Cleveland DSA condemns the House’s passage of HR 6090, which deploys the IHRA definition of anti-semitism, conflating anti-zionism and anti-semitism, for enforcement of federal antidiscrimination laws on campus. Republicans introduced this legislation in a desperate assault on the youth protests that have erupted across America as a result of American universities’ bizarre, large scale investments in Israel. A hundred and thirty-three Democrats voted for this bill, with Cleveland’s Shontel Brown among the co-sponsors.

Cosponsor Richie Torres claims the bill doesn’t limit criticism of Israel’s policies except when people call for the destruction of Israel. In other words, one can legally favor one Zionist policy over another, but there will be only one lawful opinion on the apartheid regime itself. Legislators are well aware that those who support democratic rights for Palestinians across historic Palestine, regardless of the model proposed, are considered to be calling for Israel’s “destruction”. They know the IHRA holds that describing Zionist colonialism as racist is, by itself, antisemitism. They themselves join in widespread and willful misinterpretation of protest slogans as antisemitic. Why the First Amendment should have an exception carved out for Israel is not clear, but there is no question of how this law will be used on campuses across the United States.

There is a good reason Israel and its allies have, for decades, worked hard to cancel, vilify, and suppress Palestinian speakers and their allies, especially on campus. They know that there is no justification for settler colonialism, massacres, torture, police kidnapping, and general exploitation of Palestinians. Reflecting on the campus protests, Israeli Minister Nir Barkat recently stated that “American public opinion is an existential threat to Israel.” Mr. Barkat’s allies in Congress say it is necessary to ban certain opinions on Israel to prevent their gaining a foothold in the United States. This is a doomed effort, already a substantial minority of Americans, including large portions of America’s Jewish community, are openly expressing anti-zionist views, a situation that was unthinkable even 10 years ago.

Passing anti speech legislation to shield genocide supporters, a supposed anti-discrimination measure from the same party systematically attacking trans youth at school, is an insult to young voters. Under Trump, there is no question that the organizations criminalized today, with Democrat connivance, will be on the front lines against GOP repression. Laws like HR 6090, among countless other bipartisan measures of state-surveillance and repression, will be deployed against us by Trump. We will use our front line role in the battle for democracy to further educate the American public about Israel, whether or not the attorney general or the supreme court consider this lawful.

There is a widespread fear that Biden cannot secure enough young and Arab-American votes to defeat Trump, particularly here in the midwest. Democrats have been trying, hopelessly, to play both sides, to both criticize and supply Netanyahu’s genocide, and it is destroying their party. Should Biden decline to veto the bill, this would represent yet another step towards a second Trump term, a step taken not by students, nor outside agitators, neither by antizionist Jews, nor Arab America, but by the candidate who asks for our vote. It is in this desperate context that the GOP and the large majority of House Democrats are asking Joe Biden and their Senate colleagues to spit on the first and most fundamental right of Americans.

Our congresspeople were among the 91 to vote against the bill. Socialists must do likewise even when they are alone. Elected socialists must maintain a clear and accurate message regarding the occupation of Palestine. We urge our representatives and our sister chapters to comply with the spirit of the 2023 National Convention, which specifically resolved to expect electeds and prospective endorsees to reject the IHRA definition.

DSA chapters nationwide will continue to engage in protected speech on and off campus. We do not ask Congress’ permission for this. We applaud our fellow students, alumni, and community members on campuses across the country, risking their safety and liberty to fight the genocide, most especially right here at Case Western Reserve University. We know that you too do not ask the US government what you can or cannot say. Take heart: history will absolve us, even if the courts do not.

The post Anti-Zionists have a right to speak – Cle DSA Statement Against HR 6090 appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

The below is a response to President Kaler’s email threatening disciplinary and legal action against students for their Gaza solidarity assembly at CWRU

Hello President Kaler et al.,

As a member of the CWRU and the Cleveland Jewish community, I am deeply disturbed by the rhetoric of this email which implies that there is rampant anti-Semitism at the protests and on our campus. Members of my Jewish communities have been standing in solidarity with the people of Palestine long before October 7. It is my duty as a person of the Jewish faith to employ our values of tikun olam (repairing the world) and pikuach nefesh (saving and valuing all lives). This includes but is not limited to being in solidarity with my Palestinian siblings in our community. For the past 7 months, they’ve watched in horror as their family members and loved ones abroad in Gaza face forced displacement, forced starvation, and extreme violence that we are priveleged enough to never be able to fully comprehend.

Our brave students are risking everything to stand up for these Jewish values of repairing the world and saving all lives. As a Jewish person, I am not afraid, I don’t feel unsafe, and I am not intimidated by seeing community members of all faiths (again, including the members of the Jewish community) come together for interfaith prayer, dialogue, study, and wellness activities. In fact, I think what we are witnessing is a beautiful display of students living out our CWRU mission of the “promotion of an inclusive culture of global citizenship.”

