Steve Salaita

The Catch

A reflection on the unreliability of impulse and common sense.

My family recently made the short drive up to New Jersey to visit relatives. I don’t normally associate Jersey with aquatic leisure, but the air was hot and the state, contrary to its unfortunate image in pop culture, is filled with natural beauty, so off we went to the shore for some swimming and sun.

When Critical Thinking Becomes Undesirable: Ivana Perić Interviews Steven Salaita

A conversation with Ivana Perić of Novosti (Croatia) about ostracism, recalcitrance, and phony charges of antisemitism.

This is the original English version of a conversation I recently had with Ivana Perić of Novosti, which was translated into Croatian and can be found here.

Ivana Perić: In your address delivered for the students at Virginia Tech, you talk about punishment and reward in the corporate university. Let’s start the same way you start in your address, by mapping out your relationship with Virginia Tech?

Steven Salaita: It’s a complicated relationship. A lot of people in my family and in my wife’s family went to Virginia Tech, including my father and both of my siblings. I spent a lot of time on campus in my youth, so when I was offered a job there it felt like an exciting opportunity. Tech is the kind of place where retention is a concern, especially with young faculty and faculty of color. It wasn’t a worry with me. My wife and I were thrilled to be in Blacksburg. But in the end, as with all campuses, Tech’s interests aligned with centers of power—in this case military power—and I had to go. It wasn’t a pleasant separation.

For Palestinians, Liberation is the Strategy

Amid widescale protest among Israeli Jews, it’s critical to remember that Palestinian liberation makes no room to redeem the colonizer’s society.

The coming of Ramadan in Palestine each year is accompanied by intensification of Israeli violence. Whatever the reason, it always happens. Perhaps Israel senses a certain Palestinian vulnerability during the month. Perhaps in an expression of punitive authority, Israel takes pleasure in ruining the Palestinians’ celebration. Or perhaps Israel simply doesn’t know what else to do. Abusing the native is integral to Zionism.

Why Did Israel Execute Shireen Abu-Akleh?

Simply put, because she was Palestinian.

Immediately after Israeli soldiers executed Al-Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu-Akleh and fired at a group of her colleagues, observers began asking how such a horrible thing could happen. Why would Israel murder a journalist well-known throughout the Arab World? A noncombatant wearing appropriate press gear? A high-profile Palestinian with U.S. citizenship? At best, it seemed like a terrible PR move. It didn’t make any sense.

The Importance of Being Flippant

Obsessing over the fate of the settler when discussing decolonization is an insidious practice.

Mohammed El-Kurd, the young Palestinian poet and activist made famous because his home near Jerusalem was stolen by a guy from Long Island who looks like a slightly more unkempt Captain Caveman, recently found himself in yet another scandal. (Any vocal Palestinian with name recognition is destined to live a scandalous existence.)

During an Israeli Apartheid Week event at Duke University, somebody asked what the slogan “from the river to the sea” means for Israeli Jews. El-Kurd reportedly answered, “I don’t care. I truly, sincerely don’t give a f….” The audience “roared its approval.”

Listening to Zionists is a Pitiful Experience

Zionism doesn’t simply compromise people’s ethics; it inhibits their ability to comprehend simple ideas about the world.

Put aside what they profess to believe and consider instead how Zionists understand Israel. Not “Israel and Palestine.” (You might want to lose that formulation altogether.) Just Israel, as in the settler colony built atop Palestine.

Punishment and Reward in the Corporate University

An address delivered for the Graduate and Professional Student Senate Annual Research Symposium at Virginia Tech.

Let me start by mapping out my relationship with Virginia Tech. My brother went to Virginia Tech. My sister went to Virginia Tech. My father went to Virginia Tech. My father’s brother went to Virginia Tech. My two brothers-in-law went to Virginia Tech. My sister-in-law went to Virginia Tech. Much of my high school class went to Virginia Tech.

I grew up an hour west of here, in a border town called Bluefield, and spent what must have been a hundred weekend days in Blacksburg.

And I taught for nine years at Virginia Tech.

The Arab Color Wheel

Are Arabs white? An exegesis of the impossible question.

We begin with an apparently straightforward question: are Arabs white? People have answered the question in book form, in scholarly articles, in legislative briefs, and in thousands of social media comments.

It is a question with no singular answer; indeed, it often evokes answers unrelated to the question. We cannot neatly categorize Arabs into any racial identity. Really, it’s a question about the ambiguities of whiteness (and the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness). We don’t know what whiteness is, exactly, or maybe we don’t agree on the definition, but we do know that it cannot (or will not) accommodate Arabs.

Internationalism and Solidarity Today

A transcript of remarks delivered at Making Worlds Bookstore, Philadelphia, on November 9, 2021.

I’m going to ask for your patience and possibly forgiveness at the outset. I haven’t done any public speaking in a while, a practice that has always been a source of mixed feelings for me. I normally speak off the cuff about the topic at hand, or about a million offhand topics, but for this event I decided to compose my thoughts. I want to be precise to the degree that I’m capable. It seems unkind, anyway, to subject you to a bunch of tangents that may or may not amount to something coherent. I’m more interested in the ensuing discussion and so I’ll try to give us something useful to think about.

Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian

Reflections on what the putative assassin of Robert F. Kennedy has meant to my generation of Arab Americans.

Convicted of murdering Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, Sirhan Sirhan is one of those rare figures whose name everyone knows, but whom nobody much discusses. Recently, however, he has been in the news again.

I remember being a kid, maybe an early teenager, sitting at the table with my father. He was cheerful that afternoon, a rare occasion in those days. He was my hero, but my insistence on doing poorly in school had caused lots of strain and we spent much of our time at loggerheads. He greeted rebellion with even more severe punishment. My father was kind and decent, but relentlessly confident in his idea of discipline.