A committee at a nation-wide organization made up of people of color asked me to give a lecture on Arab American identity. They let me know that this would be the first time their organization created space for Arab American voices. That it really mattered. They made it clear that they were deeply aware of the context of genocide in Gaza. They told me people on their staff, Arab Americans especially, were feeling isolated and broken. They understood the violence Palestinians were enduring and its ripple effects in the diaspora. They wanted a language for that ache. They wanted Arab Americans to be able to talk about what was happening in the world, even in their workplace, without hiding their pain.
They knew I had been training people how to speak and write about such violence through my Liberate Your Research workshops, and they asked me to share and lead in a way that reflected community-based stories, wisdom, and dignity.
It was easy for me to say yes to this.
From the first moment we explored the lecture idea, it felt like we were building a counter-discourse together, something more genuine than checking a DEI box. We were creating a platform for subverting the dominant colonial discourse about Palestinians, other Arabs, and Muslims that has become increasingly normalized in the workplace for a room that seemed ready to listen.
They said the subject of Palestine was welcome. They said it was needed. We spoke of naming the genocide explicitly.
Then things started to shift:
“Let’s focus on Arab American experiences shaped by what’s unfolding there… without going too deep.”
Rounds of meetings. Edits. Back-and-forth conversations. At each turn, there was a shift. Each shift was familiar to me. Those calculations that arise whenever Arab Americans are invited to speak. How much truth can the room hold? How much pain is permissible before it becomes “uncivil”?
I wasn’t willing to dilute the genocide. I revised my original plan, balancing accountability to Palestinians living in Gaza and my larger community—and to those inside the institution working to wedge the door open, even against resistance. Rounds of meetings. Back-and-forth. Each tension was familiar to me. Those calculations Palestinians and people from the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa must make when invited to speak.
I stayed with it because I knew how to carry meaning across the gaps, how to shape our messages so they could land with impact, without allowing the truths we carry to slide away or to let our truths shift off course. Truths about settler colonialism, dehumanization, and state violence and about the people, histories and cultures rooted long before those forces, carrying stories that refuse to be contained by them.
These are skills you learn slowly, over time: how to hold integrity without spectacle, how to speak what must be said without ceding ground to those prepared to twist your words or use them against you. In a climate where even a single sentence is weaponized, creative clarity becomes its own form of resistance.
When the day finally arrived, the day we would gather, virtually, to step into our intentional conversation, I was ready. The preparation had been long, but I was strong. I was prepared to share, to teach, to invite people into something deeper. The committee and I had done the work. The urgent work this moment calls upon us.
It turns out, however, that what we had prepared so carefully for was quietly undone behind closed doors, in the cloak of night.
When I turned on my computer to log in for the event, I saw the lecture event in my calendar was crossed out and replaced by a single word:
Canceled.
There was no communication about the cancellation and no advanced warning that someone, somewhere, had made this decision. The committee members who were logged in to meet offered no explanation. They did not speak of rescheduling. They only confirmed that the lecture had been cancelled. They offered a vague gesturing to unnamed concerns from someone higher up.
After that, silence.
No conversation, no processing, no respect. My lecture….my invitation to speak, the conversation we’d planned…was just erased.
This is what covert repression looks like….quick and quiet. A soft incessant violence. A soft violence arrives dressed as “risk management,” causing event disappearances and normalizing fear.
And that’s the point.
Covert repression is the tool that regimes of power use to crush truths across every sector of society: education, nonprofits, media, pop culture, and professional workplaces. They force people of color and indigenous people to self-censor or be silenced, punished.
The cancellation of my talk was not an exceptional moment of crisis. It was a parcel of the ongoing systems Black, Latinx, and indigenous people have endured for centuries in the United States.
Repression is not always a spectacle. Covert repression puts a white sheet over critical speech and thought before anyone notices. It fosters an environment of fear, control, and surveillance. As these hidden closures accumulate, unquestioned and unchallenged, they shape what is acceptable, speakable, and dangerous, and what becomes expected.
For many scholars of color, our knowledge is a liability. What is lost is much more than one voice or conversation. In the context of Palestinian and other Arab diasporic life, the repression of our voices and the elimination of our knowledge facilitates material attacks on our existence and genocide denial. It obstructs the public’s capacity to recognize state violence as it crystallizes into law and policy.
Academia Mirrors This Silence
In the loud quiet that followed the cancellation of my lecture, I couldn’t stop thinking about the familiar pattern it followed—the erasures that have shadowed many of our voices for generations. Familiar, yes. But no less jarring. Each instance is another reminder of a colonial practice honed over time, adapting with disturbing ease.
