Inspired by the Black and Vietnamese liberation movements, Arlene has been a militant in the struggle against imperialism since the 1960s—first as a protester facing tear gas and later as a teacher and writer. She edited The Movement newspaper, and was a leading voice in the anti-imperialist women’s movement of the 1970s.
For the next half century, she joined the anti-apartheid movement, the movement for justice in Palestine, including the olive harvest in the West Bank, the struggle for the right to return to New Orleans after Katrina, the movements against fascist U.S. police and their deputized militias and against the holocaust in Gaza‚—always standing in solidarity with national liberation struggles both inside and outside the U.S. Empire.
To support herself and her two sons, she worked as a sociology and women’s studies lecturer, machinist, journalist and public health expert. During the first ten years of her children’s lives, she was on welfare.
Arlene Eisen is the author of the influential study, Operation Ghetto Storm, first published by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. Along with a Forward by Kali Akuno, their analysis of the U.S. war on Black people documented, for the first time, that US police and their surrogates kill a Black person every 28 hours. From Chicago to Oakland, from New York to New Orleans, the hashtag #Every28Hours fueled campaigns that challenged police power. The US Human Rights Network presented the report at the 2014 Review of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva.
She also wrote, Women of Viet Nam (Revised), 1975, based on her stay in Viet Nam with the Viet Nam Women’s Union. That book so resonated with popular opinion, that even with no commercial advertising, or social media, it sold more than 50,000 copies in English and editions in Spanish, French, Danish and Farsi were published. In 1981, she returned to Viet Nam to learn how the process of women’s liberation had progressed during peacetime. Women and Revolution in Viet Nam, 1984, became the first book published in the West to explore the relationship between women’s liberation and building socialism in Viet Nam.
Eisen’s journalism has appeared in Telesur, The Root, Counterpunch, San Francisco Bayview, including on “Zionist Sabotage of UN Anti-Racist Efforts”, Pambazuka, Washington Post, and others. For three years, she produced and hosted Nina Viva, a monthly radio show on KPOO-FM that featured voices of women who stand against Empire. For example, listen to “Interviews with the Palestinian Feminist Collective.” Based in Caracas, she was a staff writer for Venezuelanalysis.com, an independent English-language daily news service.