BY RABAB IBRAHIM ABDULHADI

The author was one of three 2020 recipients of the AAUP’s Georgina M. Smith award, which is given to those who have provided exceptional leadership in a given year in improving the status of academic women or in academic collective bargaining and, through that work, improved the profession in general. Because award winners will not be able to receive their awards in person this year, we have invited them to make remarks on Academe Blog. See the announcement about the award.

I am honored and proud to have been granted the AAUP’s Georgina M. Smith award and I join my co-recipients in thanking the Association for this honor. This award does not belong to me alone; it belongs to all of us. It belongs to everyone who sacrificed and continues to advocate for justice in and for Palestine, in particular, and the indivisibility of justice, in general. At this historic moment, I dedicate this award to both the victims of racial terror, police and military violence, and structural racism, and to the organizers of the uprisings against white supremacy, settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and police brutality from Minneapolis to Jerusalem and from Brazil to Kashmir and Puerto Rico, including Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians for Black Lives. This award is indicative of the broadening support for our rights to academic freedom and freedom of speech; our responsibility to produce justice-centered knowledge; a rejection of Zionist ownership of Jewishness and right-wing hate speech, smearing, bullying and intimidation; and a de facto insistence on the urgent need for institutions to raise the bar in countering Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, and hate groups that are seeking to silence supporters of Palestine on US campuses.

A Rising Spirit of Solidarity—An Injury to One Is an Injury to All
I also see this award as affirmation by the AAUP of our collective rights to unionize, organize ourselves, and defend our contingent faculty, junior colleagues, graduate student workers, and other vulnerable faculty. The livelihood of our colleagues is being threatened by preexisting inequalities that have been deepened and exposed by the global health crisis. I am honored to be part of an expanding movement that is resisting the creation of facts on the ground and that insists on fighting against the rush to further privatize public life and corporatize our universities. I add my voice to my colleagues in the AAUP and across campuses as we demand a stricter adherence to democratic and transparent shared governance, fair labor practices, and an end to the policing and the militarization of our universities. I am proud to be part of a rising spirit of solidarity on my own campus, San Francisco State University, led by the Executive Board of the California Faculty Association. It was so gratifying to see an unprecedented attendance at our Zoom union meeting last month and over a thousand signatures of current faculty members defending our lecturer colleagues and refusing to compromise their rights in favor of our gains.

AMED Studies and Justice-Centered Knowledge Production
Finally, I see the award as an expression of AAUP solidarity with the mission, content, and integrity of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies. I am thrilled that the AAUP has recognized our vision for AMED’s academic focus, pedagogical praxis, and community accountability. Starting as an initiative in 2007, AMED Studies was intended to become the fifth department in the College of Ethnic Studies. We were inspired by the “Spirit of ’68” SFSU Student Strike, led by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front. The strikers demanded the decolonizing of the curriculum, the production of justice-centered knowledge, uncategorical commitment to a reciprocal and accountable university-community relationship, and validation of the lived experiences of historically marginalized communities. Our academic minor, general education courses, collaboration with AN-Najah National University in Palestine, reciprocal and critical solidarity delegations, open classrooms, oral history intergenerational conversations, and teaching Palestine inside and outside the traditional academy and the US, are not a luxury. They are intellectually appropriate, ethically and morally essential, and relevant and timely, especially in our current reality of intensifying white supremacy and other forms of racism and hate speech, including attempts to erase Indigenous communities, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-Blackness, anti-Asian racism, and xenophobia. By contrast, AMED Studies brings to college life what California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) comparatively proposes for public education: teaching future generations the rich experiences of diverse communities whose histories have been erased or otherwise painted with racist stereotypes and strokes of distortion. Teaching diverse narratives and experiences of Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian communities will likewise further respectful and mutual understanding and challenge hatred, ignorance, isolationism, and exceptionalism.

I believe that by giving me this award, the AAUP has made clear that demanding the best justice-centered knowledge we can offer and pushing our students to exercise critical thinking and to be accountable to their communities are neither controversial nor exceptional. Rather, these are and should be our everyday preoccupations and praxis as educators and producers of knowledge. The AAUP award affirmed our right not to be derailed or distracted no matter how loud the noise pollution is and no matter how many resources our critics have to amplify their voices.

Please join me in urging San Francisco State University and the CSU chancellor to immediately reinstate the AMED Studies faculty lines, support the program institutionally, and reject smear and bullying campaigns by groups that are only interested in hate speech and the politics of violence through the reproduction of smears and distortions.

Please join me in urging the state of California to support the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum guidelines for public schools and refuse to erase the histories of Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians in the state of California and the world.

Please join me in urging all our university administrators to end the criminalization of student and faculty activism for social justice, including justice in and for Palestine, and stop the maligning of advocates of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) and the hurtful smears of falsely equating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. This false equation only serves the neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic agenda and deflects attention from the just struggle of the Palestinian people for self-determination, return, and life in dignity, justice, and peace.

Please join the AAUP in demanding justice for all. A better world is possible, but only if we make it so.

Guest blogger Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi is the director and senior scholar of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies and an associate professor of ethnic studies and race and resistance studies in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.