they'd perfected on the Irish. So for a while,
the British occupiers and Zionist settlers had a really good thing going. But around the time World War Two was starting up,
British interest in the Zionist project began to wane and Zionist settlers decided
it was time to fight for their independence and kicked off an era of Zionist terrorism targeted at the British and Palestinians alike.
Zionist terrorism escalated to a point that it was no longer in the Crown's best interest to be there.
So in 1947, amid increasing tensions and violent conflict between Palestinians,
Jewish settlers and the British, Palestine was partitioned. The nascent UN proposed a partition plan that would end the British Mandate
and establish in its place two independent states, one Arab and one Jewish. Zionists
supported the plan as it would further legitimize their presence in the region. And many leaders, including the eventual first Prime Minister and first president of Israel,
explicitly called the partition plan a stepping stone to further colonization of Palestinian land. Which, by the way, did happen.
Arab leaders were, of course, less keen on the plan. Under it, more than half the land would go to the Jewish state
that made up only a third of the population, and the vast majority of that third had only come to the region in the last
20 years. And Palestinians still owned a majority of the land and constituted a majority of the population, despite
some 300,000 of them being expelled during the mandate. Arab leaders argued that the partition plan
violated their right to national determination under the U.N. charter, which it absolutely did.
But despite blatant intent of further colonization and Arab appeals for national determination, the partition plan passed in a vote on November 1947.
And at midnight on May 14th, 1948, the Mandate of Palestine ended,
the British withdrew their remaining troops and personnel from Haifa, and the Jewish leadership in Palestine declared the establishment
of the State of Israel. The next day, Palestinian and surrounding Arab armies invade, starting what we call in the West
the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the result of which is our next map.
For Zionists, this was a war of independence, freeing themselves from British occupation-- as if there was any possibility
of an Israel without the boundless support of said British occupation. For Palestinians,
however, this war was the beginning of what would become known as the Nakba. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe argues that this was not a war,
as it's often framed in the West, but rather an ethnic cleansing. About 80% of non-Jewish Palestinians fled or were expelled from what became Israel.
While some hundred thousand more were internally displaced, becoming refugees in their own country.
And "expulsion" sounds like it could be nonviolent, but it was very much a violent process.
On screen right now is a list of some of the massacres on Palestinians, initially by Zionist paramilitary groups and later by the Israeli Defense Forces
they would become. Legal frameworks were also set up to expropriate Palestinian land, allowing the newly formed state to seize all property left behind
by fleeing refugees and transfer the vast majority of the Palestinian economy to Israel.
Israel was quite literally built on the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages, in the emptied homes
and with the confiscated resources of people who became refugees. And it wasn't like they could have just come back
after the war and try to reclaim their stuff, Israeli forces just shot and killed the thousands
of Palestinians who tried to return to their homes immediately after the war. They lost the right to return, remember?
Besides taking Palestinian life, land, and resources, the Nakba took Palestinian culture, for example, by destroying
non-Jewish historical sites and renaming local geographic features in Hebrew. And today, commemoration of the Nakba is a criminal offense in Israel.
Wouldn't want to sully celebrations of independence from their horrible British patrons with memories of a genocide would we?
Which brings us up to the next superpower, patron of Israel: the United States. God bless America!
So World War Two just ended, Israel exists, and the US has some interests in the Middle East.
The obvious one was the newly discovered oil that the US clearly thought it was entitled to and still kind of does,
but another was the escalating rivalry with the Soviet Union, which was looking dire as newly independent Arab states were becoming increasingly interested
in socialism. And like Zionists before who had recognized mutual interests with the British,
Israel quickly positioned itself as a useful asset to the up and coming world superpower, with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz publishing a proposal
to the West in 1951, volunteering Israel as a "watchdog" state that could "be relied upon to punish neighboring states
whose discourtesy to the West went beyond the bounds of permissible". In 1959, America began providing military
aid to Israel, an investment that would prove invaluable when another war broke out in 1967.
So Egypt tells Israel they can't move ships through the Strait of Tiran, and Israel attacks Egypt,
and next thing you know, they're fighting with a bunch of Arab states. Within six days, Israel takes control not only of the entirety
of historic Palestine, but also the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and Golan Heights from Syria.
Because appeasement doesn't work! Like the war in 1948, the Six-Day War was simultaneously a historic tragedy
for Palestinians and a major advancement for Zionist colonization. Palestinians called this war the Naksa as it brought the expulsion of another
300,000 people and Israeli occupation of the remaining Palestinian land. For Zionists, however, the decisive victory
was evidence of Israel's usefulness to the United States, solidifying an alliance that would only grow from there.
Israel would become the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid, receiving over $150 billion since 1959.
And in that time, our aid has driven a cycle of violence in which Palestinians resist their continued colonization
and the US backed Israeli military suppresses them. Depending on what year the present day map you're looking at represents,
you'll see the West Bank in different amounts of disillusion. The general land grab strategy over the last couple of decades
has been to provoke and wait for occupied Palestinians to do anything remotely aggressive, bomb the shit out of Gaza, and then build
more illegal settlements in the West Bank while everyone's still distracted. And with every cycle, lots of people die,
the vast, vast majority of them Palestinians. And it is yet another iteration of the cycle that brings us to
where we are today.
Today, human rights groups like Amnesty International have outlined in great detail how Israel is an apartheid state
that systematically privileges Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians.
You can read that report or watch the companion video for a more full picture, but I'll summarize some key points here.
Any Jewish person in the world, whether by blood or conversion, can immigrate to Israel and automatically become a citizen with full rights.
Palestinians, however, have four tiers of residency status, none of which are equivalent to Jewish Israeli citizenship.
There's also 5 million Palestinians and counting living in exile around the world because of all the goddamn ethnic
cleansings and the whole no right to return thing, but let's focus on Palestinians still in the region.
So in the best case scenario--Israeli citizenship-- Palestinians have *some* semblance of legal rights.
They can vote or run for public office, but they could never use that right to challenge the ongoing colonization of their people
because candidates who challenge Israel status as a Jewish state are prohibited from running in elections. They also face
extensive systemic discrimination, both legally and effectively. They have different color IDs and license plates to identify them, and face
discrimination in housing, health care and education that functions very similarly to technically illegal, but still very possible
anti-blackness in the United States. Here's a database of 67 discriminatory laws in Israel
that includes handy explanations of how they function, and that's just the legally sanctioned stuff.
So Israeli citizenship is the best case scenario for Palestinians. And then the situation of permanent residents in East Jerusalem
is marginally worse, as their non citizen status leaves the door open for expulsion.
But both of these groups exist among Israeli society as second and third class citizens.
Palestinian residents of the West Bank are the fourth class citizens. They live semi-integrated with Jewish settlers, but face blatant
marginalization, such as being restricted to only using certain roads. There's also this thing where,
if an Israeli is arrested in the West Bank, they'd be tried in a civil court, but if a Palestinian was arrested in the West Bank, by default
of being Palestinian, they'd be tried in military courts. And what do you know, 95% of Israeli military court cases end in conviction.
And in the worst case scenario, you have Gaza. Palestinians in Gaza, as well as those in the West
Bank, do not have freedom of speech, assembly or political action. Those who engage in peaceful protests or displays of nationalism
are regularly met with arrest, beatings or death. Gaza has also been under a military blockade since 2005, which collapsed
what was left of its economy, leaving Israel in control of its access to water, electricity, food, medicine, educational supplies, building materials, everything.
All that, in conjunction with rampant poverty and unemployment, repeated bombing campaigns, and a whole bunch of other war crimes
I'm not going to get into today, has left Gaza in what Amnesty International called
"a state of perpetual human rights crisis". And it is within this context, a perpetual human rights crisis
in a broader apartheid state brought about by a century of brutal colonization
facilitated by Western imperialism, that the events of October 7th occurred.
This account is not comprehensive and I am certainly simplifying points, but the broad strokes here are clear as day: Zionists set out
to colonize Palestine, and with the help of a British occupation and U.S. financial aid, they've almost achieved their goal.
And the "war" that's going on today is just the latest step in this hundred year process of fully realizing the Zionist dream of "a land
without a people, for a people without a land", or in other words, a Palestine with no Palestinians.
So I would hope that this history is enough to see the events of October 7th and the subsequent months as anti-colonial resistance and colonial suppression.
But for some reason, there are still grown-ass adults out there, including so-called progressives and leftists,
who refuse to sympathize with or support the Palestinian people. In fact, when I made a community post about it
back in October calling for solidarity with the Palestinians, I got a lot of shit for it. And I just deleted it all,
because this is MY channel and I do what I want, this is NOT your space for free speech lol But now, I'm going to respond to these arguments.
In particular, I'm going to try to answer the three most common critical questions I got on that post:
Why should I care about this? Don't Jews deserve a homeland? And of course, do you condemn Hamas?
So if the United States military is the world police that just can't stop violently spreading democracy everywhere,
Israel is its loyal sidekick. We already saw American interests in Israel as a watchdog in the Middle East,
so imagine that, but like, everywhere. You know that Operation Condor,
that thing in the seventies and eighties where South America was becoming a bit too into socialism so the US backed a bunch of right wing terrorism and political activity, helping
establish violent authoritarian regimes across the continents? Guess who helped? Israel armed countless paramilitary death
squads and dictatorial regimes in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Ecuador, the list goes on.
They did the same for despotic regimes in Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand. In Africa, Israel acted on behalf of the US in arming and training
authoritarian regimes in Zimbabwe, Malawi and even South Africa, the OG apartheid state. There in particular, where
there was an international embargo set to discourage all the apartheid,
the US was able to superficially participate in, but also undermine the embargo by funneling helicopters
through Israel to transport goods in and out of South Africa. There's actually a whole history of military and economic and diplomatic
collaboration between Israel and apartheid South Africa, which is why the current ICJ case against Israel by South African lawyers is so fucking poetic.
So wherever movements arise that could challenge the imperial world order, the U.S. and Israel are committed to supporting authoritarian regimes who crush them.
But all that world police stuff kind of works to the benefit of your average American, right?
We enjoy that special kind of safety you can only get living within the borders of the most outwardly
aggressive nation to ever exist. And we don't just innocently enjoy that safety,
we pay for it: adjusted for inflation, the U.S. has given Israel a total of $270 billion since 1946.
We've been giving Israel $3.8 billion a year since 2016. That's *our* tax money paying for literal genocide.
That's enough to make me feel kind of obligated to give a shit, but for the less emotionally driven, you could think of it pragmatically:
there is so much we could do with that money here. Biden's trying to send $14.3 billion to Israel right now,
do you know what that could pay for? Housing a million and a half households. Health care for nearly 5 million children.
