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Mizna News

Black Lives Matter

Join Mizna, ITSRC, NAATW & AROC for a series of webinars addressing Anti-Black racism in Southwest Asian / North African and Disapora communities. More info here. English, Farsi and Arabic panels available.

On May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis, in the metro area that Mizna calls home, George Floyd was brutally murdered by the police. In the days since, we have witnessed a righteous uprising start in Minneapolis and St. Paul and quickly spread across the country and the world. Amidst the continuing threat of a global pandemic, thousands of people throughout the United States are risking their lives to rise up to demand justice for the murder of George Floyd and for the deaths of Black people at the hands of the police before and after his death. As the Black intellectual Roxane Gay recently wrote, there will eventually be a vaccine for COVID, “but Black people will continue to wait, despite the futility of hope, for a cure for racism.” We must not let this moment pass. This is not a time for business as usual.

Mizna and its staff stand firmly in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and the Black community to demand an end to the killing of Black people by the police in our community and everywhere. We stand with those demanding the defunding and abolition of the police. We are continuing to learn and listen—this is a time to elevate Black voices, community organizers, and leaders above all other voices.

This is an unprecedented time of reckoning, when conversations about systemic, institutionalized racism are happening in places they have never happened before. The Mizna family has spent the last week in our communities—grieving, demonstrating, donating food, working to keep our homes and communities safe. We want to be clear: we know those rising up to march, chant, and occupy streets are righteous in their anger, members of our team are among them. And while it is true that white supremacists have infiltrated the uprising, we must not let them undermine it. The media spectacle and overemphasis of “outside agitators” reproduces systemic violence and racism and minimizes the agency of local BIPOC folks in fomenting an uprising. We must challenge our leaders when they show us clearly that what matters to them is the protection of white property and peace at the expense of Black lives and justice.

We at Mizna also call on our Arab and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) community to focus unflinchingly on the insidious biases and racism present within ourselves, our families, our neighborhoods, our businesses, and our organizations. We challenge Arabs and others living in SWANA and its diasporas to confront anti-Black racism in our past and present, acknowledge the ways in which we have contributed to and profited from it, and to dismantle forms of oppression and violence both locally and globally. This means talking honestly and directly with our elders, our peers, and our children about racism and colorism. We stand with other Arab and SWANA communities and the clarity of the values articulated from our friends at the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), the Coptic Canadian History Project and many others in unequivocally stating that Black Lives Matter and that silence is complicity in upholding white supremacy.

As a small, nonprofit organization, we have the platform and the responsibility to distribute our resources to invest in our community’s demands and the commitment to Black lives. Over the past two years, we have been working with intentionality to examine the biases we have in our own work, to center Afro-Arab artists, and to understand the racial privilege that exists in the dominant non-Black Arab space. We do this as allies, we do it imperfectly, we do it with open hearts and humility—knowing we always have room to learn and grow. This work continues. We are committed to it, and we know there is more we can do. In the last week, we have supported staff to take the paid time they need in this time of grief, protest, and community care. We have created a Community Action Plan, where we are reimbursing staff for their expenses in supporting, protecting, and feeding their communities who are suffering right now. We are currently planning initiatives to move this work further. We ask you to join us and we challenge others in the Arab and SWANA community to make this commitment in their spheres. Every one of us has a role to play in dismantling oppression.

In solidarity and with love from Mizna.

Below are some resources to dig into. Remember that being anti-racist is a constant, active practice.