Taryn Thomas

Thank you for having me.

Yeah.

So I think it starts before October 7th that I used to be a Black Lives Matter activist.

Like when I'm 16 years old, this was like during quarantine 2020, right after George Floyd got killed.

And I remember seeing like Palestinian flags like at our Black Lives Matter protests.

And so when I saw this, I would ask our leaders like, you know, why, you know, why are Palestinian flags here?

And they would say that, you know, for us to be free, Palestine has to be free.

And they would utilize the same words.

Even now we're seeing the same language of apartheid, dispossession, colonization.

And it kind of struck me as like a black woman.

And I think more so just because of identity politics and kind of like, I like mistook that familiarity for understanding this conflict

and had some intellectual shortcuts when it comes to understanding this very complex and nuanced history and just compressing it into an oppressor versus oppressed narrative.

Yeah.

And so then I would want to say, like, give context on what had happened on Stanford's campus, because I think that led me to pull away from the movement itself was specifically after October 7th.

By October 20th, Stanford already put up its encampment, a sit in to stop the genocide.

This is before the families had even finished identifying its dead.

This is a week before a single soldier had even crossed into Gaza.

And so we were already labeling it a genocide.

And so we knew how the story was going to end.

And we were already protesting.