Student loan debt relief for almost 400,000 people. For the astronomers who have no sense of connection to those things,
you could build six whole TMTs! And like, remember, we're not just giving military aid,
we've also given Israel a lot of economic aid. That means that while we're over here drowning in student loan debt
and scared to get sick because going to the doctors for rich people now, Israelis are enjoying universal health care and government subsidized college,
supported by an economy that we help fund. But all that money stuff aside, I think the most selfishly concerning
thing to Americans should be how Israel's methods of policing Palestinians is becoming the blueprint for American law enforcement.
American police forces of all levels, ICE, Border Patrol, even the TSA regularly train
with the Israeli military, Elbit systems, which is basically the Israeli Lockheed Martin, was contracted by Homeland Security to militarize
the US-Mexico border. They were also contracted to put the reservation of the Tohono O'odham Nation, who I mentioned earlier
under "persistent surveillance". And in even more recent news, have you heard of Cop City?
It's going to be a massive military training facility in Atlanta where police can learn urban warfare,
and you should learn about the Stop Cop City movement if you haven't yet no matter where in America you live, because Atlanta is just the prototype.
Probably because Atlanta police have a decades long relationship with Israel through the Georgia International Law Enforcement exchange.
It's basically an exchange program for police with Israel. Their website is so uncanny, it has testimonials from the police chiefs
of Atlanta and Ferguson talking about how they went to Israel and were just so impressed at Israeli police's ability to
"maintain peace among diverse populations". That's the same Israeli police force that a 2021 Amnesty International report
described as "carrying out a discriminatory, repressive campaign, including sweeping mass arrests, using unlawful force against peaceful protesters
and subjecting detainees to torture and other ill treatment". Cop City will share Israel's militarized police tactics
to officers all across our great nation. I think something interesting about the longstanding bond between
Israeli and American police and military is how in parallel,
there emerged a similarly enduring solidarity between Palestinian and African-American activists.
Civil rights leaders like Malcolm X and Black Panther Party Chairman Huey Newton were staunch anti-Zionists who visited Palestine
and considered Palestinian resistance leaders among their comrades. They all understood that imperialism
was as much their problem as oppressed people within the American Empire as it was the problem of oppressed people outside of it.
And as Kristian Davis Bailey wrote for the Electronic Intifada: "the greatest internal threat to the US empire is that of a black revolution".
And this legacy still persists today: back during the Ferguson protests, I saw Palestinians giving people advice
on how to deal with tear gas over social media. And it's hard to miss how much of current support for
Palestine is coming from black American voices. So to my fellow Americans, who do you want to align with?
Comrades of civil rights leaders, or cop trainers?
So one version of this argument goes, well, aren't Jewish people indigenous to Israel?
Weren't they there first? And it doesn't work for a couple of reasons. Yes, Ethnic Jews around the world descend from the Israelites
who were violently expelled from the region by the Romans in the year 70. However, what the population was doing for the 2000 years since then
kind of matters. 'Indigenous' doesn't just refer to a place of origin, otherwise, everyone on Earth could say they're indigenous to Africa
and therefore are entitled to currently inhabited African land, which I guess Europeans think they are anyways,
but I digress. YouTuber Andrewism explains this in an excellent video on how Indigeneity refers to both one half of a colonial relationship
and to a reciprocal relationship with land. On both counts, Israeli settlers are very much not indigenous.
The state was brought about through violent colonization, making Palestinians the de facto indigenous population. And re: reciprocity with land,
While there's a long list of ecologically damaging practices by Israeli settlements, I think the most symbolically painful one is the destruction of nearly
a million olive trees--the quintessential local flora with immense cultural significance and utility-- in the name of Israeli security.
I'm so sorry. That's a real olive tree, by the way. It's a real tree! Definitely getting returned when this is done.
But it's also important to point out that Jewish people are not ethnically monolithic. For example, when Jews were expelled from the region, those who resettled
in Spain and interbred with that population became known as Sephardic Jews, many of whom migrated back to Palestine when they were expelled
during the Reconquista. But Ashkenazi Jews who resettled across Europe and Russia
didn't return in significant numbers until the modern Zionist movement. The difference was that Sephardic Jews integrated into Palestinian society--
they learned Arabic, practiced local sustainable agriculture, and built community with existing inhabitants--
whereas Zionist Ashkenazi Jews who arrived in the last 100 years or so have been attempting to replace the existing indigenous population.
I'm simplifying, but this article by an Israeli professor of Judaic studies debunks the Israeli indigeneity argument more thoroughly.
And this TikTok from writer Sam Kern explains the paper if you don't want to read it. They've been posting a ton of really good analyzes from an anti-Zionist Jewish perspective,
I highly recommend. So the claim of Indigeniety doesn't hold water, but there are more
modern versions of the Jewish homeland argument. It goes something like, the Holocaust happened, and to ensure it can never happen again,
we need a Jewish ethno-state. Which is what Israel is, right? Like, the highest tier of national rights is just default to any Jewish person,
that is the definition of a theocratic ethno-state. Now, I am so scared of anything
I say being interpreted as Holocaust denialism, so let me be perfectly clear:
Some 6 million Jews were systematically exterminated by the Nazis, and I believe it was exactly as bad, if not worse, than people say it was.
But that's not the only time something like that's happened. And as far as I'm aware, no other genocided population got an ethno-state.
Estimates of how many Romani the Nazis killed are as high as 80% of their population. Russia killed 2 million Muslims in the circus and genocide.
The Europeans who settled the Americas killed over 50 million indigenous people
within the span of 100 years, enough to literally change the Earth's climate.
Where are their ethno-states? And that's a rhetorical question, I don't think anyone should get an ethno-state.
Remember Richard Spencer? That alt-right spokesboy and Antifa punching bag? He's called Israel "the most important ethno state,
the one I turn to for guidance". I wish I had time to get more into this, but Christian Zionism is a huge thing.
And in fact, most Zionists in the United States are not Jewish but Christians, and they're generally extremely right wing and nationalistic.
There are actually a lot of places where Zionism overlaps with white fascism, and the Holocaust, as uncomfortable as it is, is one of them.
For one, there is evidence that the Zionists organizing the intake of refugees from Germany to Palestine
had some pretty eugenics-y attitudes towards Holocaust refugees. One organization complained about how
"the human material coming from Germany is getting worse and worse", and another asked whether perhaps they shouldn't help
"everyone without regard to the quality of those people" and instead prioritize
those who can be of use to Israel over those who would be "a burden". Those quotes are both from letters written in 1943--
when the exterminations were in full effect. And if that idea alone isn't bad enough,
they sent some refugees back to Germany. During the Holocaust. Besides the eugenics.
There are also some pretty shocking examples of Zionists collaborating with Nazis. The most famous one probably being Rudolf Kastner, a top official
in the Israeli Labor Party who conspired with Adolf Eichmann to exchange a train full
of personally selected friends and family to leave the country safely for the entire Jewish population of Hungary.
To learn more about Zionists who teamed up with Nazis, watch this video from the Electronic Intifada.
And while you're at it, watch this video about Israel's Holocaust survivors living in poverty today,
because that's also a thing apparently. Now, I know all of this might feel in contradiction with some people's impression of Israel as like,
the only democracy in the Middle East and super fucking progressive and stuff, right? But yet another outcome of Zionism's European roots is that today, Israeli
society suffers from some pretty serious anti-Jewish racism. A 2017 study reported that relative to the national average income,
Israeli Jews of Ashkenazi descent had incomes 31% higher, Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern or Mizrahi descent had incomes only 15% higher,
and Israeli Jews of Ethiopian descent had incomes 50% lower. I'm sure the different ethnic
groups of Jews just make different career choices, though, right? Like they do here? Many Ethiopian Jews were actually brought forcibly to Israel from Ethiopia,
and today, they form an effective underclass that faces well-documented discrimination in education, housing, employment, you name it.
As Jewish Israeli citizens. And, of course, it's worse for women; just look at the scandal of Israel giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants
birth control shots. Non consensually! There was even an Israeli Black Panther movement in the seventies, modeled
after the American one as a response to inter Jewish discrimination. And that's all just the racism.
Watch this video If you want to learn about how Israel's presentation as a bastion of queer rights in the Middle East is just imperial rainbow washing.
So unlearn this idea of Israel as an egalitarian and progressive safe haven for all Jews.
Zionism certainly asserts that, but it's just not reality. It is kind of genius, though, right?
Like, Zionist logic exploits Jewish people's legitimate desire for self-determination, by presenting the violent colonization of Palestine
as the only way to avoid being genocide themselves. It's a powerful example
of interest convergence-- when minority groups experience positive social change when their goals align with those of more powerful groups.
On the one hand, there's Jewish people who understandably want a sense of safety after centuries of European antisemitism,
as well as a connection to their ancestral land. On the other hand, there are Western imperial powers that benefit immensely from establishing an outpost in the Middle East
and having somewhere else for all the Jews they can't stop oppressing in their own countries to go. And the result is a legitimately oppressed group allying
with their oppressors to further oppress yet another group. And people weaponizing real oppression to oppress others isn't unique to Zionism,
Just look at TERFS--feminists who purport to advance the well-being of women whose logic is fundamentally based on the bigotry of trans people.
Canadian political writer Naomi Klein describes the sinister irony in how Zionism emulates
the same imperial power that in the past had oppressed Jewish people in her book, Doppelganger: "The Zionist version of justice said to Western powers,
if you could establish your empires and your settler colonial nations, through ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft,
then it is discrimination to say that we cannot. If you cleared your land of its indigenous inhabitants,
or did so in your colonies, then it is anti-Semitic to say that we cannot. It was as if the quest for equality were being reframed not as the right
to be free from discrimination, but as the right to discriminate. Colonialism framed as reparations for genocide."
The Israel-Palestine conflict is not Jewish people's fault for wanting reasonable things.
It's the fault of imperial powers exploiting them for its own benefit and the immense detriment of the Palestinian people.
The fact is, polls show most Palestinians are willing to coexist with the current Israeli population as long as it isn't under a literal apartheid state.
There is simply no evidence for widespread desire among Palestinians to remove Jewish people from their homeland.
They just want to have safety in their homeland, too.
Ah yes, the question on evert definitely not Islamophobic person's mind:
Do you condemn Hamas? Okay. Let's start with some basic fact checking. First, calling
October 7th, unprovoked is absurd. The provocation was the decades of violent colonial occupation,
and the UN's charter is pretty clear that occupation is provocation enough for an armed response.
Second, the idea that Palestinians should use nonviolent resistance completely ignores the ways in which Israel has rendered them
completely ineffective. Diplomatic peace processes have largely formalized Palestinian subordination to Israel. Like, read the Oslo Accords
and tell me with a straight face that the complete demilitarization of Palestine while the Israeli military maintains a presence in Palestinian territories
is not just colonial rule in human rights wrapping paper. And on a grassroots level, Palestinians attempts to organize protest, strikes, and other nonviolent
anti-colonial actions are reliably met with violent repression. This goes as far back as the thirties,
but more recently, the IDF murdered over 200 peaceful protesters in Gaza's 2018 Great March of Return.
