Sarah Jama arrives at her celebration party in March after winning the Hamilton Centre riding in a byelection to replace Andrea Horwath, who step down to become mayor.
Sarah Jama arrives at her celebration party in March after winning the Hamilton Centre riding in a byelection to replace Andrea Horwath, who step down to become mayor.
By Robyn Maynard Contributors, Nisrin Elamin , Alissa Trotz
We are Black women scholars writing with the strongest concern for the possible censure of MPP Sarah Jama at Queen’s Park. As Black women, we live with the enduring legacies of slavery and colonialism. We feel a responsibility, like many Black women before us, to oppose all forms of racist dehumanization.
We are outraged that Sarah Jama, a Black woman and Hamilton Centre MPP, may be silenced — unable to speak in the provincial Legislature — for the duration of her elected term. Jama has been targeted by Premier Doug Ford, and reprimanded by her own party leadership, in response to a statement in which she called for a de-escalation of violence.
The attack on Jama comes amidst deepening government repression of those who speak out in defence of Palestinian life.
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Jill Dunlop, minister of Colleges and Universities, has named and condemned university students and faculty who authored or signed statements, even those who have defended Palestinian human rights on social media, calling for them tobe disciplined for “supporting the atrocities that have been committed against innocent civilians.”
Are Palestinian civilians not also “innocent?”
We mourn the loss of all civilian life and we also stand with those who speak out in support of Palestinian human rights and against government efforts to intimidate and silence dissenting voices.
On Oct. 9, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced “a complete siege … no electricity, no water, no food, no fuel,” saying, “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” In a since-deleted tweet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the siege on Gaza as a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” These statements justify the ongoing attack on Gaza, constituting what Israeli Holocaust Scholar Raz Segal deems “an intent to commit genocide.”
Black people too have often been likened to animals and relegated to the realm of darkness and “the jungle.” Sarah Jama’s words emerge from a long tradition of Black women standing in support of Palestinian human rights and against apartheid, from Toni Morrison to Audre Lorde, Angela Y. Davis, June Jordan and Dionne Brand.
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On our campus and in our movements, we work from Indigenous lands and across geographic and socially erected borders, with scholars of all backgrounds — including Palestinian, Indigenous and Jewish — to stand for justice and against dehumanization. Black feminists have not only the right, but the duty, to take a stand against genocide, militarism, and occupation, and to challenge the Canadian government’s complicity in it, whether in the current attack on Gaza, its initial failure to condemn South African apartheid or its leading role in the destabilization of Haiti.
Nobody should be censored or disciplined for condemning what the UN and Amnesty International have documented for decades: that Palestinians have been subjected to Israeli military occupation and apartheid and that Gaza has been under siege since 2007.
We cannot allow Sarah Jama to be silenced and we will not be silent or complicit with genocide. Our voices echo a global majority that supports an immediate ceasefire, as well as an end to the conditions that have been at the devastating heart of this issue: an end to apartheid and an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Robyn Maynard, Nisrin Elamin and Alissa Trotz are professors at the University of Toronto.
