Moderated by Noura Erakat
In the course of resilience against the merciless edge of state-violence in the summer 2014, protestors in Ferguson held up signs declaring solidarity with the people of Palestine. In turn, Palestinians posted pictures on social media with instructions of how to treat the inhalation of tear gas. Organically, an analysis emerged highlighting similarities, but not sameness, of Black and Palestinian life, and more aptly, of their survival.
But before the violent and tragic events of summer 2014 unfolded, a critique of anti-Black racism among Arab communities in the United State and the Arab world had emerged putting into question the “natural” solidarity between Palestinians and Blacks. This often played out in competing claims in regards to Black solidarity and legacies of Black liberation struggles by Zionists and Palestinians, who among themselves are not necessarily in agreement. In turn, Black writers and activists responded to those claims with rejection, ambivalence, or affirmation based on different normative values. These interventions seemed to speak past one another for lack of a singular point of departure. Does the question of Black solidarity turn on a political commitment to combat white supremacy? Can that be done, even if victims of supremacist violence knowingly, or unknowingly, reify anti-Blackness? If not, what is the proper response? If so, what is the proper response?
At the core of these exchanges is an unequivocal recognition of the value of Black solidarity and Black liberation legacies that has not been commensurate with an appreciation for ongoing struggles against structural and literal violence afflicting Black communities the world over. This dissonance thus embodies the risk of reproducing anti-Blackness and occluding responsibility for it. In so doing, the critique has also given rise to interesting questions about race, race-formation, and racism in the Arab world. Could a U.S.-based anti-racist framework be applied indiscriminately across space? Does such a question fundamentally misunderstand the thrust of anti-Blackness? What could be gained by clarifying the meaning of anti-Blackness, often read as a stand-in for one form of racism rather than a framework that informs how the nation-state comes to embody technologies of power, coercion, and violence that determine death and the possibilities of life? By extension, and based on these competing understandings, how does a lack of critical engagement with the meanings of solidarity also risk reifying anti-Blackness? And how could a politics committed to liberation beyond the possibilities of state reformation serve as a corrective?
The controversies engendered by discussions of anti-Blackness, Israeli settler-colonialism, and Black-Palestinian solidarity, have turned on multiple and interchanging axes that often obscured what was at stake. As a result, the discussion seemed to be an effective iron rod for tension but never a productive space for reflection, self-reflexive analysis, and, ideally re-orientation. The inclination amongst the most committed and strident activists has been to bury the conversation or have it in private spaces to avoid the incendiary and unintended outcomes of critical inquiry mediated by social media. In our time of the Black Lives Matter movement and the continued struggle for decolonization and settler decolonization, this Roundtable brings together public intellectuals to bring criticism, in the liberatory sense that Edward Said theorized the term, to bear on interconnected struggles.
Beyond scholarly inquiry, this conversation is happening organically across the country and globe among organizers building a movement daily. In the streets of Ferguson, in the 250-mile March2Justice from New York to DC, on the several recent delegations to Palestine (see here, here, and here), at the Color of Violence 4 conference in Chicago, on university campuses in Occupied Palestine, activists are having these discussions with one another and, sometimes, answering these questions in deed rather than in words.
This Roundtable seeks to highlight those conversations and synergies in an attempt to better understand what a commitment to anti-Blackness should look like in the Palestinian solidarity movement and among Black-Palestinian solidarity efforts. The questions posed to the respondents deal primarily with the framework of anti-Blackness and its relationship to Palestine and solidarity without adequately interrogating the ways in which anti-Blackness manifests itself among and between Black and Palestinian communities. The respondents include scholars and activists who are often one and the same. Some of the responses help elucidate relevant theoretical frameworks, others use ongoing scholarly research to help provide historical depth and nuance, while others emphasize how practice informs these inquiries. Their responses are hardly uniform, as they reflect different disciplinary approaches and political frameworks for understanding anti-Blackness, the Palestinian question, and solidarity, respectively. The Roundtable, therefore, does not point to a definitive answer. Instead it reflects the myriad approaches to the conversation to help provide a point of departure in ways that spark more questions, more responses, more provocation, and engender more spaces in which to grapple with them, including on these pages. It is our hope that this serves as a useful pedagogical and political instrument within the classroom and in the streets where the battle for justice and emancipation rages.
Roundtable Participants (listed in alphabetical order):
Rabab Abdulhadi is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies/Race and Resistance Studies and the Senior Scholar of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative, at the College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University. Before joining SFSU, she served as the first director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan, Dearborn.
Ahmad Abuznaid is a lawyer and founding member of the Dream Defenders and co-organizer of 2014 delegation of Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, and Dream Defenders representatives to Palestine.
Ebony Coletu is an Assistant Professor of English at Penn State University. Formerly she taught in the Department of Rhetoric and Composition at the American University in Cairo.
Bill Fletcher Jr. is an editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com, Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the past president of TransAfrica Forum, and the co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Justice.
Che Gossett is an archivist and activist who works to excavate queer of color AIDS activist and trans archives. They have contributed to Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex and BCRW’s Scholar & Feminist Online and Queer Necropolitics.
Sarah Ihmoud is a doctoral candidate in social/activist anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a Palestinian American Research Center Fellow, a Wenner-Gren Foundation Fellow, and is currently conducting dissertation research on sexuality, intimacy and settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel.
Robin D.G. Kelley is the Distinguished Professor of History & Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in United States History. Kelley is the author of seven books including Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (The Free Press, 2009).
Aja Monet is an internationally established poet, performer, singer, songwriter, educator, and human rights advocate of Cuban-Jamaican descent.
Donna Murch is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University and the author of Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
Nadine Naber is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago and a member of the Diaspora Studies Cluster. She is the author of several books including, Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (NYU Press, 2012).