Here's fact check number three: Israel- Hamas war is a bit of a misdirect. The attack on October 7th was organized and executed
by a coalition of liberation groups, which did include Hamas. But among others, it also included the PFLP and the DFLP,
which are secular Marxist-Leninist organizations. And more recently, the Israel-Hamas war has extended from Gaza to the West Bank,
which is governed by Fat7, the also secular rival to Hamas.
So if the perpetrators were more than just Hamas, and the areas targeted are governed by more than just Hamas, why is the Western media
so fixated on Hamas? Of all the resistance movements, why is the only one we're hearing about the Islamic Resistance Movement?
The short answer is that people in the West are conditioned to fear violence from Muslims, so when imperial interests need to exploit the Middle East,
they can pass it off as defensive rather than blatantly evil. Bigotries have functions,
and that's the function of Islamophobia. The OG citation for how racist Western representations of Arabs
serve empire is Edward Said's "Orientalism", but if you want something less academic and more modern,
Nazia Kazi's "Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics" is a great primer.
PRIMER. Thanks, I guess. TLDR, we're constantly bombarded by depictions
of dangerous Muslim terrorists in film, TV, political rhetoric, hell, even racist Halloween costumes.
And while a lot of Americans are aware of this enough to know that they should like, be nice to their Muslim neighbors,
many still retain a latent Islamophobia that lets them believe that things like the war on terror are anything but the mass murder of Arabs
for the sake of Western oil interests. And I'm not saying that Islamic terrorism doesn't exist,
it does. But there's also kind of a ton of Christian terrorism. There is even a pattern of Jewish ultranationalist hate crimes
committed by Israeli civilians on their Palestinian neighbors. That's terrorism, too.
But no one in the West relates Christianity or Judaism to terrorism the way they do Islam.
That connection has been deliberately cultivated for decades now. This isn't unique to Muslims;
the designation of terrorism has long been used by imperial entities to demonize anyone who dares oppose them.
The U.S. considered basically all of Black civil rights activity in the fifties and sixties terrorism,
it considered Nelson Mandela terrorist until like 2008, and now it's saying that the Yemeni Houthis who have been blocking
Israeli ships and killing exactly zero people are also terrorists. So the disingenuous narrative of unprovoked Muslim violence taps
into a very specific fear that people in countries like mine are primed to have.
And fear is a great entry point for the mass scale emotional manipulation that is required to sustain empires.
So to me, the interesting question isn't "do you condemn Hamas?", it's: "what does
'Do you condemn Hamas?' do?" What is the discursive function of this question?
Well, what it sure doesn't do is give people in a place like the United States any meaningful entry point to advocate for the safety of anyone in the region.
Israeli violence can be organized against from abroad via its partnerships with our country--
militaristically, diplomatically, economically, industrially-- but 'condemning Hamas' won't like, lead people to pressure politicians to cut ties
with Hamas, or boycott companies that support Hamas, because there is no institutional support for Hamas.
The only thing you could feasibly do is support Israel's absolute brutalization of Gaza.
That, or feel morally pure from saying 'all violence is bad' while not doing anything about any of it.
So condemning Hamas won't promote peace. But what it can do very well is leverage
Westerners' Islamophobia as a distraction from the genocide their governments are supporting. And I don't want to minimize anything,
Palestinian liberation forces did kill hundreds of civilians on October 7th, including dozens of children, and they did take hostages.
Nothing Israel hasn't done on a much, much larger scale many times over, but still, these are legitimate tragedies.
What's not a legitimate tragedy was this obviously bullshit story Biden and Bibi were peddling in the immediate aftermath
about 40 beheaded babies. This was one of many now debunked stories to come out in the early days of Gaza's
genocide that conveniently made Hamas look like a cartoonishly evil
super villain rather than freedom fighters operating in impossible conditions. And they spread like wildfire.
One post about the 40 babies thing got over 44 million impressions on Twitter. Because to the average American who spent a lifetime rationalizing his country's
nonstop aggression in the Middle East, these stories seem believable. And if that's believable, then the eradication of Hamas seems righteous.
And someone saying 'free Palestine' sounds like a heartless terrorist sympathizer. Biden knows perfectly well that Americans readiness to focus
on the exaggerated or imagined atrocities of Muslim terrorism will reliably dominate conversations about a literal ethnic cleansing.
That's why he lied. Because the headline "one Israeli infant was killed in the crossfire of an attack
by a coalition of secular and religious organizations resisting Palestine's decades long colonization" does not hit as hard
as "Islamic terror organization beheads 40 Israeli babies (because they want to kill all the Jews)".
It is the instrumentalization of Islamophobia 101: stir up programed fears, and distract from critical context.
And again, Israeli civilians did die. But like, if you were trying to explain to someone why the Holocaust was bad,
and then the only thing they responded with was: "but what about the hundreds of thousands of innocent German civilians that were killed by the allies? They bombed children!"
You wouldn't think that person is being balanced and treating all life as valuable,
you'd immediately recognize them as simping for Nazis. Not because the death of German civilians wasn't also tragic,
but because there is a difference between the death that inevitably comes out of a conflict and the large scale
systematic murder of populations for the purpose of establishing an ethno-state.
I know people don't like the Israel-Nazi comparisons, but sometimes it's just too fucking apt.
What do you want me to do? The way I see it, the only way you can center Israeli deaths in a political conversation
is if you believe their lives are simply worth more than that of Palestinians. The real grief people feel for the loss
of settler life doesn't have to blind you to which side has the material power
and will to enact a genocide. The human experience is complex, and I have seen people hold
both the tragedy and the bigger political picture simultaneously. It can be done. But the blind uptake of condemning Hamas
as a prerequisite to an acceptable opinion bulldozes the potential for any complexity in favor of a comforting affirmation
of our great nation's indisputable foreign policy: bomb the shit out of the A-rabs until they stop hating our freedom so goddamn much.
So how else can we make sense of the reality of anti-colonial violence on settlers?
I think it's just kind of the inevitable outcome of violent occupation. The typical Palestinian resistance fighters were boys
orphaned in one of the many sieges on Gaza to happen in their lifetimes. They are direct products of the violence that surrounds them.
Like, people don't do terrorism for fun. Here's another TikTok of someone explaining a research paper about it. Brutal
military occupations that bomb civilians' homes, kill their families, destroy their livelihood, and cut off access to necessities
drive people to levels of desperation that we living in relative safety in the West cannot fathom.
Israel isn't creating a safer home for its citizens by trying to eradicate Hamas;
it's ensuring the continuation of the anti-colonial violence they point to to justify their most heinous crimes against humanity.
Because short of killing them, you can't make humans stop trying to survive.
Trying to argue for the freedom of Palestinians but separating that from anti-colonial violence contradicts
the fundamental principles of Palestinian liberation, which, in addition to the right to return and self-determination, assert the right to resistance.
So please do not let your solidarity for Palestinian liberation be neutralized
by the unfortunate necessity of violence in the face of decades of brutal colonial occupation.
I do not think innocent people dying is okay, but I'm not so naive as to denounce all violence as equally immoral because I can't contend
with the reality of a world in which violence is often the default. YouTuber
Elliot Sang put it really well in a post on the topic: "If you don't like the violence, then that means you are human.
If you think disliking this violence permits you to cast judgment upon those who use it to survive, then you have no praxis.
You have discarded a genuine relationship with reality in favor of a comfortable life of abstraction.
A comfortable life of abstraction is incompatible with liberation." So what'll it be?
A comfortable life of abstraction? Or embracing the complexity of real liberation?
If you're down with the latter, I think we can finally get back to our telescopes. And if you're sitting there thinking how hypocritical it is
to condemn Israel for doing all this stuff that America has done for ages, I'm so excited for you to see where this video is going.
That was pretty intense. Let's regroup. Another deep breath. Big inhale...
Exhale... Take a moment to check in with yourself.
See if that last section made anything come up for you. I want to share a quote from Kris Archie, a Secwepemc woman
who does community facilitation work in what's known today as Canada, on the feelings that you may be experiencing right now. "When you hear the words decolonization,
white supremacy, patriarchy, or even racism, do you feel something?
Do you get a chill down your back, randomly start crossing your arms, getting tense all over your body, or even just feeling
an urge to resist? Well, good. When your body is cold, it shivers.
When it's hungry, it growls. When it's in fear, it shakes. And when it's sad, it cries.
Your body is meant to respond, whether that be physical or emotional.
And it's the same when deconstructing what you've been taught. It tells you that something is there
and that you must go through and find ways to process it." So if you found yourself activated by this video so far, that's fine.
I'd even say it's good. It's what I'm going for. But I'd also encourage you to take a little break and find some grounding.
Drink a glass of water, take a walk around the block, maybe try some breathing exercises or some stretches.
Don't worry. I'm not going anywhere. I'll be right here when you get back. Please do whatever it is that you have to do to take care of yourself in this moment.
And when you're ready, we'll start meandering our way back to astronomy.
Act 2: The Colonial Premise
So the reason I wanted to bring Palestine
into the conversation is because it offers a painfully obvious example
of a very particular way in which American universities act politically.
Don't worry, I'll get us back to the telescopes, but this will be relevant, I promise. Despite the not really that complicated nature of Israeli settler colonialism,
criticism thereof is a controversial enough stance that it illustrates a limit of academic freedom.
So what is academic freedom? The gist is that the whole point of higher education--to create knowledge
and ideally use it to better society--is undermined if scholars aren't free to study and say and teach whatever they want,
even if it's politically inconvenient to authority. Some might say, especially if it's politically inconvenient to authority.
This is why we have tenure: a status professors get where they become nearly un-fireable. Historically, academic freedom was meant to apply
in formal professional work, like research and teaching. But today it's understood to include extramural speech like public debates,
non academic writing, and social media posts. This inclusion could theoretically be disputed,
but scholars have argued that the delineation between professional and extramural speech is both unclear and unhelpful,
and the American Association of University Professors has long been operating with a definition of academic freedom that includes scholars speech as citizens,
so for our purposes today, I'm going to count both. When we hear people talk about the deterioration
of academic freedom these days, it's usually in defense of obviously bigoted professors or bad faith reactionary provocateurs,
which is why free speech on campuses is generally seen as a right wing value. And that really bums me out, for one, because academia is actually
pretty hospitable to people with obvious bigoted opinions, but also because it conveniently distracts from the actually real and very pervasive
silencing of non-bigoted but politically challenging speech. For example, anything remotely supportive of Palestinian liberation. Case in point:
Dr. Steven Salaita was a university professor with a long track record of excellent teaching and respected scholarship in his field,
until he was fired for "antisemitic" criticism of Israel. Prior to that point, he had published many academic papers and books with such
criticisms, both as their main point or as part of a broader conversation on topics like Orientalism, Islamophobia, and Arab American politics.