To reiterate, I am not threatened by the students singing, practicing yoga, praying, and gathering for meals together. What I am afraid of, however, is the increased surveillance and policing measures we are seeing all across campus. Acts of surveillance only seek to antagonize our students who are peacefully exercising their right to protest our institution’s silence and complicity in the horrors we are witnessing from afar.

President Kaler’s email regarding the student protests, sent on 5/2/2024 to intimidate the camp and slander its participants.
——————–

We urge you to write your own response to the administration’s attacks against student organizers and their supporters:

Provost’s Office: provost@case.edu
Presidents Office: president@case.edu
Office of Student Affairs: katie.brancato@case.edu

The post Letter from a member of Case Western’s Jewish Community appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

In Houston, we know that we are not alone in our struggle for economic, social, and housing justice. We are  not alone in the struggle for liberation from capitalism, colonialism, […]

The post May Day Statement appeared first on Houston DSA.

(This statement is from April, 24, 2024) We stand with unwavering solidarity with the students in Rice University, the University of Houston, Columbia University, and all campuses, as they demand […]

The post Student Encampment Solidarity Statement appeared first on Houston DSA.

(This post is from November 8, 2023) For the last 11 weeks, our members have been on the ground talking to Houstonians all over the city about the importance of […]

The post Houston voters overwhelmingly pass Proposition A! appeared first on Houston DSA.

Students here in New York and across the country are staging protests and encampments on university campuses in solidarity with Palestinians under siege in Gaza for over 200 days. The student movements are united by a common call for their institutions to divest and boycott the state of Israel, companies, and institutions complicit in Israel’s occupation and ongoing genocide in Gaza. In response to this vast mobilization of students, the university administrations at Columbia, NYU, CUNY and elsewhere have handed out mass suspensions & even threats of expulsion to students involved in the encampments, in addition to unleashing NYPD to arrest students protesting peacefully on their campuses. Tonight, we will hear from the students themselves. We will hear from Britt, a student organizer at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at CUNY City College, about the ‘Five Demands’ of the students to the CUNY administration. We will also be joined in-studio by Erin, a student at NYU and a member of the National Coordinating Committee of YDSA, to hear the latest from the NYU encampment and what YDSA is doing to meet the national moment. 

*This episode was recorded at 7pm Tuesday night before the NYPD sweep and mass arrests of students at Columbia and CUNY. Go out and provide jail support for the arrested students & comrades opposing genocide at One Police Plaza  

Link to CUNY Gaza Solidarity Statement: https://twitter.com/cunygse/status/1785677626431934751/photo/1

As Ron DeSantis and his ilk across the country seek to further enshrine a white supremacist version of history in our schools, libraries, and cultural centers, “organized efforts to document and broadcast the truth of our past are the most significant defense we have against disinformation.”

Place names are an enduring and omnipresent way of remembering the past. The choice of place names informs whose version of history is commemorated and given precedence. Our daily interaction with the names of streets, parks, rivers, and buildings continuously reinforces a specific version of history and consciously and subconsciously informs our relationship to the places we live.

A Brief History of Place-Naming in Michigan

People have been naming places for as long as there have been people in places. Indigenous place names often relate to the intrinsic nature of the land. Teuchasa Grondie, the place of many beavers, is the placename Iroquois speakers call the place we call Detroit, and Maskigong, based on Ojibwe “mashkig” meaning “swamp,” describes the large wetlands at the headwaters of the Maskigong Ziibi (Muskegon River). Descriptive place names value the land for its innate properties and allow for the creation of practical maps that share knowledge of how to get from one place to another, using narrative stories, poetry, and song, as well as pictorial images.

Settler-colonialism brought with it the practice of naming places to claim land ownership. British, French, and Spanish colonizers asserted the collective ownership of their rulers and cultures by naming places for kings and queens, Christian saints, European towns and cities, and famous figures from their history. Hence across the river in Ontario there is a town called London and a river called Thames, and any number of places across the U.S. named for St. _____ and various Charleses, Marys and Georges.

Individual colonizers claimed ownership of land by affixing their names to the places they settled. To give just two of many examples in Michigan: Pellston was named by William Pells in 1882, to claim his ownership of a camp on the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad [1], and on the Lake Michigan coast, Bliss was named for Rhoda Bliss, the first white woman to colonize there [2]. Many of the places the colonial settlers slapped their names on already had names. Some of these names were erased and replaced, such as Teuchasa Grondie by Detroit, and some were erased and rewritten in English, such as Maskigong to Muskegon, Michigami to Michigan, and Michinimakinaang to Mackinaw.

