Join Feminists for Justice in/for Palestine to call on NWSA to Honor the Academic Picket Line and Reaffirm its Unwavering Commitment to Palestinian Liberation & Feminism, including BDS.

Contact: feminists.justice.palestine@gmail.com

Preamble: The following statement was first crafted in December 2022 by feminist scholars and activists committed to and under the auspices of Feminists for Justice in/for Palestine (F4JP). It is now being released in June 2023 with some revisions following a long, difficult and still unresolved process trying to make the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) more accountable to F4JP, Palestinians, other Indigenous peoples, and marginalized communities and movements from multiple colonial contexts. In specific, the statement was spurred by the need to hold the NWSA leadership accountable for crossing the academic picket line in clear violation of the organization’s 2015 resolution committing to solidarity with Palestine and the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel. Many of us who worked on the statement have long histories of being part of the NWSA, and remain open to participating in its board and future conferences provided that there is a genuine attempt to pause and reflect on Zionist and colonialist practices – such as colonial tourism – that contradict the organization’s feminist solidarity commitments. Rather than be seen as a break-up announcement, this statement is an effort to insist on accountability, transparency and unflinching solidarity from the largest and oldest women’s studies association in North America. We urge NWSA to take up the Zionist-legitimizing event, which we discuss below, under accountability in particular, and unambiguously define settler colonialism, white supremacy, Zionism, Islamophobia, Orientalism, Brahminical-Supremacy, casteism, and other violences as structural issues that require ongoing education, vigilance, self-reflection, coalition building, cross-sectional conversations and an unwavering commitment to building an ethos of transnational solidarity. We are guided by Audre Lorde’s reminder that ​​”Survival isn’t some theory operating in a vacuum. It’s a matter of my everyday living and making decisions.” (A Burst of Light 1988, p.60) We are writing here, putting our words into the public realm, because our survival and liberation for ourselves and our communities cannot and must not be brushed aside as a simple mistake, an oversight, a lack of consideration, an endnote, an errata.

This statement, by Feminists for Justice in and for Palestine, National Women’s Studies Association, was first drafted in December 2022, finalized in April 2023, tweaked, and released on June 15, 2023

To sign your name to the statement below, please fill out this form.

After Crossing the Academic Picket Line, NWSA is Called upon to Reaffirm its Unwavering Commitment to Palestinian Liberation and Feminism, including BDS.

As the 2015 National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) resolution clearly affirmed, solidarity with the transnational movement for Palestinian liberation is a feminist issue. The ongoing Palestinian Nakba–the continuing violent dispossession, displacement and attempted erasure of Palestine’s history and its very existence–demonstrates that Palestinian life is intimately bound up in the violence and death machinery of settler colonialism. The death machinery of Israeli settler colonialism includes (but is not limited to) the siege on Gaza, state and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and in historic ‘48 Palestine, policing, incarceration, political repression, apartheid, physical and psychological abuse, and movement restrictions—all of which reproduce refugees both in Palestine and across the world, while withholding the Right of Return. Within this settler colonial context, queer and trans* Palestinians are subject to Israel’s violent pinkwashing, Palestinian women experience disproportionate rates of breast cancer mortality and all manner of health issues, due to lack of healthcare access and mobility, hundreds of children and minors are rounded up and incarcerated as administrative detainees without charge every year by the Israeli military, and prisoners are routinely subjected to violations of their rights, including sexual and physical abuse. The struggle for Palestinian liberation has historically been intimately connected to, and intertwined with, the struggles of Black, Indigenous, Kashmiri, queer, trans*, non-binary, disabled, oppressed-caste, working-class, and other colonized and marginalized people all over the world. In the spirit of the Indivisibility of justice, and understanding the joint struggle as intersectional, transnational and multidimensional, we call on the NWSA, one of the largest academic networks of feminists in the United States, to recommit to, and practice, its own self-proclaimed values of solidarity and justice after crossing the academic picket line.

