Professor Asha Samad-Matias. An expert. A witness. An expert witness. An expert witness to theory, social life, and social justice. So many of us are mourning with her passing. Her death. Her death an exclamation point. Her passing a passing of radical politics and the consolidation of conservatism in our social and academic spheres. Prof. Samad-Matias’s name does not show up in public media discourse or in institutional discourses. She served the City College of New York for decades and has shaped the radical politics that weaves through a white institution in the heart of Black Harlem. A sign of the work she did that was vital but never in the institutional public eye. She was an expert witness on so many fronts, a beacon of light during dark times, and the most affirming soul.
I came to interview at the City College of New York for a tenure-track Socio-Cultural Anthropology Assistant Professor position in May 2013. During my job talk, Prof. Samad-Matias offered the most generous greeting that made me, as a nervous junior scholar, feel welcome. Feel welcomed. Feel in my skin. Through the course of my talk, her smile broadened and she shook her head to affirm my points. I felt connected and heard; I am grateful to Prof. Asha Samad-Matias. I knew immediately that I wanted to share space and take part in practices of world-building with her. It would be a great honor to be her colleague. I joined the department in January 2014.
Prof. Asha Samad-Matias was an expert across fields, spaces, and institutions. When we think of the term expert witness, we move into the space of the courtroom. In this respect, Prof. Samad-Matias was widely recognized as an expert in the legal sense. As a result of her incredible work with regards to refugees, asylum-seekers, and justice with regards to migration, she was brought in numerous times to serve as an expert witness in these legal cases. Her presence, her scholarship, and her testimony were vital to the lives of marginalized communities.
When in conversation with Prof. Asha Samad-Matias, one immediately recognizes her as an expert witness for and across scholarly fields. As a senior lecturer, Prof. Samad-Matias has taught about refugees, Asia, Caribbean, Africa, Latin America, gender and sexuality studies, Islamic Studies, migration, and race. With a difficult teaching load of 8 or 9 classes a year, she was easily one of the most voracious readers I have ever met. With my recent interest in refugee studies and Muslim Studies, Prof. Samad-Matias had read so much and cited all the new books that I did not know. In addition, she could provide theoretical and methodological connections across fields that made her an expert witness in the truest interdisciplinary sense. Her scholarly interests stretched across continents while staying attuned to the intimate and yet oppressive colonial and imperial crossovers in the US and within the academy.
Within the classroom, she was an expert witness on race, education, and inequity. Her classes on refugees, migration, Islam, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean were vital to students learning sophisticated theory and seeing themselves in the class. As the winner of the teaching award for the Colin Powell School (school of the social sciences), she infused her classes with vibrant texts that prepared students for positions of leadership on campus and in our worlds. My dear friend, colleague, and sister Asale Angel-Ajani added, “Asha was a teacher in the truest biggest sense, the kind of teacher that bell hooks wrote about, the kind of teacher that made us recall the names of our ancestors.” With so many first-generation students, students of color, and working-class and working-poor students in our classes, Prof. Samad-Matias was absolutely a lifeline. In addition, for these students who are also in the STEM fields, she brought many students into Anthropology as a second major that provided an expansive interdisciplinary training and vital mentorship in the service of justice.
Prof. Asha Samad-Matias provided expert witnesses and Black feminist theory’s emphasis on difference and story-telling with regard to institutional life. As historically white institutions, such as the City College of New York, today emphasize their commitment to diversity and showcase the many photos of students of color as metonymic of the larger institution, Prof. Samad-Matias’s politics foreground the complex histories and politics of our educational institutions. Her politics and her presence were an archive that complicated, in the most necessary ways, the narratives of educational institutions. Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Adrienne Rich organized in the 1960s and 1970s to challenge the new admissions requirements at the City College of New York that would have limited admission for Black and Brown communities in New York City. Through their activism, they were able to make the college live its mission, and they played a key role in the emergence of Black Studies and Puerto Rican Studies at CCNY and across CUNY (Ferguson, 2012).
