Month: September 2025

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Too many promising breakthroughs in women’s health research stall out due to a lack of funding. I’m trying to remove the roadblock for just one.

I was flat on my back on the cold tile of my bathroom floor, with a wet washcloth over my forehead, when I first learned about Dr. Marlena Fejzo’s work. It was December 2023. I was four months pregnant. While I had experienced some nausea in my first pregnancy, my second was an order of magnitude worse, and the bathroom floor was where I spent most of my time, always within arm’s reach of a toilet.

But scrolling through the headlines that day, I found a surprising glimmer of hope. Dr. Fejzo had cracked the code on understanding severe morning sickness, proving a genetic link between the mechanism of pregnancy nausea and vomiting for the first time.

As I fought off another wave of my own nausea, reading about her research felt like a lifeline. Someone was figuring this out. And if a scientist had made such a huge breakthrough, surely treatment couldn’t be too far behind. Not for me, of course. But for women after me.

Right?

It’s important to understand how limited the understanding of pregnancy nausea and vomiting (NVP) was before Dr. Fejzo’s work—and, largely, still is. Nearly seventy percent of women experience some degree of NVP in pregnancy, and yet, before Dr. Fejzo and her collaborators, doctors didn’t know what actually caused it.

Prior to 2023, the historical hypothesis was that hormones, such as estrogen and HCG, were somehow implicated in NVP—but a causal link to nausea and vomiting had never been demonstrated. Just eighteen months ago, my own OB told me, “We don’t know what gives some women morning sickness. Probably those pesky hormones.” (Pesky hormones is not, to my knowledge, a medically meaningful term.) The current edition of perennial bestseller What To Expect While You’re Expecting, updated in 2024, also states that “no one knows for sure what causes pregnancy nausea.” As if vomiting were just part of the elusive mystery of sacred motherhood, not a biological phenomenon that deserves care and answers.

Angered by the lack of medical information on the subject, Marlena Fejzo approached NVP research from the perspective of a geneticist, and that of a survivor. In 1999, Dr. Fejzo had herself suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum, or HG, the most severe form of morning sickness—a debilitating condition which can quickly lead to severe malnutrition. Her doctor was dismissive, accusing her of exaggerating her symptoms and attention-seeking, all while she was fully incapacitated and rapidly losing weight. Tragically, despite a last-resort feeding tube and seven different medications, her condition became too advanced and she lost her pregnancy at 15 weeks gestation.

In the 25 years since, Dr. Fejzo has been committed to researching HG. Her early efforts moved slowly, with little to no funding, carried out alongside her day job researching ovarian cancer. (Complicating her efforts, women vomiting to the point of incapacitation have a hard time participating in research trials.) Dr. Fejzo partnered with the Hyperemesis Education and Research Foundation to set up a web portal, then contacted affected patients individually to obtain DNA samples.

Her work took a huge leap forward when she partnered with private genetics company 23andMe in 2010 to include a question about HG in their health surveys. From those responses, and the genetic data of 50,000 women, Dr. Fejzo was able to determine that HG had a strong genetic link. The greatest risk factor was in a gene that codes the hormone GDF15—which occurs in all humans, but is produced at the highest levels by the placenta. This finding was immediately exciting to Dr. Fejzo. High GDF15 levels were already known to occur in late-stage cancer patients with cachexia, a syndrome that causes weight loss, appetite loss, and muscle wasting—all similar symptoms to pregnant people suffering from HG. The evidence was lining up.

Together with international collaborators, in late 2023, Dr. Fejzo released a groundbreaking paper in Nature, titled GDF15 linked to maternal risk of nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. Simply put, Dr. Fejzo and her collaborators had cracked the code on morning sickness. Even better? Their work suggested methods of prevention and treatment.

When Time Magazine named Dr. Fejzo one of its 2024 “Women of the Year,” they noted, “Fejzo is now applying for funding for a clinical trial to test whether the drug metformin—which is approved to treat Type 2 diabetes but is used off-label for numerous purposes and has been shown to raise GDF15 levels—works as a preventive therapy.”

I was thrilled to hear it. For women who had experienced HG before, or had a family history of it, or who could, hypothetically, take a blood test to gauge their risk—preventative therapy would be life-changing. And, in some cases, life-saving.

The problem, as it turned out, was finding the funding to do it.

Six months after I first read about Dr. Fejzo—this time, attempting to rock a newborn to sleep—I saw a post on a pregnancy message board about an incredible women’s health researcher who could not get funding for a clinical trial.