But he didn't get fired over his scholarly work. He got fired over tweets. He had already accepted a tenured position
at the University of Indiana and was getting ready to start his first semester there When Israel launched Operation
Protective Edge, a 2014 military campaign that resulted in the death of nearly 1500 Gazan civilians.
His tweets were honestly not that wild, he remarked on how absurd defense of Israel's action was,
expressed frustration at anti-Zionism being conflated with antisemitism, and named the inherently colonial context of the conflict.
But they sparked a huge media backlash with letters pouring in, calling for his firing, wealthy donors threatening to stop contributions, and eventually
the university rescinding his employment. He did successfully sue them over it, the ruling said that his firing was illegal and that his right to free
speech trumps the desire for a disruption free environment, but they wouldn't rehire him,
and the impact of the scandal affected his academic reputation for years to come. The unfortunate moral of Salaita's story is that a tenured professor can exercise
their legally protected right of free speech to tweet about a topic they've formally studied as a scholar and be fired for it--
academic freedom be damned. Inspired by these events, Salaita wrote the book "Uncivil Rights: Palestine
and the Limits of Academic Freedom", in which he outlines how his firing is part of a long pattern of American scholars
having their solidarity with Palestinians landing conveniently outside their protected speech.
In some instances, pro-Palestine speech is suppressed via formal institutional power, like firing or tenure denial.
For example, Norman Finkelstein, a scholar of the Holocaust and the Israel-Palestine conflict
whose parents are literally Holocaust survivors themselves, critiqued the content and rigor of Alan Dershowitz's "The Case for Israel"
in a public debate, on his personal website and eventually in a book. And yes, that Alan Dershowitz.
In response, when Finkelstein was being evaluated for tenure, Dershowitz lobbied his university to deny it,
and they did. And when tenure is denied, you don't get to try again. You have to leave. So Salaita was fired despite his tenure,
but Finkelstein's story shows us that tenure itself can be weaponized to fire someone.
There's also a whole point to be made about how universities are hiring increasingly more adjunct, part-time, or otherwise non-tenure track professors
who can be let go in response to political speech at any time through contract non-renewal, which means that even the theoretical power
of tenure to protect academic freedom is diminishing every year. But even for tenure and tenure track faculty, Salaita
and Finkelstein's firings show that free speech-ing too close to the sun is effectively grounds for termination.
Outside of explicitly institutional mechanisms like firing, Salaita argues that conditional academic freedom is also maintained
by social factors, and by social factors I do mean harassment. Interestingly, all of the examples of extensive harassment without job loss
that I found center professors who discuss Palestine in their courses specifically: Dr.
Joseph Massad at Columbia in 2004, Dr. William Robinson at UC Santa Cruz in 2009, Dr.
Lara Sheehi at George Washington University in 2022--they were all victims of months-long harassment campaigns featuring death threats,
public calls for firing, and professional ostracization, all justified by the inherent antisemitism of their anti-Zionist critiques.
I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention examples of anti Palestine academic censorship in the current moment,
like the forced disbanding of Students for Justice in Palestine at Brandeis University, the ousting of Harvard President
Claudine Gay, and the complete non reaction to former IDF soldiers attacking pro-Palestine student protesters with chemical weapons at Columbia.
Salaita highlights an ironic feature of the discourse disavowing these pro-Palestine scholars
by comparing the way their "anti-Semitism" is positioned as the REAL threat to civil discussion and safe campuses,
and therefore silencing them in fact PRESERVES academic freedom, and the unfortunate phenomenon of white people who hijack conversations
about racism by centering the complete non-problem of reverse racism. And while some of the speech suppressing disavowal comes from the general public,
it's worth noting that plenty of it comes from inside the victims' own institutions. And that's not a coincidence. That
a pro-Palestine professor likely has many colleagues who will vocally oppose them isn't just because that's how most people would act,
because the makeup of any university isn't a representative slice of society. If an organization like a university has whatever values,
the people within that organization are generally going to share those values, both because organizations preferentially accept people who align with their values
and because socialization on the job pressures people to conform. A handy outcome of this process
is that institutions can rely on social pressure to help silence the few dissenters who make it through the homogenizing gatekeeping.
I'm going to speak to how this social phenomenon manifests in astronomy in a bit, but the point I want is to land this section on
is that the experiences of Salaita and others like him reveal that academic freedom-- a central tenet of the idealized,
objective, apolitical, pure pursuit of knowledge dream that higher education sells-- is kind of bullshit.
Criticism of your country's political allies is exactly the kind of inconvenient to authority scholarship that the ideal of academic freedom
and the existence of tenure is supposed to protect. And while none of the scholars I've mentioned have been punished for criticizing Israel in their formal academic research,
they have been very clearly and consistently been made examples of for sharing effectively the same information in classrooms and on public platforms.
The general point that academic freedom is not meaningfully guaranteed is an important one,
I'm sure this isn't the only topic that gets suppressed, but for my argument today, I'm more concerned with the specificity
of Palestine because there is no parallel story of academics losing their jobs for posting pro-Zionist takes on social media.
There's no professional backlash to scholars publicly arguing against Palestinian liberation. There's no mass outrage at faculty teaching
anti-Arab hate when they speak positively of Israel in classes. People are really desperate
to make both sides arguments out of Israel and Palestine, but when it comes to academics' free speech, it really only goes one way.
Salata argues that this bias isn't a bug, but a feature, saying: "In barring me,
the trustees also banished a set of ideas it considered threatening,
while codifying others it finds appealing. The body of the dissident scholar personifies
a breach of institutional virtue. He is thus banished from entry as both
physical object and intellectual subject." So to me, Salaita's argument is unambiguous:
universities can and do further particular political agendas. So what is that agenda and why is it so invested in silencing anti-Zionist speech?
Like, what is the institutional value in American universities that is driving this comically lopsided manifestation of academic freedom?
And what does any of this have to do with telescopes?
So something I intentionally left out about the Slater
scandal is that he wasn't a professor of Middle Eastern studies; he was fired from a Department of American Indian studies.
He certainly has done lots of scholarship on the Middle East, but he has experience in both, and his work is often interdisciplinary.
His doctoral thesis, for example, was on interrelated discourses of colonization in North America and Palestine.
And if it doesn't make sense to you why those disciplines would have some overlap, you've got to start paying more attention, because even with modern
geopolitical alliances aside, Israel has a whole lot in common with the United States. Namely that they're both settler colonial projects.
Both started with British colonizers facilitating the settlement of a largely European population that eventually rebelled onto inhabited land.
Both were justified by biblical arguments about a people chosen by God destined to bring progress and civilization to a land filled with barbaric heathens.
Both resulted in the genocidal elimination of a vast majority of the original population to make room for settlements,
and most important, for our discussion of academia, both their colonial interests are protected by institutions of higher education. Here's
Salaita again: "Any cursory review of the history of American universities shows that academic freedom isn't universally accessible.
The suppression of blackness and indigeniety predates the purge of Palestine, and in many ways, contextualizes and sustains it."
We already talked about the fight for Black liberation's long history of solidarity with Palestinians,
so it follows that the two might have similar challenges re suppression in academia. Just look at Angela Davis: in the seventies,
she got fired from a professorship and spent a year in jail for a murder she didn't commit because of her radical Black feminist communist politics,
and in recent years, she's gotten civil rights awards rescinded because of her solidarity work with Palestine.
But since this video is ostensibly about telescopes in Hawaii, I'm more interested in the indignity part of that quote and how its suppression
contextualizes and sustains that of Palestine. And to understand the suppression of indigeniety in academia,
we have to learn about land grant universities. In 1862, our tallest president ever signed something called the Morril Act,
which took 30,000 acres of stolen indigenous land and distributed it among state governments.
The states were encouraged to sell, trade and develop these land grants to fund new public universities that would teach and conduct research
in military science and engineering, agriculture and other disciplines necessary for the growth of the colonial settlement.
In this way, land grant universities had a particular purpose: unlike the more traditional higher education emphasis
on a liberal arts curriculum, land grant universities were formed specifically to foster expertise that materially serves empire.
And like, I realized those words, "to serve empire", sound very dramatic, very Star Wars,
I know. But when you build a school on stolen land that teaches how to build a new society
on the mass graves of another one, what else am I supposed to call it? I mean this very literally.
UC Berkeley, my alma mater, is a land grant university that was born out of the state's College of Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts.
It was established on 160 acres of stolen Ohlone land in 1866,
the same year of the nearby Three Knolls Massacre, in which settlers killed 40 of the Yahi people amid the 30 year California genocide.
But go Bears, right?? The body of one of the Yahi was actually used as a subject of study by the UCB
anthropology and medical programs to horrifying acclaim, and the remains were only
just repatriated to the descendants of a nearby tribe in 2000. So the premise of land grant universities is pretty fucking heinous,
but their contemporary influence is more than just their colonial roots. In 2014, the Association of Public Land Grant Universities
put out a statement condemning participants of a pro-Palestine academic boycott of Israeli universities that spoke at length about critical projects
the boycott would stifle, hilariously including "improving health and wellbeing across the globe".
Ironically, much of the APLU and others' condemnation of the boycott was based in free speech arguments, as if there isn't an abundance of evidence
that academic freedom in American universities is custom fit around the sacrosanctity of Zionism.
Notably, the statement did not mention the name of the orgs participating in the boycott, any information on the name or nature of the boycott, or even the word Palestine.
Because that's how colonial institutions have to respond to anti-colonial sentiments: not by engaging with it in good faith.
not by starting a dialogue, not even by acknowledging it, but by patently rejecting its existence and castigating those who don't fall
in line. Like the violent establishment of land grant universities in the past, or the firing and harassment of academics who expressed support for Palestine
today, the contemporary APLU responds to anti-colonial dissent by just pushing into the world a version of reality where it doesn't exist.
Settler colonial institutions are going to protect modern investments in settler colonialism, and that requires promoting the image
that settler colonialism isn't still a problem. Also, I don't want to let non-land grant universities off the hook. Like,
Salaita's whole firing scandal was at a land grant, but Finkelstein's, for example, wasn't. But land grants make up enough of the big research universities
in the United States that they help set standards for other schools that want to be competitive, so even non-literally colonial universities will often behave colonially.
You can see this in Israeli universities as well: Ilan Pappe, an Israeli scholar who wrote a ton of books on Palestine,
was effectively pushed out of his job at the University of Haifa and left the country entirely due to the abuse he got.
And a former student of Pappe's while he was still in Haifa, wrote his dissertation on the Tantoura massacre, in which hundreds
of Palestinian villagers were violently executed for no reason. And in response, he was punished by the university, sued by Haganah veterans, and the archives
he based his research on were sealed off from the public. Academic freedom my ass. So while land grant universities give us a very straightforward example
for thinking about colonial institutions, their political functions are not unique.