Through her time at CCNY, Prof. Samad-Matias has seen the changes, celebrations, and assaults on Black Studies at CCNY. With Ethnic Studies departments as scapegoats for economic challenges and often the first to get cut during financially precarious times along with Women’s and Gender Studies (see Duggan, 2004), she experienced and fought against the defunding and dismantling of Black Studies as a department. With her activism and organizing with various Black faculty on campus, she has been a part of the Black Studies program. A vital necessity in Harlem, but never fully supported by educational institutions.
Prof. Samad-Matias supported students of color in their demands for equity and political voice. With Black Feminist scholar bell hooks having spent time at CCNY, Prof. Samad-Matias is part of an important history of activist and women of color feminist/Black Feminists at City College of New York. She was a supporter of the cultural center on campus that trained and organized leaders, who were demanding justice in and outside of CCNY. She was a mentor and advisor to many student clubs on the campus. With US empire’s far reach, she spoke out against US-led wars, challenged various forms of settler-colonialism locally and across the world, and challenged anti-Muslim racism. Prof. Samad-Matias was an expert witness who shared these stories and continued to support justice-centered leadership among the student body, across the city, and across the globe. She embodied and practiced scholar-activist-mentor-leadership.
Furthermore, as an important scholar teaching Islam and Muslim communities, she pushed for Islamic Studies at City College of New York. With so many Muslim American and Muslim international students at the college, her classes provided an important map to Islam across the world, Islam in the US, and Islam in New York City. With the long histories of Black Muslim communities in Harlem and the growth of South Asian, SWANA region, and African Muslim communities in New York City, her classes provided such an important theoretical and affirmative spaces for students.
You have been such an important leader. You have been so many things to so many of us. You have been a teacher, a mentor, a sister, a mother, an aunty, and a dear friend. You made home for us in place that were not habitable for people of color. Your practices of space-making were vital for our lives. In your passing, I hope we can continue to create equitable worlds and critique power. I have learned so much from you and I promise to try my best to see, share, and follow your footsteps. My sister Asale Angel-Ajani reflected that your life “is a road map to uplift and community building—it’s a guide for us to know that we are not alone and importantly, that we will not be erased by these institutions.” You will always be the brightest light.
Stanley Thangaraj is the Inaugural James E. Hayden Chair and Professor for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Social Justice as well as the Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Social Justice at Stonehill College. His interests are at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. His monograph Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity (NYU Press, 2015) looks at the relationship between race and gender in co-ethnic-only South Asian American sporting cultures. His newest research is on Kurdish America, which received the 2015 American Studies Association “Comparative Ethnic Studies” award and 2023 Association for Asian American Studies Social Caucus Faculty Article award.
Professor Asha Samad-Matias was the first Muslim woman professor I ever met. As a young Muslim woman at City College, I was in awe of Professor Samad-Matias’ presence in the classroom and in the university at large. I took my first anthropology class ever, “Immigration and Refugee Movements,” with Professor Samad-Matias during my sophomore year and though I was a psychology major at the time, I registered for her class and it changed the course of my life, forever. Selfishly, I wanted to witness a Muslim woman who wore the hijab proudly in a space that was often hostile to women who looked like her and myself. I learned what it meant to be an educator in that classroom. I hope to honor Professor Samad-Matias’s legacy by always showing up for my students the same way Professor Asha Samad-Matias showed up for me and hundreds of students during her long tenure at City College. May she rest in eternal peace.
Sara Seweid-DeAngelis is an advanced Ph.D. candidate in Feminist Studies with a minor in Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She comes from an inter- and trans-disciplinary background specializing in Critical Disability Studies, Critical Fatness Studies, and Feminist Science and Technology Studies. Her dissertation is entitled Beauty, Race, and Belonging in the Shadow of Enslavement: Visual Culture and Egyptian Nation-Building (1910-1965) and it is a detailed study of Egyptian nationhood that examines race, gender, class, and dis/ability through the prisms of beauty and ugliness.
Her research has been supported by various fellowships and grants including The University of Minnesota’s Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (DDF), Diversity Predoctoral Teaching Fellowship, University of Minnesota, Morris (UMM), Foreign Language & Area Studies Annual (FLAS) Fellowship, The Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies (BBQ+) Institute, The Social Science Research Council (SSRC), among others. Over the past several years, she has designed and taught courses in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and Sociology departments at various institutions.