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One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.
As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the US, as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.
This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States, in family rooms, on college campuses, on city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.
MODERATOR
Dr. Carmen Rojas is the president and CEO of Marguerite Casey Foundation. Under her leadership, which started in 2020, MCF launched the prestigious Freedom Scholar award and has granted more than $323 million in funding to dozens of organizations doing the hard work of shifting power to those people who have long been excluded from having it. Prior to MCF, Dr. Rojas was the cofounder and CEO of the Workers Lab, an innovation lab that partners with workers to develop new ideas that help them succeed and flourish.
PANELIST
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. The start of his journalism career coincided with the start of the war on terror, and over the following decade, he reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, Washington Post, GQ, NPR, Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 novels that changed our world. His second novel, What Strange Paradise, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. It was also named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and several other publications. His new nonfiction book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, won the Palestine Book Award and the National Book Award. Omar lives near Portland, Oregon, where he is on the faculty of the Pacific University MFA in
Dr. Barbara Ransby is the John D. MacArthur University Chair and Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Black Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she directs the Social Justice Initiative. She is a widely acclaimed historian of the Black Freedom Movement, an award-winning writer, and a longtime activist. Dr. Ransby is a member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is recipient of numerous awards, including the Franz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. She is a member of the editorial board of the London-based journal, Race and Class. Her current political commitments include work with The Rising Majority, The Movement for Black Lives, Scholars for Social Justice, and the Women Donor’s Network. She is the author of three books, most notably the multi-award-winning Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement.
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