Linda Sarsour is a working woman, community activist, and mother of three. Currently she is the Advocacy and Civic Engagement Coordinator for the National Network for Arab American Communities (NNAAC) and serves as the Director of the Arab American Association of New York, a social service agency serving the Arab community in NYC.
Jared Sexton is an Associate Professor and Director of the African American Studies School of Humanities as well as the Film & Media Studies School of Humanities. He is the author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Nadera Shalhoub is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of several books including a forthcoming work entitled Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
1) What are two or three pressing questions about anti-Blackness Black-Palestinian solidarity?
Ebony Coletu
i) What habits of speech and practice can help shift the conversation of shared struggle from the metaphoric uses of blackness as the sign of disposability to linked fate that focuses on the interdependence of segregating, flattening, threatening institutions that distort our existence?
ii) How do we avoid bracketing blackness when it leads to contradictions in practice/analysis?
Sarah Ihmoud
i) If we envision anti-blackness as a permanent structure of Black enslavement, and settler colonialism as a permanent structure of native elimination, what are the conditions of possibility for black and native survival and life?
ii) How might we begin to construct a theoretical perspective that, on the one hand, recognizes the pitfalls of the "people-of-color" paradigm (e.g. Sexton 2010) and on the other, is able to conceive of a set of potential political solidarities based on Black/Palestinian relationalities? Is there a basis for political solidarity between the Slave and the Native that does not mask complicity with structures of anti-blackness?
iii) If we analyze Israel as a settler colonial state, and thus, Palestinians as an indigenous peoples, how do we envision settler decolonization in terms that do not recapitulate to the very logics of white supremacy formative of the Israeli state that are inflected by anti-black animus; that is, what alternative political imaginaries might form the basis for an alternative epistemology?
2) What is Anti-Blackness and how does it bear on the work of all organizers committed to combatting racialized violence regardless of context?
Ebony Coletu
Anti-Blackness is the tacit or explicit use of Blackness to mark what is undesirable, disposable, and not valued on a sliding scale of humanness, and it includes all of the pleasures and subtle benefits of that marking for those who do it. The impulse to deny anti-Blackness as a lived encounter and socially-legitimized practice gives some clue about its acceptance and the work that goes into protecting it. Anti-Blackness emerges from a robust set of interlocking legacy institutions that legitimize segregation and black invisibility, weaponized visibility, and ultimately black death to secure and prioritize white supremacy, renamed as a drive for ‘safety’. Rather than focus on a crisis of empathy for black death, anti-Blackness probes our political imagination to historicize the ways black disappearance, torture, devaluation, and the racialized optics of terror congeal into inevitability. As a result anti-Blackness reframes the question of how we die. Instead of viewing black death as a demographic issue that affects a particular population, it signals the importance of blackness as a predicate that releases those who kill black people from responsibility.
The challenge organizers face in addressing spectacularly racialized state violence and vigilantism, is to resist the urge to metaphorize slain black bodies as the master sign of disposability. We can then think of anti-Blackness as a way of naming the operating assumption that Black people can be killed with impunity and instead of reinforcing that as an enduring fact, offer a broader prompt to reimagine our political futures beyond an exclusive claim to humanness premised on the disappearance or marginalization of blackness.
Nadine Naber
Women of color have been at the forefront of some of the most transformative “joint-struggle” work reflecting an analysis of the intersectionality of multiple oppressions and multiple struggles--recent examples include the Southwest Youth Collaborative’s (SWYC) work on Juvenile Justice and post-9/11 related war and racism; the interconnected anti-military recruitment campaign and Palestine Points of Unity initiated by INCITE!; the Women of Color Resource Center (WCRC) integration of Palestine solidarity within the organizing and activism for the World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001; the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association’s dialogue on difficult issues between Black and Arab women in Seattle in 1994 and their multiracial coalition building related to Palestine, the Philippines, Iraq, indigenous struggles, the prison industrial complex, and more with ADC SF (now AROC) in the Bay Area in 1999 and 2000; and the recent joint struggle against Loyola university’s administration between Black students, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Middle East Student Association.
There is a lot to be said about what can happen when movements place women of color, queer and transgender people of color’s life struggles at the center of struggles aimed at keeping people alive. At the least, masculinist paradigms that require diminishing difference and uniting and fighting are replaced with commitments to enlarging the frame for how we understand oppression; dismantling multiple oppressions and leaving no one behind; and prioritizing all forms of human dignity. As Black Lives Matters makes more clear than ever, the outcome is broader movements for dismantling many forms of racism, occupation, classism, and heteropatriarchy and their distinct intersections in different contexts.
Bill Fletcher Jr.
European colonialism introduced “race” as a method of oppression and social control, with the prototype being found in Spain and the English conquest of Ireland. Color was introduced during the slave trade as a means of creating an identifiable hierarchy to reinforce the system of colonialism and capitalism. "Black" has been used by various societies at various points to suggest a lower place in the socio-economic hierarchy, frequently associated with those who worked outside in the sun getting darker compared with those of an elite class who were inside. But "blackness" as a negative category associated with suppression and oppression is directly linked to the slave trade and colonialism. European colonization of much of the world introduced this particular variant on "color," thereby reinforcing prejudices through the construction of a system of oppression. Further, "black" is not simply a color. A very dark-skinned South Asian is not considered "black" by the oppressor in the United States, whereas a light-skinned African American is considered "black."
In the alternative, the late Steve Biko suggested a positive understanding of "blackness" that related to the conscious appreciation of the need to both take pride in one's heritage (as part of a racially oppressed group) and to engage in the struggle against racist and national oppression. This definition is incredibly important in that it helps us to understand how a South Asian in Britain or in South Africa or in Guyana will declare themselves to be "black" even if they are not directly of African origin. "Blackness," in that sense, takes on a progressive, political and internationalist framework.
