Palestinian & Black American Solidarity Cannot End Over Voting

Photo by Madison Oren on Unsplash

The Palestinian-Black American liberation alliance is not new.

In fact, it’s at least sixty years old and dates back to the 1950s and 1960s with the embrace of the Palestinian struggle by Malcolm X, The Black Panthers, and other prominent Black thinkers and revolutionaries. It’s almost as old as the State of Israel — established in 1948. This alliance makes sense. Who else understands the Palestinians’ dehumanization, displacement, and legal separation from “society” and dignified personhood, like Black Americans? Who else understands legalized segregation, state-sanctioned brutality, second-class citizenship, and what it feels like to not be at home in your own birth country?

In fact, when I first heard Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu “characterize Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas as an existential battle against the ‘forces of darkness’…equating the fight against Hamas with a struggle between the ‘forces of light’ representing humanity and the ‘forces of darkness’ embodying animalism,” I understood exactly how Palestinians are stigmatized, dehumanized, and scapegoated by many Israelis. It reminded me of the words used by eugenicists and other “enlightened” European thinkers to describe Africans and justify our subjugation for profit. Netanyahu, like white enslavers, also used religion. White American physician, Samuel A. Cartwright, who coined the term Drapetomania for the “mental condition” that made enslaved people want to run away, had this to say about Black Americans. Yes, this man so deeply believed that the natural order was for Black people to be subjugated by white people, that if a Black person wanted freedom, they had to be suffering from a mental illness.

Per the Washington Post —

In 1849, Samuel Cartwright was engaged by a Louisiana medical committee to investigate “the diseases and physical peculiarities of our negro population.”

He began his report for the Louisiana committee by reviewing “the anatomical and physiological differences between the negro and the white man.”

Skin color was obvious.

But “there are other differences more deep, durable and indelible,” he wrote. “The membranes, the muscles, the tendons . . . even the negro’s brain…