“The fear and silencing on college campuses today is not arbitrary or new,” wrote Abena Ampofoa Asare, an associate professor of Modern African Affairs at Stony Brook University, in an essay titled, “The Silencing of Fred Dube,” published last year in the Boston Review.
This might be a surprise for those who are just now realizing the relationship between censorship and speaking out for Palestine, after seeing the news of immigration officials detaining Columbia University Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. Others might have learned of the double-standard of silencing speech about Palestine from earlier events, like MIT’s “banning” of doctoral student Prahlad Iyengar over his essay and other pro-Palestinian activities a few months ago, or from the crackdown of silent protesters at Harvard just before that, or from the arrests at campus encampments all over the nation at this time last year.
But Asare lets us know these events were not unprecedented and that they in fact were rehearsed decades ago at U.S. colleges and universities.
“It is a policy passed down from generation to generation; it is rigorously and virulently inculcated, dangerous both because of whom it harms and what it buries,” she wrote in her essay.
Before the most recent bombardment of Gaza that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, she notes, and before even the existence of Hamas, and long before groups like the Canary Mission began doxing students and scholars, “there was Fred Dube.”
In her compelling essay, Asare tells the tragic story of how Ernest Frederick Dube – a former South African anti-apartheid activist – would in the early 1980s see his entire life unravel after a visiting historian from Israel discovered a line that Dube was using to prod critical thought from his students. The line – “Zionism is as much racism as Nazism was racism” – was among many other provocative prompts, explains Asare, but would be singled out and used as ammunition to shoot down his career.
Now, in another essay just published in Radical Teacher, Asare explores the usage of DEI on campuses and the further silencing of voices of Palestinian solidarity, when she writes about “DEI in a Time of Genocide or Re-Calling June Jordan’s Years at Stony Brook.”
Both of Asare’s writings give a historical and critical look at the “Palestine exception” to censorship that helps explain why we’re here today, as Khalil is locked up for committing no crime and as executive orders and bills in Congress try to limit speech critical of Israeli government policies and the political ideology of Zionism.
As Asare told the Sampan this week: “Keeping things under wraps only allows this status quo to persist.”
We spoke with Asare by email and video chat about her work.
The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Sampan: In your most recent essay, you explore this idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs becoming a sort of “trap.” You even recall this scene in which last year you were meeting over a video conference about the university’s DEI mission with job applicants, while just outside, nine students demonstrating for Palestinian human rights were arrested. Then you write, “The DEI office proffers platitudes about civility and community while shadowing students at rallies, events, and lectures, flanked by university police”…. Could you explain this idea of the DEI trap?
Asare: The DEI framework in higher education administration – specifically the creation and elevation of DEI officers … after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 – created a sense, a false sense, that the United States had arrived at national consensus about the harm that histories of racial violence, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and economic exploitation, and so forth, had caused, and about the need for redress. In fact no such consensus existed. This was apparent even before the current 2025 backlash in which we see DEI being gleefully attacked by our current administration and being swiftly abandoned by the universities and other institutions that supposedly “got it.”
But even before this, the limitations of the corporate DEI model that flourished in universities was clear. Black women specifically (along with many others) have been speaking and writing about the cognitive dissonance of these DEI roles, of being “set up” to function as an optical or rhetorical laundering of the university’s social justice mission, while actually lacking the power to pursue structural transformation. Some of the chapters in my 2024 book, When Will the Joy Come: Black Women in the Ivory Tower (UMass Press), speak about being in these DEI roles where the contradiction between the university’s noisy embrace of DEI and its unwillingness to do the work of confronting histories of racism and misogyny become apparent.
With this said, Palestine completely snatches the veil from universities’ supposed embrace of DEI, because Palestinian scholars and students are never embraced by the university. They are not touted as the type of diversity the university plasters on its brochures. The work of Palestinian scholars is not treated equitably, in fact there are traditions of scholars who have been kicked out of their posts, doxed, and forced out of universities simply for telling the truth about conditions in Palestine-Israel. Palestine and Palestinian studies is not part of what U.S. universities rush to include in their curricula or speaker series. Can you credibly value diversity, equity, or inclusion and yet accept that one part of our human population be rhetorically (and then physically) erased?
Sampan: In both of your recent essays, you show that what we’re seeing play out now – since Oct. 7, 2023 – is built on decades of silencing people, especially Black and Palestinian intellectuals, but others as well, who dare to question Israel, humanize Palestinians, or speak critically of Zionism. You explore how professor and poet June Jordan paid a high price for speaking for Palestinian human rights in the 1980s. Do you think a possible silver lining to what’s happened over the past year and a half is that this silencing has been brought out to the greater public?