Sarah Ihmoud
Anti-blackness is a racial logic foundational to modernity and the liberal humanist framework, and thus, the very formation of the modern nation state, shaping contemporary formations of race and gender regardless of socio-political context. Theorists of anti-blackness reveal that black intimacy with death is modernity’s condition of possibility. Despite the legal end of slavery and the formal colony, black captivity and social death endure in other forms, both discursively and as a political project, as “slavery’s afterlife”. The imagination of the white polis, and the paradigm of liberal civil society with its attendant discourses of rights, freedom, and law, relies on the exclusion of blacks altogether or their availability for gratuitous violence and premature death. Moreover, the symbolic non-value of blackness energizes the entire spectrum of human subject positions and thus, anti-blackness is the condition of possibility for the “universal subject,” or the “human”.
In this sense, then, anti-blackness is a provocative reframing of the black ontological condition that opens up our understanding of humanity as a structure of antagonisms. Moreover, the durability of blackness as a category equated with racial slavery and social death that transcends space and time, the impossibility of integration and thus, black life in the modern nation state, raises a pointed critique of identity-based politics predicated on a politics of recognition, forcing a radical reimagining of liberatory projects for social change. Ending racial slavery would entail destroying the very category of the human, a relinquishing of desire for integration into the nation state, a rejection of democracy itself and a radical break with western epistemology as we know it.
3) How would you define Black-Palestinian solidarity? Is that an appropriate way to describe solidarity between Blacks in the United States invested in anti-racism work and Palestinians, generally, committed to anti-Zionism? Is there an optimal way to describe organic movement work dating back decades to the present as Black-Palestinian solidarity?
Jared Sexton
There is a sense in which we might understand “the essential blackness of the Palestinian struggle” as the interminable radicalization of every radical movement worthy of the name. I draw this phrase from a 2013 op-ed published in The Electronic Intifada by noted Palestinian American writer and activist Susan Abulhawa. There are various ways to read this phrase to be sure, too many to discuss in the present forum. But as a modest contribution, drawn from the history of express political solidarity with Palestine from black movements throughout the world, I would affirm, before specifying, what I think is the obscure truth indicated by the author of the critically-acclaimed novel, Mornings in Jenin. In a moment of friction with the editors of EI, it appears the article was titled against Abulhawa’s stated wishes: “The Palestinian Struggle is a Black Struggle.” The hope of the editorial decision was an expanded readership generated by provocation; the fear of the authorial objection was a broad misunderstanding running the risk of appropriation. The question raised thereby was symptomatic: how to tell the difference between solidarity, slight, and seizure? More precisely, the challenge is to understand a solidarity that seems to persist, in principle and in practice, despite problems of asymmetry or even antagonism; a solidarity that does not simply join the struggle, but exceeds it from within; a force of solidarity that is in the struggle more than the struggle itself?
Nadine Naber
The interconnections between Black and Palestinian struggles have been well established. Consider the framing that asserts these are “similar struggles” based on glaring evidence --about African American and Palestinian experiences with similar forms of systematic state violence, military occupation, and mass incarceration or about how many U.S. police officers brutally killing African Americans trained with the Israeli military. But asserting either “similarity” or a “shared enemy” (capitalism, imperialism, racism, etc.) cannot sustain long-term Black-Palestinian solidarity and has (intentionally or unintentionally) produced “transactional” forms of solidarity. In a U.S. context where simply asserting a Palestinian narrative (of dispossession, struggle, etc.) is a battle of its own, the transaction model establishes “solidarity” in exchange for legitimacy or visibility. And many Palestine solidarity activists have struggled with and against the opportunistic short term move of reaching out to Black liberation movements in ways that do not do much more than legitimizing our struggle or broadening our base.
Ebony Coletu
This question reminds me of the work undertaken to declare Zionism as a form of racism in U.N. Assembly Resolution 3379, which was pivotal and complicated. The subsequent effort waged by Israeli and American government officials as well as proxy actors to undo the resolution (formally retracted in 1991) definitely demands critique, and we can do that while recognizing that a commitment to anti-racism does not necessarily capture the scope of anti-Zionism. Nor does it account for the varied invocations of Zionism within certain traditions of anti-racism work that have imagined freedom variously through the lens of settler-colonialism or remigration to an ancestral homeland.
Recently, I traced the movements and recruitment rhetoric of an ancestor who grew up in the Gold Coast, Alfred Charles Sam, who later collaborated with African Americans to facilitate resettlement in what is now Ghana. They invoked ‘African Zionism’ heavily throughout the movement (1911-1917). However, it eventually collapsed under the weight of questions about land ownership, local labor compensation, business development models, colonial taxation versus exemption, and indigenous rights. Later, waves of Rastafarian migration to Ghana also invoked a kind of Zionism without displacing or colonizing indigenous resources, but that does not rescue Zionism or 'blackwash' the concept. It just encourages us to look more closely at the negotiations that unfold in the wake of migration. How are desires and debates about land, distant kinship, religion, and the politics of entitlement resolved?
How can that history inform conversations within faith communities that rhetorically deploy Zionism in ways that seem to contradict the politics of solidarity? To what extent can solidarity be reframed as the work undertaken to forge connections even in the midst of contradictory commitments? And when do the contradictions nullify, or rely uncritically on a history of solidarity that has not been maintained? The answers may shift but the practice of relentless asking may help reimagine the roots/routes of Black-Palestinian solidarity.