I almost scrolled by the post, convinced it couldn’t possibly be about the same researcher I’d first learned about while incapacitated on my bathroom floor. But then, I saw her name—and immediately stopped scrolling.

My first naive assumption: that the great capitalist machine would have a profit motive in preventing a condition that affects millions of women—something those women would do anything to solve. My second naive assumption: that promising research gets funded publicly. The post I was now looking at disproved both—a reality that felt equally disillusioning and enraging.

Part of the problem, as it turns out, was precisely that Dr. Fejzo’s research was such an outlier. Since Dr. Fejzo is the only full-time HG researcher in the country, grant review boards still don’t have the expertise to properly review her applications. When researchers of under-studied conditions do not have peer scientists to advocate for them and their research, their work often goes overlooked. As Caroline Criado Perez writes in her book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, “It’s not always easy to convince someone a need exists if they don’t have that need themselves.” As of writing, Dr. Fejzo has been denied seven different grants.

Learning this, my vague notions of “science” and “progress” quickly crumbled. I’d previously had some kind of faith that medical problems existed; and then scientists solved them; and then we all benefited. But of course, there is no abstract body of “science,” and scientists are people who require resources to perform their work. It had never occurred to me to question where, exactly, those resources actually came from.

Scientific breakthroughs do not, on their own, produce follow-up funding. Neither does media attention or critical acclaim. Visibility is important, of course. But it doesn’t automatically turn into dollars. As Time noted, Dr. Fejzo had intended, and still intends, to launch her clinical trial with an existing generic drug, metformin—something already known to have a good safety profile in women trying to conceive, lowering potential risk for participants. But the use of this drug is also why there’s no profit motive for pharmaceutical companies to invest some of the $83 billion—with a B—dollars they put into research and development each year: The drug already exists.

Moreover, resourcing women’s health research funding, already challenging, faces stiffer headwinds than ever. As of 2020, only 5 percent of healthcare-related R&D efforts are targeted specifically at women’s health issues—and most of that is dedicated to female-specific cancers, leaving only 1% of all medical research dollars invested in all other female-specific conditions, including maternal health conditions, menopause, endometriosis, and the like.

While the women’s health gap is a global issue, it feels particularly acute in the United States of 2025, where the current administration has also made abundantly clear that they do not consider women’s health a priority. The New York Times reported that terms such as “female,” “uterus,” and “mental health,” painted with the indiscriminate brush of “DEI,” can get a grant submission flagged for further review. According to JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association), overall grants disbursed by the National Institute of Health (NIH) are down $1.8 billion in 2025. Recently, NIH funding for a landmark women’s health study of 40-plus years was revoked, before being reinstated due to public outcry. Meanwhile, even research grants for active scientific projects face termination when they “no longer meet agency priorities.” (A quick perusal of these terminated NIH grants includes plenty with “pregnancy,” “breast,” or “ovarian” in the title… and none with “prostate,” “penile,” or “testicular.” Priorities, indeed.)

In just the last eight months, Dr. Fejzo has spoken at the White House, lectured at Harvard and Yale, and won prestigious awards. Her most recent paper in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology garnered a great deal of attention from the OB-GYN community; and her work has been extensively profiled both in major outlets such as The Guardian, and influential parenting newsletters like Emily Oster’s ParentData. There seems to be a consensus that this work is essential; that it deserves attention and further research. Yet none of this has actually translated to funding.

This enraged and frustrated me. I found the pregnancy message board post and got in touch with its author—who, it turned out, had been desperately hoping Dr. Fejzo was already conducting clinical trials, and had been devastated to learn they hadn’t even yet begun. She put me in touch with the researcher herself. “In terms of fundraising, I need all the help I can get,” Dr. Fejzo emailed me.

Over the course of several conversations, hearing about her difficulties in obtaining funding and the incredible promise of her work, I became convinced that someone needed to be a champion for Dr. Fejzo’s work. And it might as well be me. This is how I—a complete outsider, whose last brush with genetics was MOLBIO 101 twenty-odd years ago—launched myself into fundraising for medical research.

Some familiarity with the nonprofit world was a big help. Since Dr. Fejzo works at the University of Southern California, donations to her work are routed through USC as a 501(c)3 research university, making them eligible for tax deductions, some corporate matching programs, and various other mechanisms that make a donation financially advantageous. (And supporters aren’t writing a check to an entity they’d never heard of.) I also worked with USC to set up an ongoing crowdfunding page so that interested people can donate any amount directly to Dr. Fejzo’s research fund and share within their own networks, GoFundMe-style.