The NWSA has a long history of debate on Palestine, and a more recent history of decisive action, including joining the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against the state of Israel, which now codifies this organization’s commitment to official Palestine solidarity work. Feminists for Justice in and for Palestine (F4JP) is a collective formed in 2014 to initiate the NWSA historic vote in 2015 supporting the BDS call, and highlighting the many ways in which the intersection of gender and sexual justice, and justice in and for Palestine permeate our studies and practice. We write this letter, with alarm and disappointment, to name the ways that the BDS commitment has been violated by the organization’s president, to explain the profundity of this violation, to query the apology letter that was offered on November 9, 2022, and to propose a path forward that will re-center the multiple radical commitments that prompted and sustained the movement for BDS at NWSA.

While we are concerned with the larger cultural and institutional neglect of Palestine as a feminist issue, this statement arises directly in response to the current actions of the president of the NWSA, Dr. Karsonya Wise Whitehead, who attended a tour of historical and religious sites in Palestine, referring to it as Israel, not long before our organization’s 2022 Annual conference. This trip is particularly alarming since Dr. Whitehead assumed the presidency of NWSA being fully aware of the organization’s institutional commitment to Palestinian liberation, including the formal adoption of BDS since 2015. However, some Palestinian feminists noticed Dr. Whitehead’s social media posts and relayed concerns to leading colleagues at NWSA. The latter then impressed upon Dr. Whitehead that her trip crossed NWSA’s own picket line, and only then did Dr. Whitehead issue a public apology that, however, is lacking in full accountability.

In her email, Dr. Whitehead attempts to “sincerely apologize for the painful political message this trip and [her] social media posts have conveyed.” In response, we call on Dr. Whitehead to take meaningful accountability for the harm that she caused, as it is not merely the “political message,” but the trip itself that is a violation of our organization’s commitment to BDS–a violation that Dr. Whitehead relegates to a difference in “perception.” Dr. Whitehead writes: “I understand how many of you may have viewed my trip as a violation of BDS” (emphasis ours). Christian Zionist religious excursions are a clear violation of the boycott of Israeli goods and services, as mandated by the BDS call. This trip brings to light the direct harm caused by the larger institution of Christian Zionism, which is one of the bulwarks of the Israeli Apartheid state. Excursions to Palestine for “religious and familial reasons” (as quoted in Dr. Whitehead’s email apology) not only contribute to the Israeli economy and the Israeli state’s racialized and militarized management of the holy sites of multiple religions, but crucially, also help to legitimize the settler colonial Apartheid Zionist state. Drawing on centuries of Orientalist and Zionist tropes about Palestine and the surrounding countries, such religious trips frame occupied lands as the site of religious fulfilment and joyful spiritual “homecoming” for foreigners, while most of the land's indigenous people cannot even travel safely through their lands, let alone visit these sites of spiritual and historical significance to them. The trip never should have been taken by the NWSA president, and at least this fact must be acknowledged by Dr. Whitehead and NWSA.

We also want to note that we stand in solidarity with all other colonized and oppressed women, trans* and non-binary people who have critiqued NWSA in the past, and those subjected to eminently unethical research practices by allegedly “feminist” scholars in and of the U.S. We remember the letter issued by Kashmiri, Muslim, and Dalit feminist scholars in 2019 stressing their concerns over inviting Arundhati Roy as a special guest speaker. As the Palestinian Feminist Collective reminds us in a pledge signed by NWSA:

Liberal feminist traditions in the U.S. . . continue to weaponize feminist discourses against Palestinians and other marginalized communities by failing to confront the structural forms of gendered and sexual violence inherent to settler/colonialism, imperialist wars, racial capitalism, and global white supremacy. Liberal and Zionist feminisms rely on Orientalist discourses to silence and undermine the collective aspirations of Palestinian women and their co-strugglers, contributing to intensified political repression that criminalizes free speech on Palestine and Palestinian liberation.

Activists in the field of feminist studies are relentlessly under attack because of our uncompromising anti-Zionist stance and inextricably related commitments to social, economic, political and environmental justice. This breaking of the picket line on the part of the NWSA president creates further vulnerability for Arab and Palestinian students and scholars, precarious faculty, graduate students, and those working in Palestine solidarity struggles. We believe that this myopia exemplifies, and may contribute to, the general lack of transnational anti-imperialist consciousness at NWSA. As members of NWSA, we feel strongly that the organization must create a much-needed space for intersectional, intergenerational, and transnational community-building. It is precisely because of NWSA’s expansive network and reach that we call on the organization to activate accountability and solidarity in support of Palestinian justice. At the same time, many of us struggle with academia's complicity with/silence over accountability of imperialists/settlers of color (per Haunani Kay Trask's words), who not only use their racialized bodies and misapplied sense of victimhood to legitimize their own imperialism/settler colonialism against Indigenous peoples, but also collude with Zionists and white supremacists for the legitimization of Israeli, U.S., India, and other colonial states in exchange for honorary white settler status. This practice is rampant in our academy, elevating careerism over justice.

