I’ve had my fair share of run ins with Facebook.
I think it started with a post I shared during the pandemic about my first job and why I didn’t become a lawyer. It was at a moment when the only hope of ever leaving our homes again was placed on the vaccine, but well before the vaccine was released. I shared how I worked for a prestigious law firm that represented a pharmaceutical company in a racketeering case because they had falsified their safety records to the FDA. I shared my concern about the “warp" speed, abbreviated testing and potential for fraud. The post went viral. Soon after I received an email from Facebook telling me that my account was being restricted essentially because I had too much influence.
Honestly, I wasn’t too phased by the email - I figured I couldn’t be worse than Trump, and that eventually the ban would be lifted. Perhaps, if I stopped engaging in political debate and stopped posting anything controversial for a while. Unfortunately, my self censoring campaing didn’t seem to work. Nevertheless, I kept sticking my hand into the fire to take the temperature and continued to find that my posts were no longer seen.
Given everything that had happened and my special experience having traveled throughout Israel and the Occupied West Bank, I wanted to offer some thoughts on the moral crisis we are now immersed in. And so I shared the below photo and caption. Not only was it shadow-banned, but I was blocked from sharing posts inside our business community group as well. Soon after, I was blocked from commenting on Instagram, seemingly because I continued to refer to the genocide and the Biden administration’s actions as “racist” in spite of warnings about my choice of words. Apparently, it’s not allowed to say something is “racist” on Meta.
And so here is my last meaningful Facebook post. Going forward I will be using the “notes” feature to post thoughts on articles and any random insights I may have. And I will share a regular compilation style newsletter that wraps up what I have been reading and thinking about. In addition I have added some of my favorite segments from the WBAI Morning Show, which I co-hosted for several years. I hope you enjoy reading and leave as many comments as you would like! I believe in freedom of speech and that we learn through sincere dialogue.
This is a photo that was taken of me in the spring of 2011. Christopher and I were traveling in Istanbul. We took a tour of the funicular and came out at Taksim Square. There was a huge wave of people walking quickly, and some people were handing out signs. All of the signs I saw were in Turkish or Arabic except for this one that was (randomly?) handed to me.
It turned out that it was the anniversary of the murder of the 9 Turkish (including one Turkish American) humanitarian aid activists peacefully bringing medical supplies to Gaza on one of the flotillas. At least 6 of these peaceful activists were killed in an extra judicial manner (gunshot to the head) by Israeli forces who boarded the ship.
There were hundreds of thousands of Turkish people attending the protest and commemoration. I've been to a lot of protests, and this was amongst the biggest.
A few years later, after Occupy and during Black Lives Matter, remarkably I found myself traveling in Palestine and Israel. I spent time in Jerusalem with an Israeli friend I went to grad school with. She toured me around her home city and brought me to an incredibly fascinating place that was part of her scholarly research: a kind of museum that was focused on a future vision for "the temple mount," which is where the Al-Aqsa mosque is currently. The vision involved the replacement of the mosque, one of the three holiest sites for Muslims, with a temple.
After that visit I met up with some activist friends from Occupy - one who is Palestinian-American. We spent about 3 weeks traveling in the Occupied West Bank with a film crew, Andrew Ross and David Graeber. We spoke with activists, militants and scholars.
There are so many things that stuck with me and I am forever changed by this exchange of culture and ideas. But one of the things that has haunted me was the clarity with which Palestinians still have a sense of their humanity. Aside from avoiding extinction, the thing they absolutely do not want to become is like us, Black Americans. After 400 years we are still struggling for some thing so basic - just to matter. Really think about that. They fundamentally reject the idea of living as a permanent underclass. They refuse to be relegated to living as a people without dignity or fundamental humanity.
Since this experience, I have seen my own life and our own struggle through a different lens. On so many occasions I have asked myself, are we really a permanent underclass? The answer comes to me as a yes. Have we been striped of our dignity? I see it in myself every time I choose to step out of the way of an angry white walker for whom I am invisible here in Brooklyn, and I feel the loss of something essential. I feel the anger and my being wants to resist, but mostly I don't. When I reflect on the ways in which I constantly patrol my emotions, because there are so many feelings that I am not allowed...the answer in my heart is yes, we are not fully human. And there is a cost. It's a cost to our being-ness.
My Palestinian-American friend once made a comment on my radio show that the Palestinians still have dignity because "it takes generations to strip a people of that."
So as we watch the pain of two oppressed peoples fighting for dignity through their trauma, and as we watch the racial divide here in the U.S. grow and morph into our collective downfall, I want to encourage you to take a deep breath and ask yourself who do you really want to be in this brief life we are granted? Can you find a way to use your life to support the wellbeing of all of the beautiful humans living and loving on this planet?
I am committed to forever being the person holding that sign. I admire her. She's kinda badass and amazing. And today I want to be the person who reminds you that humanity can only prevail when we stand against hate in all of its insidious forms - and when we stand for justice with the deep understanding that peace is always going to be impossible without it.