This moment is not unique to me, nor the gravest form of silencing. Still, it was tethered to the same machinery that works, in different registers, to confine what can be spoken, remembered, or mourned.
The loss of a lecture, or a syllabus, a media appearance, or a teaching job are the calculated steps that lead not simply to censorship but to the normalization and institutionalization of erasure.
Education, especially higher education, is one of the fascists’ most vital battlegrounds.
Educator Jesse Hagopian reminds us, “The attack on education is not peripheral to the rise of fascism or authoritarianism in this country. It’s actually a prerequisite.” You don’t arrive at fascist rule without dominating the schools. As the Trump administration’s roadmap, Project 2025, makes explicit, academic discussions about race, gender, and systemic oppression, and universities that allow them are an explicit target. It proposes, for instance, banning federal funds from going towards “critical race theory (CRT)” and winding down “area studies programs” at universities.
We’re watching this happen in real time: Academic departments like Gender Studies and Black and Africana Studies are being dismantled. For instance, Indiana University Bloomington is eliminating Gender Studies, among others, Middlebury College is shutting down its Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, The University of Chicago is pausing or reducing PhD program admissions in language, the humanities and anthropology, political economy, social thought, and conceptual and historical studies of science, and Texas A&M just fired a professor of gender studies. As the headlines make clear, universities are overtly firing, suing, arresting, or defunding scholars such as Dr. Steven Thrasher at Northwestern and Dr. Tiffany Willoughby at UC Irvine who have spoken truth about the genocide to power. Just as pervasive are the many less visible acts of censorship and silencing. Public applause for Harvard’s liberal legal challenge to the Trump administration and their recent victory in court has covered up their capitulation to financial and political pressure and their complicity in the erosion of education. They have cracked down on Palestine scholarship, closed or curtailed at least three academic programs connected to the Middle East, forced out the director and associate director of their Center for Middle East Studies, and enacted changes to diversity programming related to women, LGBTQ students, and race relations that mirrored demands from the Trump administration.
To be sure, selective defenses of the university further narrow the most vulnerable fields and communities. Yet they also legitimize that narrowing more broadly, reinforcing the narrative scaffolding that allows state violence and repression on campuses to appear reasonable, necessary.
Violence doesn’t always arrive as bloodshed and protests. Sometimes it’s the accumulation of a disappearance, a policy change, the sudden vacancy of a job, doxxing, the withdrawal of a grant, repeated threatening emails, or a lecture that once mattered but is now gone.
Fascist regimes consolidate their power through miseducation, ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and a bipartisan politics of austerity. They cultivate a deep disdain for nuance, reflection, and thought itself. They aim to destroy the very idea of scholarship as a public good. Philosopher Jason Stanley notes in How Fascism Works that fascist movements thrive on propaganda and anti-intellectualism, replacing analysis with appeals to nationalism, grievance, and fear. As Trump puts it, higher education institutions are “turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions.” The new academy he has in mind will be “strictly non-political and there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed.” At the same time, we cannot lose sight of the ongoing bipartisan politics of austerity driving the destruction of higher education or our university administrators who are turning their backs on faculty and students facing threats, targeting, or worse.
Several of the fields currently under attack—intersectional feminist and queer studies and decolonial, indigenous, critical ethnic studies, Palestine Studies, Middle East Studies— have always insisted that truth-telling is political, that the solution to omission is not visibility and inclusion but decolonization and liberation, and now, the stakes are even higher. Erasure comes faster, silence runs deeper, and danger is increasingly inside of the university.
Our writing, speaking, and analyses are not just research. They are defiance. They analyze foundational structures of power. They are the tools to remember what oppressive regimes want us to forget. Our stories hold memory, dignity, and the pulse of lived experience. When they disappear, something deeply profound, with severe historical consequences, disappears with them.
The Cost of Disappearing Stories
Our stories are how we remember who we are, how we pass wisdom across generations, resist forgetting, name our grief, and give shape to joy. As scholars doing work rooted in justice and liberation, we turn to these stories not just for data, but for what Layla Feghali calls re-memberance. They are the lampposts that guide many of us through struggle, and what she explains as the voices our bones refuse to forget.
This is why the erasure of our research, our writings, our voices, and our classrooms is meant to be collectively devastating. It’s an intellectual, personal, communal, and political attack at once, and it comes with a cost that no university institution will name.
