How the monopoly on interpretation obscures complicity in genocide
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Freedom Summer of 1964, when the alternative freedom schools opened around Mississippi as a crucial liberatory pedagogical component of the civil rights movement. Black children entered the 41 freedom schools to learn about and discuss their history, disenfranchisement, and radical potential in a curriculum that ranged from the arts to social and political studies. This educational network of care confronted the white supremacist control over the Black imagination, beginning a process of unlearning that emphasized uplift and autonomy against oppression and segregation.
Apartheid regimes rely on breaking the body and soul of the oppressed. Freedom school educators in the Jim Crow South were standing strong against the oppressor. The people throughout the world supporting the struggle for a free Palestine are following in their footsteps.
When the McGill University encampment in Montréal started a summer program for revolutionary education, it was predictably met with outrage. One particular target was the image that Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights McGill (SPHR McGill) used in their advertisement for the program: that of armed and masked 1970s organizers reading quotations from Chairman Mao. McGill President Deep Saini issued an announcement condemning the violent imagery, which he considered an issue of national security. Bipartisan Members of Parliament and the National Assembly, from the Liberal Party’s Anthony Housefather and Marc Miller to the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) Minister of Higher Education Pascale Déry, urged the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) to heed President Saini’s repeated calls on the grounds that the image was an incitement to hatred. Québec Premier François Legault reiterated his contention that the encampment was illegal. The SPVM has since consulted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)—an escalation of involvement from local to national policing.
The alarm over the superficial issue of the provocative image deliberately diverts attention from the truth of McGill’s and Canada’s involvement in the genocide in Palestine. Settler states like Israel and Canada learn from one another and confer legitimacy on education that erases ongoing histories of active dispossession and the violence inherent in their own existence. For years, student organizers have drawn attention to McGill’s role in delivering guns to an apartheid system, one which receives extensive material support from governments across the Global North, including Canada’s. But instead of condemning Israel’s occupation of Indigenous land and the killing of 40,000 Palestinians (although the death toll could be much higher), McGill chooses to concentrate its energies on endless condemnation of the language and imagery of an Instagram post circulated by peaceful student protesters. (more...)
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