HAASMEEN

“Would you rather be illusioned or disillusioned? Would you rather have illusions about the world, or would you rather see the way things are? So, to get disillusioned, it’s actually a good thing. The problem for a lot of people in this world…that they identify with something, and when that something then comes under scrutiny they feel personally attacked.

To get disillusioned is actually a good thing… Don’t be afraid to be disillusioned. It’s better to be disillusioned than illusioned. Don’t be afraid to be dis-identified. Don’t identify with something outside of yourself to the extent that you become uncritical. and blind.”

— Dr. Gabor Maté

“It was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.”

— James Baldwin


”Open Letter to the Born Again,” The Nation, 29 September 1979, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/open-letter-born-again/

RESOURCES

This is a living page of resources. Below are articles, posts and videos that have supported my unlearning and relearning.

FILMS + PODCASTS + VIDEOS

  • Israelism Film: When two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel witness the brutal way Israel treats Palestinians, their lives take sharp left turns. They join a movement of young American Jews battling the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, revealing a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity.

  • From the river to the sea (who gon check me boo?): Someday We'll All Be Free [Hoodrat to Headwrap: A Decolonized Podcast] From Congo to Tigray to Darfur, there are multiple genocides happening on the continent of Africa and the United States' government is complicit in ALL of them just as they aid and abet Israel's genocide against the Palestinian People to shore up its political and economic power in the region. There is a genocide against Black people here in the US, the same US that still has a one million dollar bounty on Assata Shakur but ya'll don't hear me tho.

  • Gaza Fights For Freedom (2019) Full Documentary

  • Sudan's History & Context for Today's Conflict | AIDA ABBASHAR | [afikra عفكرة Podcast]

  • Understanding Jewish Disillusionment with Israel (w/ Gabor Maté) [Bad Faith Podcast]

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

“Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism”

By Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. Link here.

“This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. Instead, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of.

Driven by expansion, colonialism, and resource extraction and propelled by neoliberalism and rabid consumption, our world is profoundly out of balance. We take more than we give; we inoculate ourselves in positive self-regard while continuing to make harmful choices; we wreak irreparable havoc on the ecosystems, habitats, and beings with whom we share our planet. But instead of drowning in hopelessness, how can we learn to face our reality with humility and accountability?”

Visible – Art As Policies for Care – Socially Engaged Art 2010-Ongoing” (2024).

Bought at Good Press here, a workers cooperative book + print shop based in Glasgow, Scotland.

“Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness”

By Da’Shaun L. Harrison. Link here.

“To live in a body both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs, and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black people in the United States are subject to sociopolitically sanctioned discrimination, abuse, condescension, and trauma.

Da’Shaun Harrison–a fat, Black, disabled, and nonbinary trans writer–offers an incisive, fresh, and precise exploration of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness, foregrounding the state-sanctioned murders of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people in historical analysis. Policing, disenfranchisement, and invisibilizing of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people are pervasive, insidious ways that anti-fat anti-Blackness shows up in everyday life. Fat people can be legally fired in 49 states for being fat; they’re more likely to be houseless. Fat people die at higher rates from misdiagnosis or nontreatment; fat women are more likely to be sexually assaulted. And at the intersections of fatness, Blackness, disability, and gender, these abuses are exacerbated.”

“Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture”

By Sherronda J. Brown. Link here.

“The notion that everyone wants sex–and that we all have to have it–is false. It’s intertwined with our ideas about capitalism, race, gender, and queerness. And it impacts the most marginalized among us. For asexual folks, it means that ace and A-spec identity is often defined by a queerness that’s not queer enough, seen through a lens of perceived lack: lack of pleasure, connection, joy, maturity, and even humanity.

In this exploration of what it means to be Black and asexual in America today, Sherronda J. Brown offers new perspectives on asexuality. She takes an incisive look at how anti-Blackness, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalism enact harm against asexual people, contextualizing acephobia within a racial framework in the first book of its kind. Brown advocates for the “A” in LGBTQIA+, affirming that to be asexual is to be queer–despite the gatekeeping and denial that often says otherwise.”