I learned about land grant universities from a book called "A Third University is Possible" by La Paperson, which I highly recommend
for any academic interested in learning more about decolonization. As a quick aside, I am starting a virtual book club on my Patreon
once this video comes out and this is going to be the first book we read together. More information in the description below if you're interested in that.
Unfortunately, decolonization has been seriously co-opted as a buzzword in bullshit academic
discourse over the last few years, mostly via toothless land acknowledgments
and maybe some pontificating about indigenous knowledge. But something I really appreciate about Paperson's discussion of decolonization is how grounded
it is not in symbolic gestures at inclusion of people with indigenous identities, but the tangible material ways
institutions of higher education are intertwined with active colonial projects.
"The politics of land grant institutions directs us to think about the work of school beyond curriculum and pedagogy, beyond knowledge production.
Universities are land grabbing, land transmogrifying, land capitalizing machines. Universities are giant machines attached to other machines:
war machines, media machines, governmental and non-governmental policy machines.
Decolonization is about the steam and pistons, the waterworks, the groundworks, the investments, the emplacements,
the institutional, governmental, capitalistic rhizomatics of the university." I love how palpable that language of machinery is:
the land transmogrifying, the steam and pistons. It really helps me to think of a university in terms
of what it functionally does rather than just what it claims to contribute to the world.
In the last section, we saw how, functionally, universities in the States bend the rules of academic freedom to maintain an unspoken consensus
that Israel's violence on Palestinians is beyond reproach. Remember how none of those professors got fired or harassed over
talking about Palestine in their formal academic work and how they got fired or harassed instead when they used their expertise
to comment on current events in front of students or public audiences? Universities protected their academic freedom
so long as they kept their decolonial critiques contained to the publish or perish circlejerk that is academia.
But as soon as they stepped into the realm of actually doing revolutionary political action, even if it was just
that first step of informing the masses, they were silenced. But this land grant stuff shows us
that Palestine is just the canary in the colonial coal mine. The US doesn't randomly have beef with Palestinians because they like Debke
and maqluba, it's because they are current colonial subjects. As Salaita pointed out in one of his career-ending tweets: "Israel's
bombardment of Gaza provides a necessary impetus to reflect on the genocides that accompanied the formation of the United States".
And I would totally agree with him, but I'd actually take it a step further. Israel's bombardment of Gaza provides a necessary impetus to reflect
on the ONGOING settler colonial projects of the United States. Because universities have gotten really good at reflecting
on the genocides of the past while simultaneously protecting contemporary colonial interests.
We can write papers about historic atrocities and do land acknowledgments, but we can't advocate publicly against ongoing colonial violence.
And Israel isn't the only place perpetuating colonial violence. The US does it all the time! Like rerouting an oil pipeline
that's too dangerous to pass by an American city so that it goes past an Indian reservation instead. Or clearing a forest used as an indigenous burial site to make space
for a police training complex that will teach urban warfare tactics. Or building an 18 story, five acre telescope on a mountain
that is sacred to yet another colonized population, in order to make some graphs, about space
with smaller error bars.
So I think we have enough context now that I can just come out and say the thesis of this video: the plan to build TMT on Mauna Kea,
as well as the building of the telescopes that preceded it, is inherently colonial.
Hawaii is a settler society where the self-determination of the native population that was nearly genocided out of existence
is secondary to the utility their land brings to the United States, primarily as a military outpost, but also whatever else it can be useful for.
At one point that was plantations, today it's generally tourism, but on Mauna Kea, it *is* astronomy.
The land the telescopes are on make them inseparable from the colonial power that controls that land.
And this dynamic is underscored by the consistency of objections to their building by Indigenous voices.
And here is the really hard to swallow part: any benefit astronomers careers gain
from the use of telescopes on that land comes at the direct cost of indigenous people's alienation from it.
If you think I'm being unfair because Hawaii's colonization already happened and building one more telescope doesn't change anything,
you're still paying more attention to made up things like property laws and the American government than the material conditions of people's access and relationship to land.
Calling the police to arrest native elders who are just standing on their land so we can build another
telescope is not dissimilar to Israel bombing the shit out of Palestinians just living on their land so it can build another settlement.
And if you think I'm being dramatic by comparing genocide in Palestine to building a telescope, then you're still paying more attention to the purported intention of astronomers
than the long standing, violent, exploitative and still present colonial institutions that grant them power.
Colonization is an ongoing process, and the difference between Hawaii and Palestine is that in the former,
there aren't enough indigenous people left to pose an existential threat to settlers, and the latter, the indigenous population is still the slight majority.
Or at least they still were as of this 2018 report. Honestly, this year might tip it.
And if you think I'm exaggerating the connection between the two, please remember that the United States government is involved
in both far off places for exactly the same reason: their use as military outposts, one in the Middle East and one in the Pacific.
That is the joint cause of both of these conflicts today: the geopolitical interests of Western imperialism. This is why
you might have seen those multi-nation calls for liberation recently: Free Palestine, Free Sudan,
Free Congo, Free Haiti, Free Hawaii, and beyond-- not as separate issues, but as different interconnected manifestations of the same problem.
Like civil rights activist and Tupac's godmother, Assata Shakur, said: "Any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned
about other people's freedom as well. Each time one of imperialism's tentacles is cut off, we are closer to liberation."
So that's the perspective I have of the TMT conflict today: a weirdly nerdy tentacle of imperialism.
But I didn't come into astronomy with that perspective. In fact, when I started grad school, getting to travel to Hawaii and use
telescopes on Mauna Kea was probably the thing I was most excited about. I literally chose the program I did because it had so much access
to some of the best telescopes on Earth. University of California is a managing partner of the Keck telescopes,
for example, which means a huge chunk of all their observing time is reserved solely for people from UC schools, which is why I got to use them so much.
They're also one of the few member institutions of TMT and one half of the original design team,
which means that when protests were going on, I wasn't just vaguely in the field of astronomy, I was in a department that had a vested interest in the project success.
So between my experiences traveling to Hawaii to do observing work, spending several weeks at the scientists facility on the summit of Mauna Kea
and the nearby town of Hilo, as well as attending various conferences centered on specific Mauna Kea telescopes, and studying five years as an astro phd
at a TMT member institution, I was in the belly of the fucking beast.
And from those experiences, it is abundantly clear to me that the view of TMT as a continuation of America's colonial legacy
in Hawaii is not a mainstream perspective in the field. I'm going to try in as general and unlitigable way as possible
to describe the perspectives I did see across these spaces. Broadly speaking, there were three stances people took.
The first, actually acknowledging the inhumanity of the decision to deploy the cops on Mauna Kea protectors, was the most uncommon by a long shot.
I saw this from only a handful of people, mostly grad students, usually through things like social media posts, open letters, or mentioning
Hawaiian sovereignty in a science talk that uses Mauna Kea data. I can't give specific examples of the ways in which I saw people
with this perspective experience professional retaliation because I don't want to get sued, but I'll just vaguely gesture
at that whole section about academic freedom from earlier and say... it's not NOT like that.
Seriously, reading Salaita's book after this experience with TMT was uncanny.
The second stance, which was slightly more common than the first, but still only expressed by a minority of people, was vehemently pro-TMT.
And I don't want to say that everyone who was super jazzed about the telescope is a horrible person, but like, some of the worst
human beings I have met in my life were in this category. Can't sue me for that!
For real, though, this group expressed different interpretations of the same colonial premise
I've been talking about this whole video in their support of building TMT on Mauna Kea. The slightly more charitable version of this
take was that the Mauna Kea protectors are anti-science. As I've talked about in numerous videos before,
Physicists and astronomers tend to see themselves as neutral observers who can explain reality objectively
and provide great value to the world through the foundational knowledge they produce about the universe. So when Hawaiians started getting in the way of TMT construction,
they were really getting in the way of this most noble and pure goal of understanding humanity's very existence.
I know I might sound like I'm joking, but like, dead ass this was some people's sincere argument.
Like, some people really didn't catch the irony of their self-perception as neutral, contextless
observers of nature requiring the construction of a 20 story building and the defense of a police force to do that observing.
And this isn't new; remember Jeffries calling Hawaiians unsophisticated and backwoods for opposing his precious project?
'Ignorant natives' is such a cartoonishly reflexive colonial science trope at this point, and I honestly can't believe I saw it to the extent I did.
And I can't help but compare this anti-science characterization of Mauna Kea protectors to the unfortunately
ubiquitous characterization of pro-Palestine people as antisemitic. In both cases, a group is designating themselves the representatives
of something as broad as science or Judaism, and saying that anyone who opposes their violence opposes the thing
they say they represent, and only bad people would oppose that right. And of course, I think this is a bullshit take
either way; native Hawaiians aren't inherently anti-science any more than Palestinians are inherently anti-Semitic.
It doesn't matter who it's for, or what's the reason, they both just don't want their colonization to continue.
The significantly less charitable version of the attempted take was that the Mauna Kea protectors were a dangerous threat
to the safety of innocent astronomers. You know, just like the Zionist propaganda that Israel's regular carpet
bombing of Gaza is defensive because Palestinians are just inherently a violent and hateful threat to people who love peace.
The scales of violence are different, for sure, but either way, the unambiguously disempowered
colonial subject is the one being labeled 'dangerous'. And I want to be perfectly clear, the Mauna Kea protectors
at no point posed any sort of danger to astronomers. One former system specialist at one of the telescopes
that was evacuated in 2019 described the evacuation saying: "they chose to close down for fear of protesters who were unarmed and nonviolent".
And this is consistent with all the coverage I saw at the time: completely peaceful demonstrators standing, picketing,
chanting, maybe handcuffing themselves to some objects. But despite their persistent pacifism, they were met with armed police
and forced arrests. And I don't even want to frame it as like, they were righteous for being nonviolent
and that's why bringing out the police was wrong. It's more that the Mauna Kea protectors were objectively more in danger
than the astronomers the police acted on behalf of ever were. Again, it's not specific to Hawaii:
colonial projects will wield state power while simultaneously decrying the people they occupy as the real danger.
Like those who buy into justified defense arguments on the genocide of Gaza, the many astronomers who bought into narratives of dangerous protesters
ultimately helped obscure the actual power dynamics of the situation. And whether the pro-TMT folks were taking the "we must advance scientific ideals"
route or the "we must protect ourselves from barbarism" route, they always framed the conflict in the same way:
the question of TMT was never, "should we build there?", it was always, "how do we get away with it?"
How do we make them let us build it? How do we make this not look so bad?
I didn't hear a single person whose take wasn't explicitly anti-colonial so much as entertain the idea of building TMT somewhere else.
I did hear a lot of conversations brainstorming what PR moves could soften TMT is increasingly negative reputation.
