Late on a Thursday night in September and via phone call, two long-distance friends and I recounted the details of videos that made us cry that past week. 

Some were shared by news outlet powerhouses such as the Associated Press and Al Jazeera, some by local on-site journalists such as Bisan Owda (@wizard_bisan1) and Motaz Azaiza (@motaz_azaiza), and some by teenagers from their phones on the ground. All of them depicted the daily realities of civilians living and dying across the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. The three of us traded descriptions of supermarket shoppers cowering beside exploded pagers and produce and bereaved parents wailing at massacres of their entire bloodlines.

As we discussed our distress, determination, despair (all words that now seem too paltry to express how we feel) over this graphic, real-time documentation of the war crimes being committed against our people, it occurred to me that it all felt strikingly routine—in a sense. None of us wondered as to why the others had seen and sobbed over such videos, or why clips as short as 15 seconds were so vividly remembered across the group. 

We know why. We, as young Muslim girls growing up in America, experience a continuous and familiar grief over the decimation of our homelands, the genocides of those in our ummah (global Muslim community), religion or ethnicity notwithstanding, and the crimes against humanity we witness perpetuated by governments globally. The Israeli regime’s occupation of the West Bank, systematic murder of Palestinians in Gaza—deemed by Israeli Minister of National Security Ben-Gvir as de facto ethnic cleansing—and its bombing campaigns that have killed over 1,000 Lebanese civilians (nearly a quarter of them being women and children) are neither new nor forgettable parts of the latest news cycle for us; they are cruelties that we carry every day, and constant reminders of the methods by which Westernized systems of authority repeatedly go about denying justice to their oppressed.

That is to say, we are not easily surprised. Skeptical, tenacious, and experienced; we have no illusions about what it means to be Black and Brown Muslim women in this country. 

Last semester, when we followed the pro-Palestinian solidarity encampments nurtured across university campuses worldwide, and the subsequent police brutality that put Emerson’s Popular University Encampment on the list of those violently disassembled, we were not surprised either. 

Outraged? Yes. Scared? Yes. Horrified, anxious, mournful? Yes. But not surprised. Young BIPOC are aware of the years that police brutality robs from the average lifespans of those in our communities, especially those who hold multiple marginalized identities. We understand how white supremacist powers treat our lives as expendable, our bodies as targets, our words as “issues of safety,” and our presence as one of many “forces that threaten to pull us apart.” And when it comes to their savage pushback against our resistance? We were not—are not—surprised.

We are not unaware, either. Many freshmen who did decide to attend Emerson this fall—particularly those of us who are marginalized, and those of us who believe in protecting Palestinian humanity—are aware of Emerson’s questionably convenient (to say the least) termination of the Bright Lights Cinema Series and curator Anna Feder following her screening of “Israelism,” updated demonstration policy placing “time, place, and manner restrictions on speech,” impending programs informed by the Anti-Defamation League (a known pro-Israel and white-led lobby) without any concrete plans for Palestinian or Muslim-informed programming, and the reality of the peaceful community fostered within Emerson SJP’s encampment before our own administrators allowed Boston police to assault their students. 

Coming to Emerson campus, we hold this knowledge with us. We are not surprised nor unaware; we are intentional in ways that marginalized students nationwide have learned to be when operating within systems designed to keep us silent and fearful. I know this: I was not particularly “optimistic” about coming to Emerson after April 25, and the “unrest” on Emerson’s campus last spring had a significant effect on my decision to attend. It had the kind of safety-discussion-with-parents, warnings-from-concerned-community-members, sickness-over-what-my-tuition-money-funds effect on my decision to attend. Many of the students of color who I came to school with this year have told me the same. No alumni network, major programs, or location considerations lessened the weight of the administration-enabled police violence that I—we—saw inflicted upon Emerson students who form our community.

We hear talk of the “death” of a certain campus life and vibrance that we never knew, and feel ripples from the waves of trauma endured by classes present last spring each time we pass Walid Daqqa Alley. Those of us who participate in events organized by Emerson’s SJP walk in the wake of rows of squad cars trailing to our destination, and we wonder how the sophomore–senior year students already on site will meet the same authorities that concussed them and shed their blood only months ago.

Emerson students last semester had to confront what it means to establish a resistance movement within the walls of the oppressor; under the shroud of a Eurocentric school system that only holds space for the non-threatening “activism” it can capitalize off of, and then uses that capital to fund Zionist entities. This semester, incoming freshmen find ourselves confronting what it means to partake in our own education ethically; how we might grapple with giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to an institution that will not even protect the liberties of its student body, let alone those of students in Gaza whose new school year is postponed indefinitely. For many of us, it means reminding this college what serving the needs of a “unique, creative, and strong” community actually looks like, and continuing to hold Emerson accountable to the same seven proposals that it refused to meet last year.

I know that I am not only speaking for myself when I say that freshmen remember what happened here last spring, and we will not be led to believe that campus life is set to proceed business as usual now.