Since October 2023, I have become more certain about the human cost of dehumanization, and less certain about the simple judgments we make about the people navigating it.

It begins when a person becomes a label before they are allowed to be a person: Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish, Muslim, immigrant. We stop picturing the mother trying to reach a hospital, the child waiting for medicine, the family wondering whether someone they love will make it home. Suffering becomes explainable, then defensible, then ordinary.

What has unsettled me most is that dehumanization can survive exposure to suffering. We have seen images of dead and injured children, destroyed homes, overwhelmed hospitals and families searching for food, often from the screens in our own hands, and still found ways to debate whether the people in them deserve our empathy.

For me, this has never been abstract. In the West Bank, my uncle Nedal, with brain cancer had his treatment delayed by nearly a year because of unpredictable travel and movement restrictions imposed by the Israeli military. My 16-year-old disabled cousin Tamer died while my aunt was trying to get him to a hospital because of a checkpoint.

What has unsettled me most is that dehumanization can survive exposure to suffering.

I have been speaking about Palestine for decades. But I make calculations, too. As a business leader, I have sometimes stayed quiet about things I believe because I worried speaking could hurt my company, my employees or relationships we depend on. I have hesitated to tell people I am Palestinian when I don’t have the emotional bandwidth for what might follow. And after posting about my own experience with ICE raids and how one of our customers was using our technology to help protect undocumented patients, I took the post down after criticism. I still think about that choice. Sometimes I believe protecting myself or others was the right calculation. Other times, I’m not so sure.

That is why I keep coming back to what happened with rapper Macklemore and pop star Ed Sheeran. Not because I think Sheeran is uniquely responsible, but because I recognize something familiar in the calculations we all make.

Who gets to speak?

Macklemore used his opening set on Sheeran’s tour to say “Free Palestine” and criticize Israeli government actions in Gaza and the West Bank. After venue owners, namely, Robert Kraft, refused to host shows with Macklemore on the lineup, Macklemore was removed from the remaining U.S. dates. Other opening acts then withdrew in solidarity.

There is a larger question here about who gets to speak, and who has the power to decide. Dehumanization and restrictions on expression can reinforce each other. When people become abstractions, it becomes easier to tolerate the silencing of their lived experience. And when control over expression becomes concentrated among fewer people and institutions, individuals have less power to challenge what is happening around them. When fewer people are able to share what’s happening to them, it also becomes easier not to understand them.

That makes what we do with the power we still have matter even more.

Maybe responsibility also requires grace. Not absolution or pretending earlier choices had no consequences, but enough room for people to reckon, listen, learn, change their minds and act differently.

Sheeran himself is a good example of this. He has said removing Macklemore was not his decision. In the days that followed, he said he was having difficult conversations with venue owners, promoters and activists. Then, at his first show back in Philadelphia, he addressed the controversy publicly. He acknowledged making mistakes, spoke about the horror of October 7 and Jewish pain, called what is happening in Gaza “catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate,” and said the systemic injustice in the West Bank could not be overlooked.

In a way, his response became part of the point. Maybe responsibility also requires grace. Not absolution or pretending earlier choices had no consequences, but enough room for people to reckon, listen, learn, change their minds and act differently.

His words also raise the next question: What comes after recognition? Sheeran has enormous influence. Most of us have much less. What he does next, how we ensure the news cycle doesn’t move on without accountability, and what each of us does with whatever power we have, is part of what comes next.

The people who showed up at the Philadelphia concert made calculations too. Some protested outside. Some stayed home. Others went inside. Buying, keeping or selling a ticket, requesting a refund or choosing not to go may feel smaller than the decisions made by artists or billionaires, but they are still choices about how we use the power available to us.

Self-preservation is human. Fear is human. Complicity can be human too. Recognizing it gives us the chance to choose deliberately.

It’s human to turn complicated systems into simple stories, assigning heroes, villains, cowards and bystanders so we know where to place our judgment. The harder thing is examining the systems around them and our own place inside them.

Many of us aren’t the person with the microphone or the billionaire with the influence. We stay quiet when a friend says something we know is wrong because speaking would make dinner uncomfortable. We see something at work that bothers us and decide it isn’t ours to address. We benefit from an employer, investment, institution, relationship or system while knowing something about it makes us uncomfortable.

I know I do this constantly.

Power doesn’t sit in one place. We each hold some of it, even if it’s not equal. The same is true of responsibility.

What do you do with the power you’ve been given?

The point is not to find the perfect action. It’s to recognize the leverage we actually have, weigh the tradeoffs and decide where to use it. Sometimes that will mean speaking up, influencing in the background or staying quiet. We don’t necessarily owe everyone our rationale, but we do owe ourselves an honest reckoning with it.

In Philadelphia, there are concrete ways to start. CAIR-Philadelphia has filed a Right-to-Know request seeking records about how Macklemore’s removal from Lincoln Financial Field was decided and launched a public letter campaign asking for transparency. Philadelphians can read or sign that letter, follow what the records request reveals, and ask the Eagles, stadium operator and city-related entities involved in the publicly owned stadium how decisions about expression are made.

This moment is ultimately about the mirror we must hold to ourselves as we hold it to Sheeran: what we do when we are close enough to power to have agency, but tempted to tell ourselves it is not ours to use.

Self-preservation is human. Fear is human. Complicity can be human too. Recognizing it gives us the chance to choose deliberately.

The circumstances of our birth are arbitrary. Our responsibility begins with what we do with the power our birth lottery gave us. If it had put you on the other side of the checkpoint, the border, the bombing or the political system, what would you want someone with your current freedom, money, vote, platform or access to do?

Then ask what is yours to do.

Yasmine Mustafa is the Founder and President of ROAR.

The Citizen welcomes guest commentary from community members who represent that it is their own work and their own opinion based on true facts that they know firsthand.

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