I’ve made deep connections in incredible women’s funding networks such as Women Moving Millions, whose bold members are dedicated to advancing women’s well-being in every arena. We’ve hosted a number of webinars where anyone interested could hear from Dr. Fejzo directly. I leaned on the advice of friends in the academic and media worlds; I tapped every alumni and professional network I had. I dug around for matching programs through organizations including #HalfMyDAF and Pivotal Ventures that could leverage existing gifts; I got social media boosts from the HER Foundation, which does incredible work supporting and connecting hyperemesis patients and providers.

And finally, I’ve spent the last 10-odd months talking up Dr. Fejzo’s work to absolutely anyone who will listen. I’ve found that friends and colleagues are pretty interested when you adopt a single-minded crusade against morning sickness. (One stone still unturned: celebrity outreach. I haven’t found a contact for Princess Kate yet, who publicly shared her harrowing experience with HG during all three of her pregnancies. If you happen to know her, put us in touch.)

We’ve raised nearly $750,000 thus far, a testament to the power of collective action. But we still have a long way to go: Dr. Fejzo needs $1.3 million to go forward with her clinical trial—a sum of money which is both significant, and yet so tiny in the scheme of research dollars.

As my fundraising has shown me, though, this is completely doable—because I’m not the only one who feels motivated by Dr. Fejzo’s work. There is a true hunger for her research among women who have previously suffered HG. In fact, many individuals have emailed Dr. Fejzo—who, again, is a researcher, not a medical doctor—to ask whether she might help their own doctors suggest a metformin protocol. Essentially, pregnant people are volunteering themselves as studies of one, outside the controls and protections of clinical trials, out of sheer desperation for a better alternative to the pain they’re suffering through.

I think back to my own experience. I did not have full-blown HG; I had a less severe experience with nausea and vomiting that, while deeply disruptive to my everyday life, was not ultimately dangerous to me or my baby. Yet I still emerged from the experience absolutely desperate for better care. I would have done anything in my power, and paid anything within my means, for the nausea to go away. For women who end up hospitalized, it’s many orders of magnitude worse.

This is also why Dr. Fejzo’s inability to access followup funding makes me so angry. I’m angry that women’s pain isn’t considered a priority. Angry that women aren’t considered reliable narrators of their own experience. Angry that a primary response to any complication during pregnancy seems to be “suck it up.” That women, and pregnant women especially, are given vague assurances like, “Your baby is fine! It’ll get what it needs,” without any evidence to support those claims. (Oh, you’re vomiting multiple times a day? Well, didn’t you want a baby? What did you expect?)

This anger is motivating. But for those suffering from HG, it’s impossible to harness that rage into action while utterly incapacitated, fearing for the safety and health of your baby and yourself. HG can be dehumanizing—taking away your ability to advocate, fight, or do much more than exist. It’s on the rest of us, then, to rally for those who can’t.

Where funding goes, and where it doesn’t, communicates something unmistakable about what society values—and clearly, addressing women’s suffering does not rank very high on that list. So what can we do? Well, we can start by crowdfunding one critical clinical trial, then another, and another. Collectively funding public good is a foundation of society, and perhaps it can continue despite the failure of official systems to support it, if we come together to put our dollars where they count.

Should there be better ways to fund this kind of research? Yes. Are there better solutions than crowdfunding out there? Maybe. But until then, it’s time we reclaim some control, and fund the damn research ourselves.

[post_title] => Let's Fund the Damn Research Ourselves [post_excerpt] => Too many promising breakthroughs in women’s health research stall out due to a lack of funding. I’m trying to remove the roadblock for just one. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => morning-sickness-womens-health-research-pregnancy-funding-science-studies-hyperemesis-gravidarum-marlena-fejzo-fundraising [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-09-26 16:45:52 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-26 16:45:52 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9639 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 19, 2025September 26, 2025

Let’s Fund the Damn Research Ourselves

by Carey Jones

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Over-processed produce is disconnecting us from where food comes from.

The way it looked promised richness and flavor. Sharp green leaves, stemless, in a transparent plastic package with the words “organic” and “triple-washed.” It was something I’d never seen before: ready-to-eat spinach with no dirt, worms, or roots. In Colombia, my home country, produce always needed to be washed. Spinach, in particular, needed extra effort, because it was always sold as a whole. I usually soaked it in vinegar and lemon for half an hour to kill any parasites or bacteria. But in the United States, everything seemed easy, fast, and reliable—no soaking required. I bought the bag of spinach, and prepared a fresh salad with goat cheese and walnuts. In less than two minutes, it was on my plate. I chewed and chewed. But while there was a hint of spinach in whatever those leaves were, it was certainly not spinach.