Che Gossett
“As a slave, the social phenomenon that engages my whole consciousness is, of course, the revolution. The slave -- and the revolution. Born to a premature death, a menial, subsistence-wage worker, odd-job man, the cleaner, the caught, the man under hatches, without bail--that's me, the colonial victim.” -- George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye
I discovered in the course of researching George L. Jackson’s life, that the anthology of Palestinian poetry Enemy of the Sun by Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb was found in his cell after his assassination by prison guards. Jackson was so moved by the poem “Enemy of the Sun” that he wrote it down on a piece of paper. The Panthers in their eulogies for him thought it was written by Jackson – we can recall June Jordan -- “born black and now become Palestinian” -- however was authored by the Palestinian poet of resistance Sameeh al Qaseem. Yet as a social text, the poem transcends the domain of authorship, because it performs as poetics of prison abolitionist solidarity, a symbol of joint struggle and resistance to colonial prison regimes, anti-black racism and occupation, it traveled from Palestine to San Quentin. The book Enemy of the Sun was published by Drum and Spear Press, by three black women who were members of SNCC in 1969. As an abolitionist text, with an introduction that compared the Black and Palestinian liberatory poetics, it intended that this particular anthology of Palestinian resistance poetry find its way through the supposedly impenetrable walls and cages.
Bill Fletcher, Jr.
I would speak of African-American/Palestinian solidarity. While there have always been Black internationalists, e.g., Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Dubois, who would speak out on the conditions of the colonially oppressed, African American/Palestinian solidarity took a turn after the June 1967 war. It is at that point that elements in the Black Power Movement (a component of the larger Black Freedom Movement), spoke out vocally against Israeli aggression and in favor of Palestinian rights.
African American/Palestinian solidarity has always been a feature of the work of the post-1967 Black Left in the United States. Whether one is speaking of the Black Panther Party, Republic of New Africa, or multi-racial/multi-ethnic leftist organizations that had roots among African Americans, it is this group that took the lead in building various forms of political solidarity. To a great extent this was provocative and propagandistic in that there was an effort to shift and organize public opinion in favor of Palestinian rights.
Rabab Abdulhadi
I would qualify this solidarity by saying that Palestinian and Black radical politics entail a commitment to struggling against racism, Zionism, Orientalism, Islamophobia, and all forms of structural inequalities, based on gender, sexuality, class, age, ability, citizenship, etc. I am arguing here against exceptionality and identity politics that oftentimes suggest that racism only affects Blacks who should fight against it; only Palestinians are affected by Zionism and should therefore struggle against it or only Indigenous people are impacted by US settler colonialism and must dismantle it. It is as if Blacks, Palestinians and Indigenous people were special interest groups. This is about principled and strategic alliances by organizers and scholar-activists who share similar politics and worldviews.
Black-Palestinian solidarity has had a long and rich history that we can trace back to much earlier times than the recent expressions in Ferguson, Baltimore, Gaza or Nazareth. This includes by Malcolm X, Robert Williams, Black Panthers Party, SNCC, Patrice Lumumba Coalition, the African and Caribbean Resource Center, the December 12th Coalition, and the 1968 Student Strikers at San Francisco State University, to name a few. The same applies to Palestinian solidarity with Black Power movement, including support for Mohammad Ali in his defiance of the US military orders to fight in Vietnam and the letter sent by Palestinian freedom fighters who were incarcerated in Israeli jails to Angela Davis, who was imprisoned at the time in US jails.
Aja Monet
I think solidarity is active listening and creates empathy manifested in praxis. Genuine solidarity is radical love and demands of us the decolonizing of our imaginations, dismantling our programming. If we are talking about Black-Palestinian solidarity then we are talking about how those who hate us, as manifest in a logic of disdain and dehumanization, are organized and partnered in our oppression. It means we must create less “safe” spaces and more spaces of risk, spaces where we confront our internalized pain and suffering, where we make healing a necessity by personal transformation. I would define Black-Palestinian solidarity as a unified force to combat hatred and blackness. When I speak of blackness I speak of an other-ing that racism has coopted in order to rationalize a deep hatred for the difference between us. Blackness is an all encompassing entity with dimensions far deeper than a mere visible color, it is the soul of any and every movement and so Black-Palestinian solidarity is not something specific to Black and Palestinian people but is simply solidarity. Solidarity is that guttural feeling of “we are in this together” and it demands that we make change towards our future a necessary demand in every area of our lives. It requires a perspective that recognizes our interconnectedness.
Ahmad Abuznaid
There is always a moral or ethical reason to stand with the oppressed, and many do so accordingly, but for true solidarity to be present there must be a common goal, for Blacks in the US and for Palestinians, we are fighting systems of dehumanization which both invoke and advance white supremacy. I often think of the heavily cited James Baldwin quote “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time”.
Although we can make argument for the moral, strategic, and passionate justification for this solidarity, there are Palestinians who are anti-black, it is difficult to name a community that is not since the subjugation of Blacks is definitive of U.S. society. Some are anti-black because of their intention to assimilate into whiteness; other factors add into this dynamic as well. In January 2015, the Dream Defenders organized a delegation to Palestine. In part, the purpose was to expose oppressed communities in the U.S. to the Palestinian struggle, and its relation to, and implications for, life in the heart of the U.S. empire. It was also also a moment to show Palestinians that these communities identify with our struggles. None of our communities can do this alone, so Palestinians should know that there are those in the belly of the beast who are just as hungry for true liberation.
