Cartoon by Marian Kamensky

Law student Hoda Katebi: Iran protests are about ‘total liberation’

By Anne Brice

UC Berkeley: Since protests broke out in Iran nearly three months ago, sparked by the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini by Iran’s so-called morality police, Katebi has been an outspoken supporter of the protesters.

“The main demand that we’re hearing is, ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadî,’ or, ‘Woman, Life, Freedom,’ which is a Kurdish, anti-imperialist, feminist, anti-capitalist chant,” she says. “I think that that’s what is really hitting at the core and distinguishes these protests from others before — this is one that’s calling for nothing short of the end of dictatorship, which means everything from women’s rights to education to class, gender, everything.”

Although a senior official in the Iranian government confirmed on Monday, Dec. 5, that the morality police had been shut down — the first concession by the government since the protests began — the mandatory dress code remains in place. It’s unclear how the government plans to enforce the laws moving forward.

A transcript of Berkeley Voices episode 103: Law student Hoda Katebi: Iran protests are about ‘total liberation.’ is below.

Narration: This is Berkeley Voices. I’m Anne Brice.

Hoda Katebi: My name is Hoda Katebi. I’m an Iranian American writer and community organizer and movement strategist, and I’m a 3L at the law school.

I run a worker cooperative called Blue Tin Production, which is an immigrant, refugee and working-class women of color manufacturing worker co-op, hoping to set new international standards in labor and sustainability within fashion supply chains.

We’re also building a massive community space and abolitionist organizing hub in Chicago called 63rd House in collaboration with youth Black and brown organizers.

Narration: After former President Trump imposed the Muslim travel ban in 2017, when Katebi saw people who looked like her in the media, they weren’t attorneys, but always people who needed help.

Hoda Katebi: There’s just a huge lack of attorneys of color who have good politics. And so, I think that was just one thing that I was thinking about in the back of my mind.

And as I continued to do research on different state-based tools of violence against Muslim communities and communities of color, I learned about the national security entry exit registration system that Bush implemented right after 9/11 that caused over 30,000 people to be deported and not one — not one single quote-unquote domestic terrorist found, of course, and the ways in which lawyers aided a lot of that work, who were trusted in the community and pushed people to register — and understanding my own trauma of loved ones interlinked with a lot of these sorts of legal failures — I think made me begrudgingly come to law school to help fill some of those gaps rather than to become, like, a practicing 9-to-5 attorney.

Narration: Katebi was born in Oklahoma in 1995. Her parents immigrated to the U.S. from Iran in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War to earn their doctorate degrees.

In sixth grade, Katebi started wearing a headscarf, or hijab, to build a deeper relationship with Islam and to express her Muslim identity.

Hoda Katebi: I think that played a huge factor in my own growth and sense of self and all the learning and unlearning I had to do growing up as visibly Muslim in that very white supremacist school and neighborhood.

I do think there was a massive shift both in my own sense of self with respect to just being a middle schooler and losing all your friends and being bullied incessantly and being assaulted — you know, all the fun stuff that comes with being visibly Muslim in the South during the Bush years. So, I think a lot of that played a huge role in shaping my own personal growth, as well as my relationship to politics, especially when it comes to surveillance and how clothes are actually inherently political. And so, a lot of my work, professionally and personally, has sort of stemmed from a lot of those experiences >>>