Below we are listing some of the ways that would begin to repair the harm done to the Palestinian liberation struggle by the NWSA. We believe that the NWSA must place resources, time, and political will in a substantive way at minimum to take accountability for this grave breach of the responsibility of leadership. We call on the NWSA to reaffirm its commitment to BDS and offer explicit and institutional support for Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, South West Asian and North African (SWANA) and other marginalized scholars and students fighting on the ground against Zionist attacks by meeting the following demands:

  • Commit to applying BDS to Zionism as practiced by our own university administrations and defend, in public statements and open letters, Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, Kashmiri, SWANA, Indigenous, Black and other scholars and students whose pedagogy and research on Palestine and commitment to BDS are being attacked by university administrations in collusion with Zionists.

  • Officially sponsor a 2024 NWSA Delegation to Palestine, in complete coordination with Feminists for Justice in/for Palestine, featuring multi-generational participants, foregrounding junior scholars, as well as senior scholars who have done critical work over decades that led to the BDS resolution.

  • Sponsor a major plenary on Palestine at the NWSA annual meeting in 2023 in Baltimore, in coordination with Feminists for Justice in/for Palestine, to feature multi-generational scholars and organic intellectuals, and highlight junior scholars’ work.

  • Allocate ample time and resources to the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, the 20th anniversary of the Israeli reinvasion of Palestinian areas, the US invasion of, and imperialist war on, Iraq, and the 4th anniversary of the illegal annexation of Kashmir by India and explicit unleashing of its settler-colonial regime therein, to name a few key anniversaries. The theme of the year should be U.S. imperialism, Zionism, and Displacement.

  • Sponsor the travel and related expenses of Palestinian feminists, queer and trans* people to participate in the NWSA meeting in 2023 in Baltimore, in coordination with Feminists for Justice in/for Palestine.

  • Building from the 2023 plenary, materially support a cohort of members to create a teaching institute to begin in 2024. We ask the NWSA to continuously sponsor regular teaching institutes on the subject of Teaching Palestine/Teaching Gender and Sexual Justice in Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, Kashmiri, and other SWANA communities on the first day of the 2023 NWSA conference in Baltimore as well as each summer.

  • Create a transparent process whereby the expertise within the NWSA is utilized when leadership has to act or make statements about issues they are insufficiently knowledgeable about. This process should center those members whose communities are most affected by such statements and/or actions. Palestine is an obvious example here, but not exclusively so, as manifested by the issue of Brahmanism, Brahminical colonialism, and Indian Occupied Kashmir at the 2019 conference in San Francisco.

To sign your name to the statement below, please fill out this form.

To support Justice in/for Palestine, Gender and Sexual justice and the Indivisibility of Justice, contact: feminists.justice.palestine@gmail.com

Open Letter to Ethnic Studies Scholars: Attacks Against Critical Race Theory and Caste Protections

I am anonymously writing as a queer and trans Ethnic Studies scholar based in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University--the birthplace, home, and foundation of the Ethnic Studies legacy--to call on other Ethnic Studies scholars and scholars of race and ethnicity across the nation to recognize the national right-wing efforts to ban the teaching of critical race theory as interconnected with the fight to halt the recognition and teaching of caste.