Donna Murch
In some ways, partially because of my age but also because of my scholarly focus on Black Power and Black Liberation of the postwar era (1940s-1970s) I view the current deepening of African American and Palestinian solidarity through the lens of anti-colonial struggle and anti-racism more broadly. This convergence is certainly not a new one and indeed from the fight back against the land dispossession of 1948 to the influence of Arab nationalism on Malcolm X, radical elements within the Black Freedom movement saw supporting a free Palestine as an essential part of the global politics of national liberation. In the years since the end of the Cold War and with the emergence of this new movement against state sanctioned violence in the United States, the discourse of anti-blackness has become a way to talk about the centrality of domestic repression against African Americans (and peoples of African descent more broadly) to the carceral agendas of mass incarceration, police militarization and what are increasingly understood as projects of racial genocide. I think this is an important lens for the mobilization of a new generation of activists. But I also feel that it is difficult to uncouple the history of anti-blackness embodied in enslavement, forced labor, criminalization, racial apartheid and outright murder from that of Indian killing and expropriation as well as the United States’ history of imperial violence not only on the North American continent, but throughout the world. In this sense, the historical memory of the nonaligned movement, international solidarity struggles and the transnational anti-colonial left remains essential to how we build solidarity struggle today. Moreover, just as a long tradition of African American Palestinian solidarity informs current anti-state violence youth activism, it is also instructive for strengthening ties between Palestinians and communities of African descent throughout the Arab world.
Nadera Shalhoub
It’s really more than a competing history of oppression. Blackness is the constant creation of death in order to allow the potential of life and living power of others. And this is what we see today, it is a continuous death. Analytically if you discuss something that is dead it is no longer there; legally you have to have a death certificate, medically you need to have a dead body but it’s this fear of the living power of the Palestinian body and the fear of the Black dead body and living body that puts us in the same category. It’s a part of the necropolitical framework, one that reflects the political economy of life and death in its everydayness, in its intimacy, its sexuality, its economic gains, and its geopolitical scope.
Solidarity is about death and social death. We are talking about two groups that are globally perceived as living dead. As a Palestinian, I see clearly, that on a global level, Palestinians do not have a right to exist. Israelis have a right to exist because of a Biblical right and in that narrative we are invaders and are disturbing a world order. This is where I see solidarity between Blacks and Palestinians because the political economy of Blackness is the political economy of Palestinianness whereby there is other-ization and being perceived in zoological terms, in the Fanon sense. Consider the Balfour Declaration- therein we are not even people to be consulted. And the same can be said of Blacks- who are slaves and should not be consulted. They are not there to be consulted, we are not even people.
4) What is the place to address Islamophobia in the context of Black-Palestinian solidarity? Is it an impediment to movement building? If so, how can it be dealt with without creating false binaries between Muslim and Black communities given that the largest population of Muslims in the United States are Black?
Robin D.G. Kelley
Ideally, a principled anti-racist, social justice movement will always call out and resist Islamophobia, not to mention anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism and all forms of racist/sexist/homo- and trans-phobic tendencies, actions and behaviors. Being principled is not an impediment, but it will produce unavoidable challenges, temporarily fracture alliances, reveal contradictions, and create dissent. But we must always remember that it is the racial regime that generates “false binaries,” not movement strategy or tactics. Our task is to expose these false binaries by resisting all manifestations of racism everywhere; to reveal how “the Muslim” is produced as a racialized subject, what the process masks (e.g., that people of African descent make up the majority of Muslims in the U.S., that there is no relationship between political violence and Islam, that the “clash of civilizations” discourse is a racist fabrication); to thoroughly grasp the changing character of anti-Black racism in a context in which a Black petit-bourgeoisie exercises significant power and influence over the very machinery of state violence, economic exploitation, and social misery.
Rabab Abdulhadi
Islamophobia is crucial for the success of the master Zionist narrative in the Black community that does not recognize that many of the Africans who were kidnapped from their homelands in West Africa and enslaved in the Americas were Muslims. Islamophobia also comes up in accounts of Malcolm X. In his “Ballot or Bullet” speech, he contrasts how US “mainstream” media refers to him as a Muslim Minister but does not apply the same logic to Christian ministers. This is obviously not accidental. In fact, Orientalist Zionists have deliberately popularized the notion that Islam was more damaging to Africa than colonialism or that Arabs and Muslims were solely responsible for the African slave trade. This is not an attempt to sugar coat the fact that Arabs and/or Muslims (and others) did participate in the slave trade. However, slave trade (among European, Arab and Africans or Christians, Jews or Muslims) was premised not on skin color but rather on war victories. Linking racism to skin color has been part and parcel of the creation and institutionalization of plantation economy at the heart of which was white supremacy. Finally, Zionism is at the heart of the US-based Islamophobia industry, from Pamela Geller and David Horowitz, to Sheldon Adelson who is hosting a big gathering at his casino headquarters in Las Vegas to devise strategies to defeat the growing BDS movement.
5) There seems to be a conflation between the Arab-American community, the US-based solidarity community, Palestinians resident in Occupied Palestine and Arabs writ large in discussions regarding Anti-Blackness and Black-Palestinian Solidarity. For example, legitimate criticism highlights how Palestine solidarity activists “expect” Black solidarity, and even if not, they invoke examples of Black liberation struggles without adequately combatting anti-Blackness. In other instances, the critique is leveled at Palestinians in Occupied Palestine who are accused of harboring anti-Blackness as a matter of fact. Still in other discussions the question is about racism and anti-Blackness throughout the Arab world, or twenty-two Arab states without distinction for their economic, social, cultural, and political histories. How does one responsibly discuss anti-Blackness in relation to Black-Palestinian solidarity without inadvertently collapsing these distinct classes into a single one?
Rabab Abdulhadi
I definitely find that collapsing differences is problematic at best and malicious at worst. First, many advocates for justice for/in Palestine are neither Palestinian nor white; they are rather Indigenous, Black, Latina/o, and Asian and/or come from other marginalized communities, such as the undocumented or poor and working people (who might be one and the same). Secondly, we should note that Arabs, including Arab Christians, Muslims and Jews, who originate from North and East Africa, from Mauritania to Djibouti, and West Asia, from Yemen to Kuwait, come in all shades and colors, including a small African community in the old city of Jerusalem in Palestine. During the height of the Darfur crisis, Zionists tended to refer to warring Darfuris as Arabs attacking Africans in order to drive a wedge among members of the same Muslim community who looked the same and came from similar roots but were divided over resources. It was not beneficial to the Zionist, Orientalist, and racist establishment to clarify that this is the same community, lest the labeling of Arabs as racist be challenged. Third, while there are definite manifestations in the Arab (and the rest of the) world today on the privileging of a lighter skin color, this is more a function of colonial legacies by which race, class, gender and sexuality become instruments of neocolonialism rather than an inherent trait in Arab or otherthird world societies.