In Colombia, I lived in Bogotá, a densely populated and urbanized area. With reduced access to green spaces, I felt most connected to nature through food. Vegetables came from the earth and still carried the signs: roots that once absorbed nutrients, stems that transported water and sugars, bugs that had nibbled on the same leaves I would soon eat, too. Seeing all this reminded me that my food had been grown, not manufactured. It connected me to the farmers who had cultivated, cared for, and harvested it. I felt grounded when peeling, chopping, smelling, washing, and eating my produce. At the end of the day, I was manipulating something that came from the earth.

When I moved to New York City in 2022, I noticed how little people manipulated their food by comparison. Grocery stores sold pre-washed and pre-cut vegetables, and people just opened the packages and threw food on a plate and called it a meal. They didn’t need to bother getting their hands dirty, because their food was already chopped and sanitized.

To me, this disconnect was clearly separating people from nature, making food’s origins feel unfamiliar. When people don’t see, feel, and taste the whole flavor of produce, they also feel less encouraged to eat it. A mango that once grew on a tree, appears nature morte—a dead nature—in a plastic container, more like a granola bar than fruit. In Colombia, produce tasted intense and complex. Spinach, for example, tasted bitter, earthy, and savory. A friend from Peru tells me she avoided fruit her first year in New York because it tasted too sugary and artificial. Another friend from Mexico will only eat pineapple, because she thinks other fruits taste as if they’ve been diluted in a water and sugar solution.

The University of Florida found the reason that fruits, like tomatoes, taste so insipid in the U.S. is because, in the pursuit of higher yield, disease resistance, and shelf life, the genes responsible for flavor were bred out. While unsanitized produce may be risky for gastrointestinal health, GMO and ready-to-eat produce isn’t necessarily always “safer,” either. Processing facilities or farms, for example, frequently wash greens with water and chlorine. While safe in small doses, regular consumption can pose health risks. Other additives, like preservatives or antioxidants, might also cause immune diseases and antibacterial resistance.

It’s also just unnatural. A Colombian friend living in San Francisco tells me she once forgot about a bag of mandarins for two months. When she rediscovered them, they were still edible. “The mandarins were supposed to be spoiled,” she said. “What kind of component do they have to survive for months?”

It is a universal truth that Western society is obsessed with germs. We fear bacteria so much that we do everything we can to isolate ourselves from it, no matter the source. But when it comes to food, are we truly that delicate—unable to tolerate mud on our fingers or on the ground beneath our feet? Is our obsession reinforcing the binary vision that nature is dirty and dangerous, and human creations safe and clean? And what are we robbing ourselves of in the process?

Research published in Communications Psychology found that the more people interact with nature, the more fruits and vegetables they eat. While this affects us all, it disproportionately affects some of us more than others: Access to nature and socioeconomic and racial inequalities in U.S. urban areas have long been related. Simultaneously, the more urban the environment, the fewer healthy food choices are available—especially amongst Black and Hispanic communities, who often have less access to green spaces.

Community gardens and farmers markets help mitigate this gap. They also provide more affordable prices than grocery stores for organic and whole produce. I used to visit a community garden in Queens, where I learned how to compost and take care of the crops they had, allowing me to feel close to food again like I once did in Colombia. I have also tried to buy my produce in farmers markets that sell whole foods, rather than their chopped and sanitized counterparts. But access to these spaces is limited. Community gardens can’t produce the amount of food necessary to feed the whole city. Farmers markets are only in certain neighborhoods and on specific days a week, limiting access for working-class people. Not everyone has the privilege to eat spinach from the earth and not a bag.

I don’t have a solution to this disconnection. But I do know this: We understand the world through our senses. The feel of a vegetable in our hands, the smell of it, the taste, reminds us we exist because of the earth, what we feed ourselves comes from the earth, and that our cells are built from the earth, too. Our bodies evolved alongside the earth. Our ancestors touched soil, grew food, harvested crops, and fed their communities with their hands. And it seems likely for our collective wellbeing that we still need to do everything in our power to do the same.