Asare: I do not see silver linings in the tragedies that we are living through that are destroying lives and families. There is no silver lining to genocide.
If some of us are gaining more clarity that our American universities have been silencing and erasing Palestinian and Black and anti-imperialist thinkers and activists for decades, because we are now seeing it in our own time and context, I think this clarity is necessary and helpful.
Sampan: I was struck by the story of Dube, and, honestly, nearly cried while reading your essay – how this man’s life could be torn into pieces for essentially trying to spur his students to think critically. What was the process like for you to write this essay…?
Asare: Thank you for your kind words about reading the Dube essay. I do not take your empathy or your tears for granted; thank you for engaging with this work. I approached the legacy of Fred Dube at Stony Brook primarily as a professor in Africana Studies, where Dube had taught. Pieces of the story of Fred Dube’s experience at Stony Brook had been told to me by elder professors when I was a new professor in the department. This was clearly a wound that hadn’t been adequately addressed.
After October 7th, 2023 when I saw the inability of colleagues throughout my university to talk credibly, empathetically, or rigorously about what was going on in Palestine and Israel, I remembered the story of Fred Dube and knew that this wound, still open and weeping, could have something to do with it, and I went looking to sharpen my own understanding of where I was and what I was facing. Because Fred Dube’s experience is part of my department’s institutional heritage, and is our collective and shared history, I am glad to have been able to share a piece of it in ways that resonate. I’m thankful to the Dube family for sharing some of this story with me. However, there is a lot more to Fred Dube’s story than the piece that I offered in the Boston Review essay.
Sampan: … Many people have been silent on Palestine and, as you know, many universities and colleges have not only been silent but have crushed dissent. What do you feel will ultimately be the cost of the staying silent?
Asare: I hope all of us living in this country continue to speak out about Palestine. I think we need to speak out in our neighborhoods, in our houses of worship, in our schools and our classrooms, in our bedrooms, to our children, and in the public squares. I hope people of good will begin to take up more space, use their voice, their art, their smile, their anger, their confusion, their fear, to take up public space and mount obstacles to justifications of genocide and dehumanization everywhere in the world. And Palestine is so crucial, because it is connected to violence and terror in Congo, in Haiti, in Sudan… in every location where precious human life is made to be cheap, we need to speak up and advocate for better. There is no safety in staying silent in matters of basic decency and human rights. This is definitely a season where the Audre Lorde poem “A Litany for Survival” is required reading.
Sampan: Do you feel like we are at a turning point now, and, if so, do you have hope freedom of speech and freedom of expression — and academic freedom — will prevail? Why?
Asare: I am not sure about turning points — perhaps it is my historian’s training to avoid such framings, but I do absolutely have hope. Most days I wake up with hope, and even when I do not, I quickly see reason to be hopeful. First of all, I know that cynicism and fatalism do not serve me, often keeps us paralyzed and short circuits our creativity. Second of all, I find hope in my community, in the people I love, and organize with, and teach, and learn from. It is important to connect with people who are engaged and awake and alive, in these times. Third, I find hope in my ancestry and faith. There are many in our lineages (I am West African) that have gone through crushing times and survived, or else I would not be here. I believe deeply in playing my role to the best of my ability, for as long as I’m here, and knowing that this is enough for one lifetime.
Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish has a quote about hope and Palestinians… he says something like “we suffer from an incurable malady of hope…. hope that our children will go safely to their schools. Hope that a pregnant woman will give birth to a living baby at the hospital and not a dead child in front of a military checkpoint; hope that our poets will see the beauty of the color red in roses rather than in blood…”
This is the hope I have, one which exists in the storm and terror, not apart from it.
Sampan: Were you nervous about writing these essays – worried that your career could be endangered?
Asare: I am nervous about most things I write; I’m always nervous about getting the story right, and doing justice to the ideas and history. But I did not choose to be a Black Studies/ Africana Studies scholar expecting praise and accolades, and the greatest danger for me would be to not tell the truth about what I’m seeing and thinking about. I am incredibly honored to be at Stony Brook Africana Studies. We are one of the oldest Black Studies programs/departments in the nation. I believe that our department’s local institutional history is a global resource, and I will continue to tell our stories.
Asare’s website is at abenaasare.net/ and both essays referenced here are available at
bostonreview.net/articles/the-fred-dube-affair/
and at
radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu/ojs/radicalteacher/article/view/1324/909 .