But how do we explain why Arab and Muslim immigrants to the U.S., including Palestinians, manifest racism toward communities of color, including anti-Blackness? In my view, to borrow from Adrienne Rich’s term in discussion compulsory heterosexuality, this is part and parcel of the herding of immigrants into whiteness in their unsuccessful quest to achieve full “Americanness” --a failed project no matter how hard they try precisely because settler colonial projects are inherently racist, hierarchical and oppressive.
Ebony Coletu
This question already poses some of the distinctions that we need to sustain, which is to say, naming specific interventions according to the context in which they happen. But the analytic frameworks we have to make these distinctions sometimes feels limited because the pressure to understand anti-Blackness as a geographically and historically specific phenomenon—tethered to America and Europe, or as a strictly as a colonial legacy--hobbles efforts to say something more foundational. At the same time, we have to be cautious about global statements that forfeit specificity, which is why so much work has gone into understanding context-specific racialization and the places/moments when anti-Blackness functions as a political-economic tool for exploiting labor, justifying degraded forms of citizenship, and marking the boundaries of humanness.
The other challenge is to combat what Neldon Maldonado-Torres has called ‘defensive regionalism’ which declares race an irrelevant concept for a particular region. When speaking of or within Arab-majority states conversations are quickly shut down with contrary assertions that deny the presence of racism and anti-Blackness in particular while ahistorically taking racism for granted as an unchanging feature of life in these countries. Yet obviously within the ‘Arab-world’—which is in quotes only to recognize non-Arab and hybrid populations—we can look for the ways ethno-nationalism develops, how Arabization in particular occurred, and what kinds of paradoxes thrive in each cultural context. For instance, it doesn’t work to speak of blackness as a marker of ancestral enslavement in Egypt—but the urge to do so, to hail black bodies as abd/slave rests on this presumption. Nubians consistently reference their indigeneity to unsettle that logic and highlight the tandem erasure of native blackness alongside non-black migration and colonization in the production of modern Egyptian national identity. There are material and political consequences to this erasure that affect what resources are invested in their resettlement, land claims, and cultural preservation.
Robin D.G. Kelley
As I suggest in my response to Question 4, without a deeper analysis of the national and global/imperial operations and histories of racism, we will continue to reproduce these sorts of binaries. I see the problem partly rooted in a myopic identity politics in which “Black” people and “Palestinians” are painted as monoliths, whose shared identity presumes a shared politics. Embedded in the question is part of the answer to the problem: too often we tend to substitute a complex historical perspective with an “identity” model of the world that collapses the kinds of differences I described in Question 4 (e.g., Black people/ Palestinians are natural rebels; Arabs are racist and Black people are victims; ad infinitum). We have a lot of history to learn and theoretical and interpretive work to do in order to move to a more sophisticated and radical politics. For example, Palestinian solidarity activists (irrespective of color) are often shocked by Black Zionists defending Israel, and yet supporting Zionism has long been the default position among African American leadership at least before 1967. There is an historical logic to this apparent paradox, which many scholars have addressed. Simply put, we need to know more and engage these questions at a much deeper level. This is why recent studies by Keith P. Feldman, Alex Lubin, Melani McAlister, Nikhil Singh and others are so valuable for advancing a new, transformative antiracist politics that doesn’t descend into cartoon identities but grasps how slavery, colonialism, dispossession, the war on terror, etc., are constitutive of the current racial regimes in all of its global dimensions. While the fight to end the occupation and perpetual war against Palestinians, and to end state violence against Black and Brown people have set the stage for the latest manifestations of solidarity, these cannot be the end goals. The ultimate objective, as I understand it, is the complete dismantling of the racial regimes themselves and the elimination of all forms of oppression.
6) What does a commitment to anti-Blackness look like at least in the context of US-based Palestine solidarity organizing?
Nadine Naber
We can turn to long-standing examples where “joint struggle” work extends beyond the “already converted” solidarity activists. Consider the relationships between Palestinian, Black, and Latino communities established between 1991 and 2012 in Chicago through the SWYC. SWYC had three after school youth centers and a Community Organizing Initiative. Their vision, work, and structure had communities working together across cultural/racial/ethnic boundaries and they were intentional about centering the different surrounding local communities. Day to day connections brought about an organic coalitional consciousness whereby those involved understood and addressed the many connected forms of racism, solidarity with Palestinians, etc. Recently, members of Greater Detroit’s Z Collective have been discussing a plan for hosting private women's circles to talk within Arab American communities not only about issues impacting “Arabs,” but also about the connected issues of anti-Black racism in light of the hierarchical and fraught context of Arab-Black relations in Greater Detroit.
Yet many collaborative initiatives lack a long-term agenda; have failed to bring to life “joint struggle” on the ground; and have been short lived. Since we do not exist outside racial capitalism, this painful and exhausting work requires (for Arab Americans) challenging anti-Black racism in our own communities --in the intimate spaces of our neighborhoods and living rooms and standing up when inter-racial marriages are banned or when racial tensions become inflamed. We need to show up for each other when any of us are colonized, sexually assaulted, intimidated, brutalized, or killed. And as recipients of the racist-imperialist corporate media and education system, Black and Arab communities generally need to do something about the limited knowledge and misinformation many of us carry about each other’s histories, traditions, and politics. The “big events” and the “photo ops” are important, but while we are organizing the next rally, let’s also focus on long-term joint campaigns and analyses and let us build life-long relationships.