After my lecture about Arab American communities was cancelled, the aftershocks came in jolts. They weren’t dramatic. They were more like a distant ache. I kept moving through my day, responding to emails, making lunch while something in me flickered. Questions nagged at me. Questions I knew better than to listen to: Why did they flag me? Will this spiral? I tried to shake it off, but the sense of exposure lingered, a relentless whisper, tugging at the corners of my attention.
Fear grabs at you quickly. Even when you know better. Even when your politics are rooted in collective dignity. Even when your ancestors taught you to stand steady.
Long before October 7, 2023or January 2025, I have been hearing this sentiment echoed among scholars of color and indigenous scholars in my Liberate Your Research workshops when we reflect on U.S. academia:
"I feel so shackled. I want to write with freedom."
"It’s like my engine has been turned off."
"My research feels so constrained and I can’t find my voice in it."
These comments are not about academic pressure.
They are grief notes. They are the sounds of confinement and repression.
This repression is not new. Perhaps it's heavier than before, more layered. Our truths are unwelcome; they are but dangerous. Telling the truth might cost you your job, your safety, and your peace of mind. The toll of this reality is heavy.
We tell ourselves to keep going. We remind each other that this is part of a broader political strategy, that censorship is systemic, not personal, that our focus and our truest urgency belong with those living under siege–starved, deported, beaten, incarcerated. We remind ourselves of our privilege: to speak, to write, to feed our children in times of a genocide where, as Sherene Seikaly describes, every day a new massacre unfolds, and a repetition of charred and dismembered bodies loops.
We fight the narrowing of our voices. We remind each other not to apologize for existing. We grapple with why write as Gaza burns.
In writing about Arab and Muslim communities, I’ve described this phenomenon as an “internment of the psyche.” A quiet, internalized state of anxiety shaped by racial violence and surveillance. It’s the feeling of always being watched, of waiting for a knock that never comes, of fearing that your name might be added to a list for speaking too honestly.
In academia, there’s no protected space to talk about how the emotional toll of academic violence and its impact on our voices, how fear can blunt our writing, how rage can turn to exhaustion before a single paragraph is done. We need to make space for this. To affirm the voices emerging under the weight of a system trying to erase what we know, beyond cancelled lectures designed for targeted communities to speak in their full voice.
Liberatory research is emotional labor. It asks us to tell the stories that were never meant to survive, and when that labor is censored, it doesn’t just cost us a line on a page.
It costs us the will to speak.
It costs us the breath to keep going.
In “A Litany for Survival,” Audre Lorde teaches us:
“So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.”
And Palestinians teach us we are still here and we will remain.
Writing.
Remembering.
Refusing to disappear through every loss.
Reclaiming Our Narrative Through Liberated Research & Collective Support
Research shaped by justice has never stood apart from struggle. It has accompanied resistance, carried memory, exposed harm, and called institutions to account, even when those institutions were the ones funding the harm in the first place. That work has never been easy, and now, it’s harder to pretend it is safe.
The pressure to pause is real. Budgets are being slashed, departments are vanishing, colleagues are punished or quietly disappeared. Losses like these are easy to log and record in spreadsheets and announcements. Others, however, settle in more quietly and unmentioned: a frayed sense of direction, an interrupted timeline, the slow disorientation that comes when the ground beneath our work erodes and no one speaks about the rupture aloud.
This is the moment we find ourselves in, and it’s the moment we decide how to continue.
To move forward now doesn’t necessarily mean ‘do more’! Instead, I think this is the time to become more deliberate…more attuned to what matters, and more aligned with the knowledge that research is no longer—and never truly was—a solitary pursuit. This work is collective—co-produced within relationships, accountable to communities, and for the purpose of liberation. This is the kind of power that builds slowly, with strength through careful analysis and bold circulation. A force that can shift a field of study, a community, a curriculum. A fire that leaves a mark even when the institutions try to wipe the walls clean.
Each act of study, each emerging analysis, every challenge to the dominant story, contributes to a larger body of resistance which is shaped by everyone who refuses to let truth disappear.
We need to protect this power and the pathways, the real ones, we walk to feed it. We stumble, pause, and ache….but we continue.
From this presence, the questions we explore regain their shape and our voice steadies in the headwinds. Our work finds its place in something much larger than an individual contribution….it rises to meet a living, ongoing refusal.
The future of higher education, if there is one worth working toward, will belong to those who keep writing and speaking what was never meant to be studied, and who do so with the full force of purpose behind them.
[I am grateful to Robyn Paulette, Sherene Seikaly, and the team at Jadaliyya for their editorial support.]