The protests that proliferated on the streets of Ferguson, Baltimore, and everywhere the BLM movement inspired activists reminded me of the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt several years earlier. As an Egyptian American with family members and friends who put their lives on the line during that nation's historic 2011 revolution, I heard in the demands made by BLM protestors an echo of those that rang out in Tahrir Square in Cairo. In an article that appeared in Ebony days after the killing of Freddy Gray in Baltimore, Loyola Law School professor Priscilla Ocen and I wrote, "Poverty and the police state prevailed in Ferguson and Cairo, Baltimore and Benghazi. Soldiers and patrol cars closely monitored city blocks—where unemployed youth roamed with little purpose and even shallower prospects for the future. Emaciated communities, rich in only nihilism and hopelessness, kept their residents trapped." Many of the symptoms that gave rise to the Arab Spring were similar to those that ignited the Movement for Black Lives. Understanding these parallels helped mobilize non-black Muslim Americans to stand in solidarity and be active participants with the Movement for Black Lives. These precedents primed many Arab and Muslim American youth to stand alongside their black allies as the Movement for Black Lives emerged and pushed forward.

XREF: Connects the Arab Spring (2011) and the Movement for Black Lives, showing how shared symptoms of poverty and police state conditions produced parallel uprisings. QUESTION: Could explore how these transnationally shared experiences of marginalization actually mobilized solidarity across racial lines.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 434