Jared Sexton
Combatting anti-blackness in US-based Palestine solidarity organizing requires addressing what Hortense Spillers famously described as an historical “grid of identities running at perpendicular angles: things in serial and lateral array; beings in hierarchical and vertical array.” Needless to say, it matters greatly whether one speaks to and from the X or Y axis of a global matrix established by the epochal trade in enslaved Africans from the seventh century CE onward - from the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean basin toward the later transatlantic circuit, and whose pivot entailed a deepening and intensification of the internal slave trade throughout most of the African continent. There is, buried beneath modern colonial history and its opposition, what Saidiya Hartman terms “the still unfolding narrative of captivity, dispossession, and domination that engenders the black subject in the Americas” and whose subject-that-is-not-one pursues “a politics without a proper locus.” Without a locus or a land base, this landless, baseless politics, which lacks nothing at all, sits at the vertex of every sovereign claim, putting pressure on the work of solidarity with Palestine to consider another frame of reference altogether, to interrogate the basic assumptions of the struggle for liberation as such. Slavery is the threshold of the political world and the ongoing movement for abolition is a strange attractor radicalizing through the perverse affirmation of deracination, an uprooting of the natal and the national; a politics whose demand is, as the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot said of the Haitian Revolution, “too radical to be formulated in advance of its deeds.”
Sarah Ihmoud
Theorizations of anti-Blackness produce a critique of identity politics and multiracial coalitions, as any politics of recognition ultimately claims inclusion in civil society and humanity, masking complicity with structures of anti-blackness (see for example Sexton 2010, Wilderson 2010). Similarly, settler colonialism is a permanent structure of native elimination (e.g. Wolfe 2006), but the ontological position of the Native articulates with that of the Slave only when s/he claims genocide. When the Native does not claim a radical politics of refusal, but rather, some form of liberal inclusion, s/he too capitulates to the structure of white supremacy.
Anti-blackness is formative of the Israeli settler colonial state and consequently, the structural position of the Palestinian native is shaped by anti-black animus. The settler colonial regime’s inscription of terror against the Palestinian native’s body and home space has been the precondition for the life and ‘safety’ of the Jewish settler polity since the Nakba. It is thus that Palestinian suffering and death, in both its “exceptional” and mundane forms, must not be seen as an aberration to, but rather formative of the settler colonial state.
If we take this analysis to its logical conclusion, understanding that there is no integration for the Palestinian native into the Israeli settler state (to do so, she would have to cease being Palestinian), calls for a political project that goes beyond any state solution, towards a project of settler decolonization. Engaging the logic of anti-blackness forces us to reckon with a decolonization project that is not reducible to some form of native sovereignty wedded to the nation-state form, but one that seeks a far more radical break with western epistemology, and the construction of a new world. Anything less is merely a deferred form of genocide for native Palestinians, and complicity with the structure of anti-blackness.
Che Gossett
Abolition speaks to the unfinished project of ending anti-Black racism, racial capitalism, anti-trans, anti-queer, patriarchal policing, colonialism and caging. June Jordan’s and James Baldwin’s archives speak to legacies of Black queer solidarity with Palestinian struggle. It was through what June Jordan called her “embattled baptisms” – Black queer poetic struggles against war and militarization, cages and carceral violence, apartheid and occupation from Mississippi, Attica, Nicaragua, South Africa, Palestine and Lebanon – that she found renewed life. Under pinkwashing, Israel is figured as a site of queer modernity and the Middle East and North Africa, in Orientalizing and anti-black fashion are portrayed as backwards, uncivilized, ever infantile and outside of the temporal and spatial coordinates of Western modernity. Blackness has always figured as sexual/gender transgression and been subject to criminalization and regulation. Pinkwashing plays both on anti-black and anti-Arab sexual tropes. Queer and/or trans prison abolitionists and feminists of color, such as Angela Davis, Nadine Naber and many others, situate an anti-pinkwashing analysis within a broader vision of decolonization, carceral abolition and transformative forms of justice. At the recent INCITE Women of Color Against Violence conference, I had the pleasure of being in a packed audience, listening to the intersecting struggles and voices of Rasmea Odeh, Reina Gossett, Andrea Smith, CeCe McDonald and others who reminded us -- as have Assata Shakur and Mahmoud Darwish -- that the apartheid wall, the border wall, the prison wall are historically constructed and so, can and must be torn down.
Linda Sarsour
“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” This quote by Lila Watson, an Aboriginal Australian hangs in my office as a reminder of how I engage in movements led by others. Organizing as a Palestinian American Muslim in the Black Lives Matter movement has been a blessing but has also brought some challenges. Building solidarity with Black communities when we as Palestinian Americans/Arab Americans have not holistically addressed anti-Black racism within our own ranks calls to question in some cases our solidarity. While we chant “Black Lives Matter”, what are we doing as Palestinian Americans to ensure that we are contributing to the creation of a society that truly embraces, respects and upholds the dignity of our Black sisters and brothers in every aspect, socially and structurally? Solidarity is not a noun; it’s a verb, its action. When I agreed to co-chair the March2Justice, a 250-mile journey on foot from New York City to Washington, DC alongside a Black American woman, and a Mexican American woman to demand an end to police brutality it was to test my own leadership and my solidarity. What was I willing to risk? What example was I ready to set for my community? Along the route a Palestinian American imam hosted us at a masjid in Philadelphia. These experiences and the conversations about the clear connection between oppressed communities in the United States and Palestine are being derived through story telling and relationship building. This struggle knows no borders and we know that all oppression is intertwined. I am very proud of the progress, the friendships and allies that have been established. We must continue to organize together, share our stories and remain consistent in our presence for others. My investment in the Black Lives Matter movement is based on the belief that Black Liberation will lead to the liberation of all people, including Palestinians. Onward.