For the past months, I have been working alongside an intercaste, interfaith, multiracial coalition of students, staff, faculty, and community leaders from across the state under Dalit feminist leadership to push the CSU to add caste as a protected category and ban caste-based discrimination. Caste is a system of exclusion based on birth and an assigned level of “spiritual purity” with its roots in South Asia, and similar hierarchical systems are found throughout the world including Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Despite caste being so rampant in American institutions, as exposed by surveys conducted and testimonies shared by Dalit and caste oppressed peoples, conversations of caste continue to be marginalized and silenced to ensure an environment of impunity and complicity that privileges dominant/upper caste peoples. And when these stories, testimonials, and cases of lurking caste discrimination are brought forth, they are met with intense retaliation, gaslighting, invalidation, and violent threats, pushed back into the margins to restore the peace of complicity. We have witnessed this every step of the way, with a clear example being the Cal State Student Association (CSSA) public hearing where, when caste oppressed students, staff, and faculty took the immense risk of outing themselves as Dalit and raising their voices to share their experiences with caste within the university setting, they were met with blatant and shameless public gaslighting, invalidation, and intimidation tactics to silence those voices again. 

As an Ethnic Studies scholar, I could not help but think about how similar those hearings for caste protections have been to the hearings all across the nation where right-wing groups have been mobilizing to ban the teaching of critical race theory. A lot of the statements made by these white supremacist groups share the same scripts with the statements used by these caste bigots. Recently, the National Education Policy Center published a guide and report to better understand the attacks on critical race theory, where they highlighted these continuous attempts seeking to “ban historical information and critical analysis related to race and racism in public school classrooms.” These attacks on critical race theory have been on the basis that “providing students with information on race and racism is un-American, divisive, and itself racist.” 

We are facing very similar statements by our opposition, who are arguing that by adding caste protections which will enforce coming to terms with caste privilege and the rampant caste violence, “it is going to create divisions where they simply do not exist” (letter by Hindu American Foundation). However, as scholars of race and ethnicity, we know that structural inequalities do not just go away if we choose to ignore their existence and choose complicity. In fact, such organizations are arguing that the “the addition of caste is a striking departure from the well-established practice of facially neutral policies that apply broadly and generally to all employees regardless of background” because the mention of caste will “apply to only particular faculty on the basis of their national origin, ethnicity, ancestry, and religion, is by definition not only a restriction, but denial of rights.” We are all too familiar with such statements, which are articulations of the discomfort that arises from address caste and race privilege as discrimination. And as Ethnic Studies scholars, we also are very aware that there is no such thing as “facially neutral policies,” but policies have always been political, with racialized, gendered, sexualized, components that need to be accounted for. The fight for caste protections is the fight to account for these inequities. Policies and education have always been political, governed by structural power that produces privileges and marginalization. 

These hearings for caste protections also carry a larger history, placed in lineage with the California Textbook Battles during which an alliance of Hindu American Foundation (HAF), Uberoi Foundation for Religious Studies, Hindu Education Foundation, and the Dharma Civilization Foundation (DCF) tried to “erase the complex histories of South Asia and replace them with a sanitized mono-cultural story for the entire subcontinent.” During these battles, the same statements and scripts being used now to deny caste protections were used to ban the teaching of caste from textbooks, as these groups fought to erase mention of “Dalit.” 

Here, I want to turn back to National Education Policy Center’s guide again to help us contextualize these interconnected histories. NEPC argues that attacks on critical race theory need to be understood as part of a “larger ideological effort to delegitimize historically accurate presentations of race and racism in American history; to thwart attempts by members of marginalized groups to participate fully in civic life; and to retain political power.” Both the attacks on recognizing and addressing racial and caste inequities isolated efforts of discomforted individuals, but amount together to maintain very specific ideologies--the ideologies of white and caste supremacy. Through banning mentions of race and caste, these groups are fighting to maintain structural inequality, and given that they have been privileged by these systems, equity feels like oppression to them. 

We have also continuously witnessed the power of creating spaces for the most marginalized. When Ethnic Studies was implemented at Tucson High School in Arizona, the high school dropout rate for Mexican American students that previously was at 48% significantly decreased, with 93% of the enrolled students going on to graduate from high school. And it was because of the power of creating such spaces of empowerment of the marginalized--spaces that promised the bridging of equity gaps--that Arizona lawmakers took extensive efforts to ban Ethnic Studies. We are continuing to witness this right now as well, as caste bigoted groups mobilize to “negate and nullify the struggles of women, Dalits, Adivasis, and religious communities like Buddhists, Sikhs, and Muslims.” The promise that caste protections and anti-caste education offers in bridging equity gaps is also similarly threatening.  

