Profs promote Antifa-esque video encouraging followers to 'f**k sh*t up'

Two university academics face questions about their alleged involvement in the Jan. 31 protests in the New York City subway system. 

University of Buffalo professor Nitasha Dhillon and New York University adjunct instructor Amin Husain, co-founders of the leftist movement “Decolonize this Place,” featured video clips on the DTP Twitter feed, showing support for disruptive gatherings and refusing to pay fares on the nation’s largest public transit system. 

Among the protesters’ demands was to effectively ban police officers from patrolling the New York City subway system, a public transit system arguably at the top of terrorists’ lists to strike as well as “free” subway rides. The group also demanded an end to “harassment” by police.

Decolonize This Place’s website describes the organization as “collectives that seek to resist, unsettle, and reclaim the city...we aim to cultivate a politics of autonomy, solidarity, mutual aid with a long-term, multi-generational horizon of decolonial, anti-capitalist, and feminist liberation…” 

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”For us, decolonization necessitates abolition. But what does abolition demand? Not only does it demand the abolition of prisons and police, bosses and borders, but as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write, it’s “the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society” the site explains.

On the group’s website they had posted an event encouraging the gathering on January 31st, 2020 as a “city-wide convergence” at Grand Central Station with phrases such as “fuck the police” used multiple times. 

One tweet from the group shows a video of three masked individuals encouraging followers to “fuck shit up.” 

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”The streets are ours. The trains our ours. The walls are ours. This moment is ours. How will you and your crew build and fuck shit up for #FTP3 on #J31 (THIS FRIDAY)? Issa mothafuckin’ movement,” the tweet reads. 

The video’s subtitles state, “to all our friends, families, students, wage workers, teachers, musicians, transit workers, Fuck the Police 3 is coming J[anuary]31, right here in New York City. We encourage you to link up with your friends, your family, and think of the ways you can move in affinity to build and fuck shit up on J31 all day long.” 

The group’s Twitter feed includes multiple video clips from the subway protests, including individuals jumping turnstiles and not paying to enter the subway, one individual dressed in a police uniform while wearing a pig mask, and multiple images of graffiti on subway station walls.

According to the New School’s Vera List Center, Dhillon and Husain were both “deeply involved in Occupy Wall Street” in 2010. 

A page on the University of Santa Cruz’s website promoting an April event with Dhillon and Husain associates them with “Decolonize This Place.” Neither Dhillon nor Husain responded to Campus Reform in time for publication. 

Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @Jess_Custodio