As the Baltimore uprising began to take hold in reaction to the killing of Freddie Gray by Baltimore police officers, an unassuming tweet about a young African American man in New York made the rounds through Arab and Arab-American social media:

“Last night in jail I (Black) was wearing a #Palestine T-shirt sitting next to a Palestinian wearing a #BlackLivesMatter T-shirt.”

This tweet was simple, but the message was powerful. It spoke to a sense of solidarity, movement building and empathy we’ve only begun to see flickers of in Michigan’s Arab American and African American communities. 

However, these flickers will never realize their potential of becoming flames of social change if we do not immediately begin finding and eliminating the roots of racism within our communities – a pernicious cancer that has kept us at odds with one another instead of focused on the structural, political and media disenfranchisement we face together. 

At the same time the uplifting tweet appeared in our social media feeds, the words “thugs”, “criminals”, “gangbangers” and “animals” overflowed with judgmental condemnation of the protesters in Baltimore – shameful reactions coming from our Arab American friends, neighbors and allies to the pockets of violence that erupted as more news was revealed about Freddie Gray – a man illegally detained and assaulted by police who left him dying without medical attention for hours with a head injury, a severed spinal cord and crushed trachea. 

Of course, we recognize that not everyone in the Michigan Arab American community shared these sentiments, just as not every protester engaged in violence. In fact, the vast majority – thousands of protesters – were peaceful.   

For those who did criticize protesters, their first Facebook post or tweet wasn’t condemning the structural racism that resulted in the brutal killing of Freddie Gray, the broken criminal justice system that warehouses black men in jails and prisons devastating communities, the lack of basic educational and economic opportunities in our poorest communities, the poisonous lead levels in Gray’s body, or the demonization of brown and black people by our politicians and the media. 

No, many only felt compelled to speak out when condemning the protesters. Protesters, who through “riots,” as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, were using “the language of the unheard.”

We’ve written previously of the hypocrisy of  Arab Americans cheering the violence of the Arab Spring, Intifadas and other uprisings across the Middle East, and in the same breath, and with little self-reflection, indicting Black protesters as “thugs” and “criminals.” 

Ironically, some posts criticized protesters for throwing rocks at police; a scenario we’ve seen play out time and again with Palestinian children hurling rocks at the Israeli army to similarly express their frustration and desperation with a system stacked against them. 

In December, we wrote: “By repeating these tired tropes, the Arab American community is not only saying that these protesters are powerless, but as a community, they are saying that they are not worthy of power, or even hope.”

Today, we offer that by repeating these tired tropes, Arab Americans are no better than the media and politicians they criticize for labeling Arab Americans as terrorists and extremists in an effort to dismiss the Arab plight and concerns. 

By repeating these tired tropes, Arab Americans are ignoring a portion of our communities that identify as both Arab and Black and simultaneously face societal anti-Black and anti-Arab racism as well as intra-racism from our respective communities.

By repeating these tired tropes, Arab Americans are diligently playing the role of model minority – a social construct that uses identity politics to separate racial groups and propel the myth that hard work alone creates opportunities for communities regardless of the structural barriers in place. 

This tangled mess of orientalism and Arab supremacy has the Arab American community believing the elusive American dream is a shield that protects us from poverty, racism, and ignorance, rather than the American reality that is a sword used to imprison, kill, and subjugate communities of color. 

Since 9/11, anti-Arab bigotry has been increasing steadily resulting in a dramatic increase in hate crimes against those who are perceived to be Arab and/or Muslim. Federal, state, and local authorities continue to engage in wholesale discriminatory profiling of Arab Americans in the name of national security. Federal agencies have “mapped” these communities based on crude stereotypes and conducted suspicionless searches and arbitrary and indefinite detentions of Arabs and Muslims across the country, including at our airports and border crossings. They’ve filled databases with reports of the movements, First Amendment protected activities and community relationships of Arab and Muslim Americans.

And slowly, Arab Americans are learning what African Americans have long felt –  the realization of the dream of liberty, justice and freedom for all is too often stopped by the reality of isolation – the isolation of poverty; the isolation of racism; the isolation of sexism, intolerance and suspicion. 

It is, in fact, this isolation that killed: 

Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Milton Hall in Saginaw, Eric Garner in New York, Mustafa Mattan in Fort McMurray,  Mike Brown in Ferguson, Deah Barakat in Chapel Hill, Yusor and Razan Abu-Salha in Chapel Hill, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Walter Scott in North Charleston, Abdo Ali Ahmed in Reedley, and the list, tragically, goes on and on and on. 

Justice may never come for these men and women, but our collective commitment and dedication to breaking the walls of isolation between our communities will ensure they did not die in vain – their legacies can live on through a resilient and powerful solidarity movement.

A revolution is coming. We can choose to sit at home finger-pointing and name-calling behind computer screens or we can take to the streets with one voice dedicated to radical change. 

-Rana Elmir is the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan (ACLU-MI). Dawud Walid is the executive director of Council of American Islamic Relations in Michigan (CAIR-MI).