Aja Monet
There are Black Palestinians and it would do us all good if we could talk about the dimensions to Blackness which works as an othering category in all countries, communities, cultures etc. Palestinians must see and embrace the Blackness in themselves; than we can begin to have a healthy discussion that can go somewhere more than theoretical words and thoughts. We must examine our traumas and how even our methods of perceived liberation perpetuate systems we are fighting against. We must examine how deeply we internalized capitalism as well as the hierarchal perspective of freedom. It is very simple, Palestinians need to reexamine their ideas about blackness as more than the “struggle porn” commodified by the United States and exported to rest of the world for exploitation. Palestinians should identify not just with our pains and injustices but also our victories, our joys, our visions, and our imaginations for a future where change is real and possible. Blackness is the embodiment of resistance, the soul of resistance, and Palestinians know resistance. In the pursuit of justice we must honor how much of our oppressors’ mannerisms and ideologies we have absorbed and internalized. If we want to be free, let it be because we know shackled and silenced is no way to be- let us know real pursuits of happiness—if we want to be free, let it not be because we want to live in the house of our oppressors, still silenced, and still shackled. Blackness is the collective voice of our protest and all that we create in the direction of our freedom.
Nadera Shalhoub
We need to look at the psychology of the oppressed and at survival mechanisms whereby you witness your inability to keep your house, to reach places, to keep your children alive, and to live literally and all you are doing is surviving. And if you don’t see support and see that Palestinians are separating themselves from Blacks and the Black movement, it is a condition of their situation and fragility as individuals and communities in the world. I don’t support it but I can understand it.
This is where gendered violence may be helpful. In some cases, you see a girl who is about to be killed by her own family for transgressing social norms and you see her mother is approving the killing. How can a mother approve the killing of her child? But then you understand that this mother is trying to preserve the lives of the other girls in the house and if she will show her anger and pain over her daughter, she might lose the rest of her children. The power of the powerless is limited and their ability to cope for survival reflect a narrow set of choices for decision-making.
Politically, there is no question. We must be part of a Black liberation movement. The complication happens on a daily level among individuals – here support and solidarity with Blacks is imperative because we need work together. We are both in the same boat of death and need to work together. There is a pathology of self-preservation that limits these horizons and we need to be less tough on one another to allow room to breathe.
Donna Murch
In thinking about Black and Palestinian solidarity since the 2014 Gaza bombings, one of the most exciting dimensions is how the genesis of a burgeoning movement against state sanctioned violence inside the U.S. has intersected with the increased visibility and success of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement. Aided by the coincidental timing of the Ferguson protests with Israel’s bloody assault on Gaza civilians last summer, many protestors experienced a convergence of struggles in which young people found themselves facing down military weapons, including tanks, armed assault rifles, Kevlar shod “soldiers” and CS gas. The juxtaposition of images of human vulnerability in the face of overwhelming force, embodied by Israel’s carpet-bombing of residential areas spanning forty percent of Gaza and of armored vehicles advancing on young Ferguson teens in their own neighborhoods as they kneeled with their hands up, forged a lasting historical memory of the genocidal intent of using weapons of war against civilians. Indeed, at precisely the moment that members of Israel’s Home party openly advocated genocide through attacks on Palestinian women as “mothers of snakes,” African Americans began using the term to describe the state violence they were facing at the hands of law enforcement. In the ensuing months, genocide has become a lingua franca to express the plight of both African Americans and Palestinians. The victories of BDS have literally helped to lift the gag rule of both the mainstream press and particular arenas of social media thereby enabling much more unselfconscious discussion about the shared histories of the U.S. and Israel as “racial states” and “settler societies.” In addition to genocide, recurrent themes are the shared experiences of statelessness, entrapment and carcerality. This cross-fertilization of political culture and analysis is an incredibly exciting development that links both intellectual production and grassroots protest of African Americans and Palestinians.
Ahmad Abuznaid
Commitment to combating anti-blackness, first and foremost involves the support and amplification of black voices, black organizing, black lives, more importantly, inviting leaders of the black liberation movement into traditional Palestinian spaces. There need to be more opportunities for interaction. For true solidarity, we must not only work to eliminate the many manifestations of anti-blackness, but also key is to build valued, sustainable relationships between those in the different communities.
Being a Palestinian male, in leadership of an organization dedicated to fighting systemic oppression and racism here in the U.S., means that sometimes there are issues that may not directly affect my family, or even if we are affected, we are not affected to the same extent our black siblings from the U.S. are. Many times, as a non-black oppressed community member, this work involves a great deal of listening, learning and opening up of the space for others. At times, there are black-only spaces, and supporting those spaces is essential, recognizing that black liberation should be led by the very best of black movement minds. We have to make sure Palestinians understand the above, as well as the fact that terms like “Black Power” and “Black Lives Matter” do not decrease the worth or importance of our movement for Palestinian liberation, in fact they only strengthen them. In addition, Palestinians who have flourished economically here may struggle with the need for the personal implications of supporting true economic liberation for Black Americans, as it may directly affect their amassed wealth. This challenge is to be expected as white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism have often utilized the divide and conquer strategy. The goal is to be develop the analysis and requisite politics to overcome these hurdles in the pursuit of liberation for all.
Robin D.G. Kelley
Two things: first, let us not forget the LONG history of Black radical solidarity with Palestinian liberation going back at least to 1967, with traces emerging as early as 1948, and with Malcolm X in the early 1960s. These examples of solidarity and identification were not based on an expectation of reciprocity—we support your struggle so long as you support ours. Rather,