Later settlers took over not only Anishinaabe land but also Anishinaabe language to name places. Peter White, iron mining tycoon, appropriated the Anishinaabemowin word “ni-ga-ni” meaning “he walks foremost or ahead,” and anglicized it to Negaunee, to name a colonial settlement on the Upper Peninsula in honor of the “pioneer” ore furnace in the region. Henry Schoolcraft, U.S. “Indian Agent” in Michigan, who incidentally has a street named after him in Detroit, made up place names by combining Anishinaabemowin and Latin. For instance, Arenac is a combination of Latin “arena” meaning sand and Ojibwe “ac” meaning land or earth, made up by Schoolcraft to mean “sandy land” or “sandy place.” Some other Schoolcraft-appropriated names include Alcona, Alpena, Iosco, Kalkaska, Oceola, and Oscoda. Before assuming that a place name is Indigenous in Michigan it is worth researching to ensure it was not made up by Henry Schoolcraft [3].

Place naming for individuals did not just rename the land, it redrew the map. Instead of explaining, verbally or pictorially, how to get from A to B by describing the features of the land, maps now facilitated navigation using the names of the local colonizers. This orientation around ownership claims removed a layer of connection to the land as people walked or rode along the path navigating, not by the wetlands at the headwaters of the river, but by Pells’ Railroad Camp.

Redrawing the map erased and rewrote history. Many books, blogs, historical societies, websites, and Wikipedia posts have been dedicated to the stories of settlers who named places for themselves. All these sources, directly or indirectly, legitimize colonizers’ land ownership claims and orient us to place from a settler colonial perspective. Trying to dig beneath the layers of William Pellses, Rhoda Blisses and Arenacs to learn the original place names and the stories of the people who called them home is not an easy task.

A New Gazetteer for Downtown Detroit

To visit downtown Detroit is to be immersed in a space created to laud a specific version of the city’s past and perpetuate a vision of the future where that vision is seen to be the natural, and only possible, order of things. This space is created using monuments, statues, parks, fountains and, most ubiquitously, street names. In his work on the naming of Martin Luther King Jr. Streets in the Southern U.S., Derek Alderman notes, “Naming is a powerful vehicle for promoting identification with the past and locating oneself within the wider networks of memory” and “[street names] make the past intimately familiar to people in ways that other memorials cannot [4].”

What does it feel like to move through a land where your place names, language and history have been erased or ignored? For People of European Descent, with our language and history so prolifically and seemingly indelibly inscribed on the land, it is almost impossible to imagine.

This map shows what downtown Detroit would look like if you erased the streets and street names that honor the colonizers. When you go downtown to enjoy the holiday lights, open this map on your phone and, even if you think you know where you are going, try to use it to navigate. While in no way parallel to hundreds of years of human, land, history, and language theft and erasure, may this little exercise give you pause to acknowledge that theft and to recognize the impact of its inscription on the land.

Click here to open the map in ARCGIS

Unlike removing monuments or changing the names of private buildings, such as university halls, changing street names is a hard and expensive task and one that, frankly, we do not have the time to organize around given all the other needs of our communities. We also cannot boycott or divest from street names, they are everywhere; on signposts, maps, your ID, your mail, every form you fill out, your online billing statements, your eventbrite RSVP, and many more.

This Gazetteer asks us to change the conversation by subverting the street name narrative to tell another version/s of our shared history…

Click here to open the map in ARCGIS

This project is not intended to be the final word on street names. I am in no way any more “qualified” to be naming Detroit’s streets than the city’s so called “founders.” My intention is to inspire Detroiters to use street names to tell different narratives of place that expand our learning of history and thus our vision for the future.

In working on this project, I noticed I was only able to find Black and White honorees for the street names. I want to recognize that this is directly related to the legacies of colonialism and imperialism as discussed above, and to the legacy of slavery, which erased the indigenous names of enslaved people, and replaced them with the names of their White enslavers.

If you would like to share an honoree/s (it could be anyone from the past or present, well-known or unsung, a personal hero or a family member, or someone who is both of those things) and their stories for the gazetteer, either for any of the streets on the current map or other Detroit streets, parks, plazas etc., please click here!

[1] Petoskey News Review, 14 April 1966

[2] The Petosky Record, 19 September 1883

[3] Walton, I. (1955). Indian Place Names in Michigan. Midwest Folklore, 5(1), 23–34. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4317501

[4] Alderman, D.H. (2008). Martin Luther King Jr. Streets in the South: A New Landscape of Memory. Southern Cultures. (14)3. 88–105. University of North Carolina Press.

The Detroit Socialist is produced and run by members of Detroit DSA’s Newspaper Collective. Interested in becoming a member of Detroit DSA? Go to metrodetroitdsa.com/join to become a member. Send a copy of the dues receipt to: membership@metrodetroitdsa.com in order to get plugged in to our activities!

Whose Streets? Our Streets!: A New Gazetteer for Downtown Detroit was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.