Maybe we could name another instrument after a Hawaiian word or find a celebrity that might counter
Jason Momoa and Dwayne Johnson's public support of the Hawaiians. You know, superficial bullshit like that.
Back then, when I was encountering these horrible perspectives in real time, I kind of just thought the people who held them were like,
specifically or uniquely deplorable. But today, with the knowledge I have of how institutions of higher education
function within an imperialist capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal society,
I can see that they were just falling in line with the unspoken premise of colonial universities: when it comes to anti-colonial dissent,
do not engage. Demonize, vilify, belittle, undermine, suppress, silence,
but do not, under any circumstance, engage. And we know why, right?
University of California is a land grant and has a stake in TMT. University of Hawaii is also a land grant and has benefited from being
the facilitator of telescopes on Mauna Kea since they started putting telescopes on Mauna Kea. Of course these universities
have no shortage of scientists who will readily suppress, oppose or otherwise neutralize dissent of colonial projects.
Institutionally, they are as uninterested in engaging with living, breathing victims of American colonialism as they are
uninterested in protecting the academic freedom of anti-Zionist scholars. And these institutions don't
even have to try that hard to maintain their colonial premise; as long as they're filled with predominantly white people who grew up in
settler societies and consequently have been socialized to not see themselves as beneficiaries of violence that happens in far off places and times,
the colonial premise will perpetuate itself. So that's the second perspective astronomers had about TMT.
And I think that's enough to make the case that astronomy doesn't just benefit from colonialism, it helps sustain it.
But like the explicitly anti-colonial perspective, this implicitly
pro-colonial perspective was not voiced by *that* many people. The vast majority of people I interacted with were actually in a third group.
And I would make that joke here that the third perspective was some secret third thing, but I can't make that joke because in my experience, the average
astronomer's reaction to the TMT conflict was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. [mood is dramatically shifted by some tribal sounding women singing]
An Emotional Coda
So I don't generally talk about like, my identity or whatever on this channel, because I feel like
research and logic is going to resonate better with what I understand to be
the epistemic sensibilities of my target audience. But because my family is from a place
that was also colonized by white people, it feels relevant today. So my family's from Libya.
Not Lebanon. Not Liberia. Not Bolivia. Libya. Like,
do people remember who this guy was? Libyan, like, like in Back to the Future! ["Who?" "Who do you think??
The Libyans!!!"] That's us! And something about Libya is that it's been pretty
consistently exploited by the West for the last hundred years or so. Italians did a whole colonial genocide, complete with concentration
camps and foreign settlers, then the allies occupied it for a while, until a brief moment of something
resembling peace and prosperity before neo-colonial oil interests came back around to fuck it all up again.
This is why my primary cultural reference point for armed Arab anti-colonial resistance fighters
isn't like, 'ohh scary terrorists', it's the utterly incomprehensible bravery of Omar
al-Mukhtar and his soldiers in that scene from Lion of the Desert where they, like, tie their knees together so they can't run away
from fighting the undeniably more powerful Italian colonial army.
In hindsight, I'm glad I had that context, but when I was younger, I was like, MOM why do we have to watch old movies
about war all the time??? And being Libyan didn't just teach me about colonial histories that inevitably repeat; the legacy of colonization is
in the epigenetics of my DNA, the dysfunction of my first gen family, the inherent contradiction
of my very identity as an Arab American. What am I supposed to do with
that?? I'm not going to get into the intergenerational trauma of it all, but if you know, you know. And if you don't know, I don't know,
go watch Encanto or something? But this is why Palestinian solidarity has always been a part of my politics.
Libya and Palestine are two very different places, but as far as a lot of Americans are concerned, we're all just
a bunch of A-rabs. Like, the other day, I was out wearing a Palestinian kuffiya, and someone tells me, a Libyan, to go back to Syria.
We're all just in the same vague terrorist bucket, so our political struggles feel shared.
The protests I grew up going to for Palestine or Iraq felt basically
the same as when we were going to protests for Libya during the Arab Spring, because it's the same imperial bullshit messing things up over there
and it's the same Islamophobic bullshit we're going to feel in the backlash over here. So I grew up around diasporic descendants
of people who survived colonization, and I share that because it was the perspective I came to astronomy with.
It was the lens through which I watched the TMT conflict unfold. And how I feel about Libya, about Palestine,
it's how I intuitively felt for Hawaii. It's another degree removed, sure, but colonized recognize colonized.
The big difference for me was that when it came to Hawaii's colonization, as an astronomer, I was in the special population of people
who got to benefit from it in blissful ignorance of the blood that benefit was soaked in. Which brings me back to the third response
astronomers had to TMT, the one that the vast majority of people opted for: complete and utter disengagement.
Sitting in silence when the more aggressively pro-TMT people made dehumanizing remarks about the Mauna Kea protectors. Avoiding
eye contact and awkwardly changing the subject when I try to talk about it. Continuing to travel to Hawaii, and use the telescopes, and publish the papers,
but ultimately refusing to participate in the political conversation. I know this probably sounds like I'm just going to start
shaming people for not caring about problems that they have the privilege to not think about most of the time,
and I *am* doing that. But I'm more interested in like, why people do that.
I spent SO much time back in grad school trying to understand why so many of my colleagues who I knew to be reasonable and intelligent
seemed so wholly unperturbed at what our field was doing.
And in recent months I found myself asking the exact same question about Palestine.
You can literally watch the genocide our tax dollars are funding in real time over social media--
how could anyone possibly still be apathetic? So here is my best shot at trying to understand why people
turn away from the realities of imperialism in science or otherwise.
Let me tell you about two conversations I had back in my astronomy days with, let's call them Alice and Bob. For quantum mechanics!
Alice, who I've spent hours imagining decolonial science futures with, was one of the most vocal supporters of the Mauna Kea protectors
I knew in astronomy. I asked them in 2019 what they thought would have to happen for the field to make things right in Hawaii,
and they said something like, I don't know, but I do think that the first step would be for astronomers to actually feel
sad for what our actions have done and the history that enabled them. I shared that idea in a different conversation
I had shortly thereafter with Bob, who I would lovingly characterize as a well-intentioned white guy.
And his response was something like, well, yes, it's very sad what's happening, but making everybody sad about it at work wouldn't be very professional, At first,
these seem like opposite perspectives, but I think they're two sides of the same truth.
Beginning to fix the damage done by astronomers on Mauna Kea would require something that's been defined outside
side the boundary of scientific professionalism: feeling sad.
The difference is just that Alice prioritized repairing colonial harm, and Bob prioritized maintaining colonial norms of professionalism.
Collectively, they made the point that Salaita did in one of those tweets that got him fired:
"The first thing colonization asks of its beneficiaries is to suppress their capacity for empathy."
And in the past few months of a genocide going on, Alice has been at actions for Palestinian solidarity with me,
and Bob, despite knowing what's going on and theoretically having the same opinion on it as me, has been completely unengaged.
Again, I don't want to just shit on Bob because he's not behaving how I'd behave, I want to understand him, because I think there's a silent majority of Bobs--people
who self-perceived neutrality in practice just perpetuates the status quo-- that could be a really powerful addition to our social movements.
But in order to ally the Bobs of the world, we need to help them make the jump from intellectualizing
their politics to embodying them, to living them. I believe that jump lies and the emotional experience of things
like sadness and pain and grief, things manly, rational scientists
aren't supposed to indulge in, especially not on the job. And I realize I might sound like I'm treating people
as political pawns or something, but real talk, I think the condition of being 'a Bob' requires
a certain like, socio-spiritual deficiency that they would massively benefit from confronting within themselves,
so really it's a win-win. For more on that point, see this excellent piece by Dr. Aisha Khan about how like, privilege hurts your soul.
Bell hooks makes basically the same argument from a feminist lens in her treatise on men and masculinity,
"The Will to Change". Her thesis is, the reason male violence-- on women, on other men, on themselves, is as much of a problem as it is, is
because men are conditioned from birth to cut themselves off from the entire range of human emotion except anger,
which they are taught to release through dominating others. And the reason this conditioning is so pervasive
is that it makes men more ready to accept being exploited in their workplaces and shipped off to war.
That's how you get the term imperialist- capitalist-whitesupremacist-patriarchy;
they're all connected, from the scale of systems to spirit. Her whole argument centers on this point that life as a man
under patriarchy atrophies the innately human ability to empathize,
and while hooks focuses on how this leads to dehumanizing views of women,
I think it's basically the same phenomenon as how people internalize dehumanizing views
of their empire's victims. How we're able to tune out the suffering we know exists all over the world that's attached to our lives.
Normalizing the pain of the other, to alleviate the pain inherent in subjugating an other.
I think this is what I see in astronomers who didn't engage with TMT stuff, and the people today who are tuning out Gaza.
Not an active unwillingness or animosity, but a default mode where the plight of colonized people
just doesn't emotionally register as something that should matter to them.
And it's not just men, to be clear. Let's remember that women can adopt patriarchal emotional norms, too,
especially those trying to make it in historically male- dominated fields like astrophysics, or whose idea of feminism is the equal right to dominate people the way men do.
But man or otherwise, it seemed like there was this protective emotional seal keeping people in little colonial cocoons
where they didn't have to feel sad about the things that happen around their work.
And individually, those people may in fact have been protecting themselves from the real psychological stress
of contending with the sources and consequences of their privilege, but collectively,
what they're protecting are the colonial interests of the institutions they work for. That's literally why so many places in the United States
are making it illegal for schools to teach anything about racism if it might make white students feel uncomfortable;
because emotions-- even bad ones--are information, and the feeling of discomfort that comes with realizing you've been complicit
in systems of oppression, if confronted instead of avoided, is the information that can lead you to do something else.
This is why power will tell you, you don't have to bother yourself with THEIR pain. Doesn't matter if it's Hawaiians or Palestinians or women
or disabled people or whoever-- when bad things happen to THEM, it's not really your business.
Don't worry about it! You deserve to absolve yourself from the tearing of the soul
that inevitably occurs when you realize your fate is tied up with those who have suffered and continue to suffer for your benefit.
What would you do about it anyways? You're busy with other things. Like writing astronomy papers! We need more astronomy papers! [I can't say
it with a straight face] we need more astronomy papers! So humanity can do progress! You want to use our fancy new telescope?
The unmatched location gives it a 15% increase in observing efficiency!!!
Have you heard the phrase the banality of evil? It comes from Jewish American political thinker Hannah Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem,
in which she reports on the trial of one of the main architects of the Holocaust. She famously observed how rather than one of the expected
extremes of shame or malice, Eichmann demonstrated ambivalence. He believed he simply wasn't responsible, that he was just "doing his job".
This will probably sound extreme to some people, but Eichmann just "doing his job" and therein architecting a genocide
is how I make sense of scientists and engineers and programmers who refuse to engage with the social and political contexts of their work.
Docile scientists, who focus on their research and don't ask questions, are a cornerstone of empire building.
