All posts tagged: Advocacy

The Xinjiang Ketchup Shirt

Are you interested in finding ways to stand with Turkic Muslims in their struggle for human rights in Northwest China? One of the ways to amplify knowledge about their struggle is by wearing it, making it a part of your everyday life. Many of the retailers who sell us clothes and tomato products are complicit in the oppression of Muslims in China. This shirt helps draw together those connections. Follow this link to find out more about how you can support the project. Below is a bit more about this effort from it’s creator, Joxkun. In addition to cotton, Xinjiang is also a major producer of tomatoes. Our research shows that 1/4 of the world’s tomato paste supply originates in Xinjiang. Several years ago, Juxkun had the idea to redesign a series of ketchup bottle and cans of soup in such a way to position them as an Indigenous Uyghur product. Things have changed since then. In May 2019, the Wall Street Journal published a report about western companies’ entanglement in a system of compelled labour connected to …

Chinese Student Responses to the Mass Internment of Turkic Muslims

Over the past two years I have spoken at dozens of universities and high schools about the internment of what is now an estimated 1.5 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims. I talk to students about the way poor minorities all over the world are marginalized by the language of criminality and terrorism, how policing and surveillance systems disproportionately affect them. I frame this by discussing the way Islamophobia has spread around the world over the past 20 years, resulting in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and, now, an attempt to “reeducate” an entire population of Muslims in northwest China. Undergraduate and high school students in the United States are typically really engaged by this. The use of technology to monitor, profile, and control Chinese Turkic Muslim populations grabs their attention. The arbitrary ranking system that has been used to determine who should be sent to the internment camps often puts them on the edge of their chairs. Telling the stories of seeing my Uyghur friends disappear makes them sad. When I’m talking with these students, I feel like they …