[post_title] => Food is Meant to Be Touched [post_excerpt] => Over-processed produce is disconnecting us from where food comes from. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => food-groceries-united-states-colombia-produce-packed-pre-washed-cut-processed-gmo-ready-to-eat-fruits-vegetables-treatment [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-09-12 16:40:11 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-12 16:40:11 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8823 [menu_order] => 10 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 9, 2025September 12, 2025

Food is Meant to Be Touched

by Ana María Betancourt Ovalle

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How one word has birthed a globe-spanning tradition of resistance.

A few months ago, I was at a protest in Washington, D.C. This was not unusual. Gaza burns. The president deports with impunity. Respect for the rule of law—notably and especially by the government—now seems like the nostalgic artifact of a more innocent era, an era merely months ago. Unsurprisingly, for those of us moved by these simultaneous horror shows, expressing our anger through protest has become almost unremarkable. I’ve lost count of the number of protests I’ve attended, the catchy homemade signs I’ve crafted and seen, and the clever chants I’ve memorized. But at that particular march, something unusual happened: a chant-leader exhorted us to cry a word in my mother tongue, Urdu.

“Azadi!” she called.

“Azadi!” the crowd responded in unison.

Suddenly, the word seemed everywhere: scrawled in chalk across sidewalks and columns; emblazoned across signs. In the heart of the nation, the seat of its power, everywhere, that old watchword of uprising—Azadi.

Azadi, or freedom, is a small word. A scant five letters in both English and its original Farsi (آزادی), these five letters have birthed a globe-spanning tradition of resistance, having been shouted by students in Srinagar and Tehran, whispered in prison cells in Ankara, and sung by women in Kashmir and Delhi. A cry familiar to all children of the Middle Eastern and South Asian diaspora, myself included, Azadi is hymn, music, and lifeline. It’s a demand for dignity from its callers and from all those who answer the call.

This demand is expansive in scope and depth, inclusive of the dignity of life, of identity, and of the ability to govern your own political destiny. Azadi evokes our collective memory that freedom is claimed, not given, while narrating a people’s unified struggle for systemic social change. For those who seek the protection of the most vulnerable while preserving the dignity of all, Azadi is always within reach.

Still, for all that Azadi is, we must be clear about what it is not. It is not a slogan to be selectively invoked. It is not a justification for state violence. Azadi cannot mean the protection of innocent life only when politically convenient. Moreover, it becomes meaningless when uttered by those who do not uphold a politics grounded in human dignity. Nowhere was this distinction starker than in a recent televised address, in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu briefly switched from English to Farsi while commenting on Israel’s bombing of Iran. “Women, life, freedom. Zan, zendagi, azadi,” he said—invoking the slogan of the Iranian women’s rights movement. In that moment, the language of liberation was co-opted to justify the machinery of war. It was surreal to hear a feminist chant—professed often by Iranian women defying authoritarian rule—repurposed by the very man overseeing the brutally indiscriminate bombing of thousands of women and girls in Gaza. The slogan, stripped of its radical roots and repurposed as rhetorical cover, stood in direct contradiction to the grassroots movements that had once breathed life into it.

Creeping autocracy in the United States has for too long been ignored and shrugged off as a dysfunction that happens only in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Global South—the lawless other. But this careless, arrogant posture can no longer be supported, nor can the dangers of autocracy be reduced to a foreign export; and so, Americans chant Azadi now, because America needs it now. The past 100+ days have exhibited what the marginalized in this country have always known: that the greatest repression within America’s borders remains homegrown. Despotism collapses the political distance between nations and times, and just as fascism is rising globally, it has risen here. The myth of American exceptionalism falsely preached that our democracy was immune to the spell of demagoguery. But we know that Americans are just as capable of voting themselves into tyranny as any other people. White supremacy, toxic masculinity, and violent inequalities in rights and liberties were always part of the country’s domestic architectures. Now, from the streets to digital silos, they are plain for all to witness.

From Hungary to India, Israel to the U.S., authoritarian regimes the world over are in conversation, looking admirably upon each other. They swap notes in class, sharing tactics of repression, like aggrandizing executive power and politicizing independent institutions. But just as authoritarian regimes learn from each other, so too must we build solidarity across movements. The rhymes of history—from the surveillance of Black radicals in the U.S. to the targeting of Kashmiri students in India—demand collective study. And along with any new lessons that may arise, we must continue to echo the lessons of some of our most beloved visionaries. From Angela Davis to Edward Said to Arundhati Roy, we are reminded that global resistance is strongest when deeply rooted in local struggle.

