Where I stand

(Originally written on October 21, 2023)

I deeply grieve and mourn the lives that have been lost and the loved ones left behind. I deeply grieve in anger and sorrow the horrific rapidly increasing loss of thousands of Palestinian civilians—children, families, people who had lives and loved their friends and families just like me.  I grieve in anger and sorrow for the Palestinian people who are fighting for their lives under relentless siege, with no time to process the immense trauma they are enduring and with nowhere to escape. It is beyond imaginable for me, the hell they are living in.  

I condemn Islamophobia, and I condemn anti-Semitism. I condemn racism and White supremacy in all its forms. I condemn genocide and the war crimes being committed by Israel with my tax dollars. I condemn the systems of violence that I have been complicit in that have led us to where we are today. These are the seeds and roots of the violence.

I oppose the decades-long oppression of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel, the violence that the State of Israel has enacted upon the Palestinian for decades, including killing many hundreds of Palestinian people in 2022-2023 before Oct 7.

I stand with Palestinian people who have been fighting to stay alive and to be free for decades. I stand with the many thousands of Jewish people who oppose the violence being enacted on Palestinians by the State of Israel today and the many thousands of Jewish people who have been working in solidarity with Palestinians for their freedom and liberation from apartheid. I stand with people and movements around the world for liberation and justice. 

I acknowledge that I too am a settler on stolen land. I do not point a finger without also pointing it back at me. My government, politicians I have voted for recently and in the past, continue to assert domination over Indigenous people of this country and continue to deny them true sovereignty. We have never fully acknowledged or made right the genocide we committed when founding this country as it is organized today. My government and these systems in place continue to harm and enact daily violence upon Black people and people of color and immigrants and trans people and the LGBTQ+ community.

I acknowledge that I uphold this system in subconscious ways, in overt and hidden ways that I don’t yet fully realize. But I am committed to continuing to learn and undo the ways that I have been programmed and socialized to accept. I commit to continuing to acknowledge my role in these systems of domination, control, and oppression and to heal from any violence that runs in my blood, some of which may be so deep and old that I will never fully know. I will do the deep work of exploring how to heal those hidden parts of me and my history and lineage so that I will be able to disrupt—more and more—my own complacency, my own prejudice and racism, my own patterns and programming, and to disrupt—more and more—these harmful, violent systems.

I thank Doctora Rocio Rosales Meza, Marika Hamahata Sato Clymer, Dr. Ayesha Khan, Therese Cator, Rachel Ricketts, Court YellowWolf, Dr. Barbara Shabazz, countless people in my community, and many more teachers and authors and spiritual activists for their work and teachings that have helped me begin to see, begin to heal, begin to change, and begin to take action for true, deep, justice and liberation. 

In the meantime, and even as I continue to learn and unlearn (ongoing healing and learning never to fully complete because I’m human), I stand with Palestine. End the genocide. End apartheid. No more funding for war crimes. No more funding for colonization or oppression in Gaza or anywhere in the world. Free Palestine.