Astronomy's like, critical mass of bobs who will reliably not question
the implications of just "doing their job" is what makes it possible for the few actively evil people who definitely exist
to shepherd the field into a profitable but evil direction. And this isn't just the case for astronomy;
shout out to the STEM nerds developing racist algorithms, gig-ifying new industries, designing war machines, or otherwise just "doing their jobs".
I'll be honest, it can be really lucrative to work ethically dubious STEM jobs.
I sincerely can understand how one could justify it. But I couldn't fucking do it.
I couldn't just "do my job". I couldn't listen to protesters outside my office window
begging us to recognize the sanctity of a colonized mountain and sit there analyzing data I took on said colonized mountain.
I know most of my colleagues have long been conditioned to block out those voices, but I haven't been.
I have the cultural context and emotional capacity to feel for them, to understand and empathize with their position,
and I couldn't just turn that off in order to write a paper. And I cannot tell you how gaslit I felt constantly being surrounded by people who could.
At one point I tried telling someone who at the time I considered a mentor that I thought I might be depressed because I hadn't
been able to get much work done during the first few months of it. And their response was literally, we all get
sad sometimes, but you have to learn how to compartmentalize. I got the same message again and again.
Put your feelings aside. Keep your head down. Fall in line. It was like, in order to function,
I had to cut off the part of myself that was capable of feeling sadness. Which is exactly how hooks describes patriarchal emotional wounding,
severing parts of your humanity and compartmentalizing them such that they won't challenge power.
But the part of me that's a Libyan person who can intuitively relate to colonial struggles around the world
isn't a separate thing from the part of me that's an astronomer. I am one whole person, not a collection of parts organized to suit empire.
And in the end, I left. I'm not an astronomer anymore. It is not my job. I got my Ph.D.
and pivoted the fuck away. This wasn't the only reason I left, there are a lot of those,
but TMT was undeniably the final nail in the coffin of that career.
Because I refuse to kill the part of me that can feel for people, even if that sometimes means feeling too
sad to maintain superhuman levels of productivity. And it does kind of suck because there's so much to feel sad about.
I'm sad that people who persisted this long under US colonization are watching
their colonizers desecrate their land with something as stupid as a telescope.
That Americans treat Hawaii like a tropical playground tourist attraction, and not a militarized
colonial settlement. That colonial settlements exist anywhere. I'm sad for the indigenous people in the United States, Canada, Australia,
New Zealand and beyond whose safety and self-determination is an afterthought to the comfort and desires of their settlers. That tens of millions
of Indigenous people died so that these nations could exist. That Palestinians are still dying so that Israel can exist.
That they've been dying for a hundred years for the same reason. I'm sad when I hear the old man giving a speech at a protest for Palestine
outline its history in the violence wrought on him, on his father, on his grandfather.
That a little girl I see at the same protest reminds me of when I was her age, and I wonder if she'll still be going to these when she's my age.
I'm sad that they and other Arabs in the US and all over the world live in fear of the racist
and Islamophobic violence that inevitably accompanies these events, and that our Jewish neighbors live in fear of the corresponding rise
in anti-Semitism. That Arabs and Jewish people in the diaspora have been literally murdered
for being seen as symbols of the conflict in the eyes of bigots. I'm sad that so many Jewish people bravely doing the work of dismantling Zionism
within themselves will inevitably face alienation from their own communities. That their beautiful religion
is being exploited to justify gruesome acts of inhumanity. That fucking Netanyahu cares more about using his people
as political pawns than their safety. I'm sad for every single person who was affected by October 7th
in the multitude of ways in which people were affected by it. I'm sad for every life lost at the hand of Western imperialism.
That the British Empire ever existed. That the American military industrial complex is straight up destroying the world.
I'm sad that I was born in the United States while so many people I care about live in countries that mine exploits. That I've spent as much energy
as I have buying into the bullshit ideals of this place.
I'm sad that I hate astronomy now. That I dedicated ten years of my life to a field that finds the sovereignty
of indigenous people less valuable than a 15% increase in observing efficiency.
I am sad for all those things. I feel so, so deeply for those who carry any of that pain.
And the only people I'm not extending my empathy to are those who, like so many of my former colleagues,
refuse to examine what they feel when they've been confronted with reminders that the safety and opportunities they experience in life
come at the cost of a literal fucking genocides. Edward Said, the scholar I mentioned earlier who wrote Orientalism,
is maybe the best example of how dangerous it is to be an academic challenging colonialism.
He didn't just get assassination threats-- his office was firebombed. He was the single professor
on Columbia's campus whose office had bulletproof windows. That's how immediately under threat he was for being a Palestinian
public intellectual critiquing Western imperialism. I want to end with a quote of his that really captures my feelings
about all the "apolitical" academics I've known: "Nothing, in my view, is more reprehensible than those habits of the mind
in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position
which, you know, to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political,
you are afraid of seeming controversial, you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate.
Your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream.
Someday, you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship. For an intellectual,
these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize and finally kill a passionate
intellectual life, it is the internalization of such habits." Even under the threat of death,
he didn't turn away from his responsibility as a scholar. But that's just Palestinians for you.
We scientists could learn a lot from them. Mahmoud Darwish
is considered Palestine's national poet. I've been revisiting a lot of his work recently, because what's better
for dealing with the big emotions of wartime than poetry? And I wanted to share one that I've been coming back to a lot.
I'll read it in Arabic because it's poetry and the sound is part of the point, but I'll translate on screen.
It's called "Fakkir bi Ghayrak", or "Think of Others".
Something interesting about Darwish, even though he was just a writer and a poet--"just" a writer and a poet--
he wrote Palestine's 1988 Declaration of Independence. And I feel like that really says something
about the national spirit of a people, doesn't it?
Praxis Postscript
[music sounds like a soviet Anthem, but in arabic--it's giving middle eastern tankie] If you're feeling kind of sad now,
good. I did that on purpose. Not just for the hell of it, but because we have to *feel* things
in order to be compelled to *do* things and I make these videos because I want people to *do* things.
But doing things is hard! Especially when you're tired. Or busy! Or tired. Or wouldn't know where to start anyways. Or tired!
Everybody is so tired. But I don't think it has to be like that. Advocating for the changes you want to see in the world can be done on a small and sustainable scale,
and it can, in fact bring a lot of great things to your life, from purpose and gratification to community and new experiences.
I get into that perspective in another video I made which tries to operationalize activism like, autistic wikiHow style.
The key is to remember that it's not what single thing you can do to change the world,
it's, what can you do to help people who have already been working on it? A topical example I love
is the emergent counter media machine disseminating news about Gaza. Israel has tried very hard to cut them off from the world,
but through a combination of wildly courageous journalists documenting events, resourceful innovators
setting up solar powered charging stations in tents, allies with money abroad buying and donating electronic SIM cards, and people around the world
working to, like, algorithmically boost Palestinian voices, a de-centralized counter media machine has emerged strong enough
to meaningfully challenge the entirety of mainstream Western media. That's fucking incredible.
So I'm just going to go through a laundry list of anti-settler colonial praxis suggestions,
starting with some that are specific to astronomers and academics, and then some that are more general.
And hopefully it'll help you find some way you can plug into bigger, meaningful efforts if you are so inclined.
If you are, I invite you to think of just one thing you could try doing this week, do it and see how it feels.
Maybe leave a comment below if you feel like sharing. Do the engagement for me, please and thank you.
For my astronomers, I'm just going to point you in the direction
of this white paper from the 2020 Decadal, written by a collaboration of native Hawaiian scientists and allies that gives recommendations
as to how the field can stop being so goddamn colonial. A major point is that we have to seek actual consent to build TMT on Mauna Kea,
and that means being okay with a no deal outcome. We can't build the telescope while a police force suppresses
indigenous dissent of it and then just make vague gestures at respecting Hawaiian culture without being colonial asshats.
The paper gives additional recommendations to mitigate imperial exploitation as a field,
as well as some suggestions that are implementable by individual departments. Besides, what's in the white paper, my main suggestion is
maybe just don't use the telescopes on Mauna Kea? Literally just don't use them. We're in a golden era of survey based science with more astronomical data
than the entire field could possibly process available publicly online, and there's more of it every day.
You can have a perfectly successful career in observational astronomy without ever touching a telescope
in Hawaii, and if you think like, a silent protest wouldn't do anything besides stifle your own opportunities, then don't be silent about it!
Be super obnoxious about it! Be that annoying person who asks every speaker that uses observations from Mauna Kea
how they reconcile the ethics of doing science with data procured on contested land.
I'm not being sarcastic when I suggest being annoyingly and publicly political as a legitimate means towards
cultural change in your local astronomy space, but I will disclaim, if you look like me or otherwise
unlike the vast majority of astronomers, doing this might make you very unpopular, enough that it may
damage career prospects with people who are lowkey cool with colonization. But if you're a white dude and you did that? At worst,
some people would say you're eccentric, and at best, you'd probably get a lot of people to take seriously the context their work exists in.
White dude astronomers are notoriously annoying anyways, why not be annoying in solidarity?
And I know 'solidarity' isn't something we often think of in conjunction with our astronomical work,
but astronomers have so much potential to undermine colonial power structures.
See: this statement from a bunch of astronomers at UC Santa Cruz condemning researchers complicity with the genocide in Palestine,
which I realize might seem like it doesn't have anything to do with astronomy until you realize how much astronomy funding comes
from the Department of Defense. Turns out all the instruments we design to look up at the sky happen to be super useful for surveilling people!
So if you're an astronomer, please read that statement and reflect on where your funding comes from and whether you think it's worth it.
Just because there are tons of opportunities to get ahead in your career on the dime of war machines
doesn't mean you *have* to do that. You can not! What if everybody just didn't? And again, don't just stifle yourself in silence.
Be fucking loud about it. For academics more broadly, I want to bring up the BDS academic boycott. I'll explain BDS in general in a minute,
But this specific component urges academics to, quote, boycott and work for the cancellation of all forms of cooperation with Israeli
academic institutions, including events, activities, agreements or projects. A channel relevant example of someone doing this is Stephen Hawking's withdrawal
from a conference hosted by then President of Israel Shimon Peres in 2013. Even super genius theoretical physicists can boycott Israel! And I want to
emphasize that the academic boycott is one of institutions, not individuals.
I literally based my whole last video on the lifework of an Israeli physicist, and that's not incompatible with the boycott,
because it's not about excluding individuals. It like the BDS movement more broadly, is about strategically divesting
from institutions that perpetuate Zionist settler colonialism. So let's talk about BDS.
Inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement,
the Boycott Divestment Sanctions Movement aims to "end international support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians
and pressure Israel to comply with international law". Their strategy works on three scales: boycotts, where individuals withhold their support
from Israeli companies and institutions; divestment campaigns, which push organizations like banks or city councils to withdraw investments
from Israel in supporting companies; and sanctions campaigns, which pressure governments to do things like stop aid,
limit trade, or cut diplomatic ties. For the individual boycott, BDS emphasizes that the strategy is to focus on a few specific
target companies rather than boycotting anything that has any ties to Israel. The most recognizable brands on the list are SodaStream, Sabra and Puma,
but review the whole thing, stop buying things from these companies, and tell your friends, families, and coworkers to do the same.
And if missing out on home bubbled water and mediocre hummus sounds terrible, here's how you can make a carbonated rig at home for stupid cheap,
and here's a recipe for hummus by a white guy. And I know just buying different products doesn't seem like the most impactful thing,
but the boycott on SodaStream literally forced them to close a factory built on an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
This shit has real consequences. There are also some emergent grassroots boycotts for companies
like McDonald's and Starbucks that aren't a part of the main target list, but like, if it doesn't get in the way of committing to the central boycott,
like, why not? It's McDonald's and Starbucks. You deserve better anyways. The kinds of actions that fall under the divestment and sanctions
parts of BDS obviously require collective action and can take many different forms, so I'm just going to like, highlight reel the range of ways people have organized
against Israeli apartheid. A lot of really powerful actions are based in local government: the City Council of Hayward, California recently divested over
$1,000,000 of its budget from companies with ties to Israel; in New York, the Not on our Dime
Act is a piece of legislation that would stifle nonprofit support of Israeli settlements, which was apparently over $144 million from 2017 to 2019 alone;
and Durham, North Carolina, became the first U.S. city to ban local law enforcement from training or exchange with Israel in 2018.
And they didn't even have to make it about foreign policy, they just argued that not having a military trained
police presence would keep their communities safer. And then there's the trade union solidarity!
From Belgium to Italy to Oakland, port workers unions have answered the call for international solidarity
over the years by refusing to work ships transporting weapons to Israel. This is actually part of a long legacy of similar actions;
the International Longshore and Warehouse Union workers have been withholding their labor from apartheid since South Africa in the sixties.
And please remember, sanctions and boycotts were a huge part of what ended it that time around.
So how can you, the viewer at home, get involved in cool local actions like this that have a tangible impact on settler colonialism
on the other side of the globe? Well, first, learn a little bit more about the issue. Sure you watched this video, and that's great.
But as hard as I've tried, I don't think it's enough to counter the lifetime of propaganda that's likely insulated
you from very basic realities of politics in the Middle East. No shade, happens to the best of us.
I put together a Google doc with various resources for Palestinian solidarity, and a huge chunk of it is just reading lists, free ebooks,
and other educational media. If I were to make a single book recommendation for who I think my average
audience number is, I'd say "Palestine: a Socialist Introduction", which is a collection of essays that explains and contextualizes
the Zionist colonization of Palestine through a marxist internationalist lens.
It's really accessibly written, you can get it from that doc for free, and it will probably jive with your probably lefty politics.
The website Decolonize Palestine, especially the page on common myths, is another good resource that's less of a time commitment,
but a good starting point for general knowledge. I'd also recommend following Palestinian journalists and analysts on social media,
I have some of them listed in that doc as well, and they're going to be your best bet to stay current with what's going on.
Once you've taken some time to educate yourself, find a group to get involved in. Of course you can just show up to marches or perhaps donate some money,
but you're going to generally have a bigger impact if you're working in conjunction with people in some organized way
Because humanitarian aid isn't actually getting into Gaza anyways, if you're the kind of person who wants to support the cause
through donating money, I highly recommend donating to local organizations doing pro-Palestine work rather than humanitarian aid groups. To get
you started, here's a 'Join a BDS campaign' tool to find efforts in your area. Alternatively, here's a map tool
to help find other local organizations working for Palestinian liberation. I mentioned Jewish Voices for Peace earlier,
they're fantastic and also have a page about local organizing. And if you're a student, check if your campus has a Students
for Justice and Palestine chapter. So I think that's enough about Palestine to get started. So let's shift from addressing settler colonialism abroad
to taking a look at it here at home.
Landback, super broadly, is an indigenous led movement in North America that aims to give land back to the people who existed on it before colonization.
Landback is one of those things like the Palestinian chant "from the river to the sea", where people who grew up
in colonial societies hear it and assume it means that the people they colonized and genocided want to colonize and genocide them back,
but that's just projection. Here's an example of actual landback work. Like I said,
I was a grad student at Berkeley, which meant I lived and worked on land once inhabited by the Ohlone people who were violently massacred and displaced
so that white settlers could teach mining or whatever. So when I lived there, I made annual contributions to a voluntary land tax
that supports the work of the Solidarity Land Trust, an organization that buys up land in the Bay Area and puts it under native stewardship.
They literally give the land back. It's not the entirety of their work, yhey also do things like build urban gardens that grow medicinal herbs
or create ceremonial spaces that benefit local indigenous communities, but their central project is materially,
legally, ecologically, culturally, socially decolonizing colonized land.
Anybody can contribute to this org specifically, but I recommend trying to find similar efforts
where you live. I did a little googling and found similar projects in Seattle and Massachusetts, so I know there are more organizations like this out there.
You just got to look. It's certainly work, but not only can it help you better address the impacts of your own presence in the place where you live,
it's also just more personal that way. You could get involved with a local org and get to actually know people
in the community your donations or efforts are going to. Like, it's one thing to read an Indigenous people's history of the United States
and have a broad sense of how this country was built on colonialism, but it's a whole other thing to learn about the specific colonial history
of where you live and how its legacy affects people in your community today. And don't even consider those relationships like, an end goal.
They are rather an entry point to a whole other level of solidarity work you just can't do when your relationships with comrades are all virtually mediated.
And if you can't find anywhere to start locally, here's a list of 24 indigenous American activists you can follow on social media
to at least parasocially tap into these communities. It is better than nothing. So yeah, join local landback orgs, donate money to landback orgs,
and if you don't have any money but have time and an ounce of creativity, fundraise for land back orgs. However you can, help give the land back.
Okay. I think that might be it. This list, of course, is not exhaustive, but hopefully I've given you at least
a starting point. I'll even throw in a bonus normal life activism tip for another humanitarian crisis going on right now:
people are dying in the Democratic Republic of the Congo over conflict minerals that are essential in all of our technology,
and one of the best things you can do to minimize your contribution to this additional case of imperial violence is to not treat your tech as disposable.
Use tech longer, get things fixed, learn how to fix things for yourself and your community, give away
or donate tech that you're done with to be refurbished or otherwise upcycled, and when you really need to buy something, buy it used or refurbished,
it's cheaper that way anyways. And apparently Gen Z kids are quitting vaping over this too. Love to see it.
Okay, done for real now. I've given you enough information to start with. Go forth and exist in the world with this new information, please.
And don't let anyone say I don't give people a way to help solve the problems I complain about. Have fun!
Conclusion
One of the most beautiful things I've witnessed in my life
was a sunrise from the summit of Mauna Kea. Let me play you a picture. It's freezing on the summit.
There's snow on the ground. You're wearing, like, five layers of clothes. The atmosphere is thin at 14,000 feet up.
Walk a little too quickly or climb a flight of stairs and you'll feel it. It's six in the morning. You've just stayed up all night collecting data,
huddled around a space heater and a laptop running the telescope in the next room. Then it's dusk.
You take your twilight images, shut everything down for the day, and you go outside,
just in time to catch it. The sky is illuminated from underneath
a vast ocean of clouds below you. The summit interrupting their apparent infiniteness
like a rarefied echo of the island emerging from the water two and a half miles below.
And the sun rises from the cloud ocean, and it's the most breathtaking thing you've ever seen.
And you understand in that moment why people believe this mountain is sacred.
I must have seen it, like, a dozen times, at least, but it's never failed to fill me with a deep reverence and awe.
It is the exact opposite experience of seeing Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. You're overcome with the inexplicably, intuitively,
palpably real significance of the Earth that we live on, not because of some objective universal standard of value,
but because of its significance to us--to people. I first learned about Mauna Kea, the place, before I knew the conflict
from a good friend of mine in college named Ekolu. This is us from my Erykah Badu hijab days.
He was probably the first person of Hawaiian ancestry that I've known well, and I learned a lot from him
about the language and the culture and the beauty of the islands before I'd ever gone there for astronomy.
I actually knew him through my Arabic studies classes because he loved to learn languages,
he must have spoken like, six or seven at least, but I never knew for sure because if anybody tried to ask him, he'd
always say, "I only speak one language: love." And like, I know if
literally anybody else I've ever met tried to say this, it would sound like the corniest shit,
but when he said it, you believed him. Besides the language thing, everyone who knew Ekolu
I knew he loved to dance. Our friend group study sessions were always broken up with teaching each other
our respective cultural dances. Me and him were even in a debka group together. Like we literally spent a year training and performing
this Palestinian folk dance to resistance anthems, and it was an incredible time.
It was no surprise that when he died, his memorial featured a dance party, which I know might sound like it was in poor taste,
but anyone who knew him knew that he absolutely would have wanted it to be that way.
I heard about my friend Ekolu's death two weeks into starting grad school, which was really strange because bereavement
is a weird way to begin a new life endeavor, like a PhD. I think I was depressed from the beginning and it only got worse from there,
especially because I was so far away from all my friends who had known him, so I felt really isolated in my grief.
And I remember the first time I went to Hawaii for an observing trip, I was so looking forward
to finally seeing this place that he had loved so much. You know, to understand his Aloha Aina, his love of the land.
And it felt like I was going to say goodbye to him by being there. Something like, I'm not sure how to explain it,
or if it makes sense, but when I saw that first sunset, I wasn't thinking about our place in the universe or the expanse of emptiness of the cosmos--
I was thinking of my friend, and finally feeling just a little bit of what that place meant to him.
And when I started to learn about the history of astronomy on the Mauna and saw the apathy
that so many of my colleagues had towards its protectors, I couldn't help but feel like my participation was an insult,
not just to the Mauna and the protectors, but to our friendship, to his life.
I recently heard someone say that grief is love that doesn't have anywhere to go.
And for a long time, my love for my dead friend didn't have anywhere to go.
And as hard as it was to loudly stand in opposition to a project in a field that doesn't treat
dissent kindly, and despite leading to me quitting the thing I'd spent a decade studying, I wouldn't have done anything
different. Because the work that it took to actively resist
falling in line with the bullshit colonial status quo
finally gave me some way to put that love. And as much as I missed my friend, and I still cry
if I think about him for too long, I smile about him too,
because I remember how much light he brought to the world.
And like, as corny as it sounds, I know that if I continue to honor my memory of him, he's not really gone.
So to everyone who experiences grief, is experiencing grief, for whoever at whatever time, for whatever reason:
I hope you find somewhere for your love to go.
Credits
[Aloha Oe' (Farewell to Thee) plays]