In fact, therein lies Azadi’s greatest power: It crosses borders, languages, and faiths, moving between nations without itself becoming nationalized. It is a global grammar of defiance.

Language lives. It breathes, grows, reproduces. Azadi has done so, too, absorbing every movement and tongue it touches: Farsi, Urdu, Kurdish, Pashto, Punjabi, English. The precise journey of the word is contested; after all, linguistic borrowing is never an isolated event. Still, it carries an expansive genealogy of struggle through its travels: against gendered violence, against settler colonialism, against religious nationalism.

While I heard cries for Azadi in D.C. for the first time this year, in Indian-occupied Kashmir—the most militarized zone on earth—Azadi has been invoked for decades, having been part of the Kashmiri liberation movement since its inception. Yet as Modi’s India forbids conversations about the region and brands it as sedition, as students and organizers are arrested for expressing their desire for freedom, as the indigenous Kashmiri struggle for self-determination persists—Azadi remains the movement’s heartbeat.

Long serving as the anthem of the Kashmiri separatist movement, now that Azadi can no longer be expressed in the open, it hides itself in art or in niche digital spaces not yet subject to state discipline. Digital speech, however, is increasingly policed. On platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Indian authorities now block, geofence, or suspend accounts that challenge its narrative. Content from advocacy groups like Stand With Kashmir is censored using the same tools of repression that platforms in the U.S. deploy against pro-Palestinian activists—algorithms, shadowbanning, keyword suppression. Surveillance and censorship, previously characterized as exclusive to so-called illiberal regimes, are now a feature of the liberal democracies just catching up.

As all this occurs, state actors escalate their repression of dissent in the United States. Trumpism has made it clear what can and cannot be said: speech critical of the Trump administration is met with swift retribution; and speech challenging domestic and foreign policy is quickly vilified, as seen by the vicious response to ICE protests in California earlier this summer. Meanwhile, students protesting for Palestine in the U.S. now face the same brutal state retaliation we’ve long associated with authoritarian regimes abroad—even though the U.S. has always had its own archive of violent suppression, from the surveillance and silencing of civil rights activists and abolitionists to the the crackdown on anti–Vietnam War protesters after them. Today, much to Trump’s delight, some of the most prestigious law firms have capitulated to executive pressure, agreeing to perform approximately $1 billion worth of pro-bono labor for Trump’s retributive pet projects. Activists and pro-Palestine advocates have been doxxed, fired, expelled, and/or blacklisted. All the while, institutional liberalism bends the knee: DEI offices that once promised safe harbor for marginalized voices now fall silent or side with power; liberal media outlets fire staff who speak out against atrocities in Gaza. The suppression of speech, criminalization of protest, surveillance of dissent—these are global patterns, and we are not exempt. Arguably, if American exceptionalism matters here at all, it will be in its ability to normalize this authoritarian bent worldwide.

And yet resistance continues. The same dignity Azadi rallies for abroad is now demanded here. On the steps of American universities. In its hallowed institutions. At the foot of the Capitol.

For all that Azadi gives, it demands something of us—namely that we do more than simply bear witness. When we chant Azadi, we are not just echoing other movements, past and present, but entering into dialogue with them, from Kashmir to Kabul to Tehran. This is not mimicry, but lineage, as Azadi reminds us in every generation that our rights are not guaranteed and must be renewed through struggle.

It is not enough, then, to be the appreciative, passive inheritor of a tradition of resistance; one must mobilize. This means texting rideshares, learning how to administer basic first aid for those whose names you don’t yet know, and tracking jail releases of those who you just met and marched alongside. This means disagreement without collapse, and accountability without exile. This means spending hours in rooms with bad lighting and too many opinions, trying to move toward consensus anyway.

If Azadi is to continue to mean something lasting, we’ll need to carry it beyond the chants—into policy fights, mutual aid networks, protective kinship, and more. Because Azadi is not metaphor, it is mandate, and requires all of us to answer its call.

Call and Response:

Hum kya chahte? Azadi!
What do we want? Freedom!

Chheen ke lenge—Azadi!
We will snatch it—Freedom!

Hai haq hamara—Azadi!
It is our right—Freedom!

Zor se bolo—Azadi!
Say it louder—Freedom!

Hai jaan se pyaari—Azadi!
We love it more than life—Freedom!

Tum kuch bhi kar lo, hum leke rahenge—Azadi!
Do what you want, we will still win it—Freedom!

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September 2, 2025September 3, 2025

America Needs Azadi

by Safiyah Zaidi

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