I call on fellow Ethnic Studies scholars and scholars of race and ethnicity to understand these interconnected issues, interconnected struggles, and interconnected liberations. The attacks on caste protections and recognition need to be understood in conversation with the attacks on critical race theory, with additional complexities as the perpetrators of caste violence hide with a claim to their racialized marginalization without attending to their own complicities in the structural violence of over 2,000 years. It is only within such interrogations that we can find coalitional possibilities that can are necessary to fight against these growing fascist powers. 

The following are a few of the recommendations, developed by Dalit feminist-led organization Equality Labs, on how to promote caste equity in your educational institution. 

  • Add caste as a protected category in your department, college, university, and union’s anti-discrimination policy. 

  • Implement diversity and inclusion training for faculty and staff to build caste competency. 

  • Build caste competency amongst students through the curriculum and syllabi.

  • Invest in Dalit organizations for external contracts. 

  • Hold a public briefing on caste. 

  • Collect data on caste exclusion to set KPI's for measuring progress on caste equity. 

  • Program for Dalit History Month to create spaces centering caste oppressed students, staff, and faculty.  

A Love Letter to the youth impacted by attacks on Ethnic Studies

A Love Letter to the youth impacted by attacks on Ethnic Studies:

The 2020-21 attacks on Ethnic Studies organizers, scholars, educators, and departments who have spoken up against Israel’s settler colonial violence across Historic Palestine--especially in East Jerusalem and Gaza--remind us that Palestine continues to be at the heart of what ethnic studies fights for. We know that you will continue to advocate for truth and with dignity for the struggle of the Palestinian people and for the principles of ethnic studies. And in spite of the ongoing effects by Zionists to silence histories that call out injustice, white supremacy, settler colonialism, militarized and violence, we affirm our commitment--now more than ever--to Palestine, the Palestinian people, and indigenous sovereignty and racial justice everywhere.

Since its inception, the field of ethnic studies has been about people coming together to speak truth to power in the face of settler colonialism, white supremacy, racism, capitalist exploitation, sexism, heteropatriarchy, militarized violence, imperialism, and other structural forms of violence and oppression that disproportionately impact the lives of people of color. The ethnic studies organizers, scholars, and educators who have come before you continue to speak out in this vein despite the different mechanisms of silencing that we persistently confront. The field of ethnic studies stands for deliberate, intentional, careful, and serious writing, teaching, and studying of the history of all forms of racialized violence by the people who have resisted it. We understand our obligation to resist and refuse the geopolitical, military, and ideological  investment of  the United States in the Israeli state and its settler colonialism of Palestine.  We know that the systemic violence against Palestinian bodies, lands, and narratives are connected to the attacks on Arab American Studies. As UCSC’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies program recently stated, “As we oppose policing and prisons, Indigenous dispossession, and racialized violence, from Turtle Island to Palestine, we refuse to use objective language that would render us silent as Palestinians continue to experience an ongoing Nakba.” We call out the role of the US nation-state in settler colonialism both locally and globally. We also call out US corporations that continue the ongoing social media censorship against Palestinians and their/our supporters These conditions are unacceptable. Despite such efforts to silence our voices, we remain steadfast in our dedication to critical ethnic studies knowledge.

We know that the truth cannot be denied and y/our beautiful histories and knowledges will prevail in these attacks on ethnic studies. Palestine endures and persists despite relentless assault and erasure. We stand with you in solidarity and in struggle against this ongoing and violent campaign of repression. We remain certain that you will be undiminished in your commitment to building a more just and liberatory future together. We stand and uphold the statements made by the  Palestinian Feminist Collective, Palestine and Praxis: Scholars for Palestinian Freedom, National Women’s Studies Association, Association of Asian American Studies, Middle East Studies Association,  Gender Studies Departments in Solidarity with Palestinian Feminist Collective, UCSC Feminist Studies, UCSC Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UIC Global Asian Studies, UCSD AAPI Studies Program, UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies, UC Davis, UIUC Asian American Studies Department, Princeton University, Yale Ethnicity, Rights, and Migration, UCLA Asian American Studies, and the Society of Sinophone Studies.

With our utmost respect, solidarity, and commitment for better,

CES Editorial Board