For decades, most Black political commentary has expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people, but recently, a new phenomenon has appeared, particularly on social media platforms, which accuses all Palestinians of being anti-Black racists, and asserts that aligning with them is either of no use to Black people or even that it is detrimental to our own cause. Some of these individuals are Democratic Party operatives attempting to maintain Black voter loyalty as Israeli war crimes in Gaza remain a campaign issue. Others are of a right wing tendency which either supports U.S. imperialism or asserts that Black politics can and should stand alone, and that any talk of solidarity with Palestinians or other peoples is misguided.
It’s not surprising that these questions have come to the fore as the Democratic National Convention is taking place in Chicago, while so-called ceasefire talks take place in Israel, even though Israel continues to reject any talk of a real ceasefire and Kamala Harris promises to keep sending them weapons. Black Agenda Report editor and columnist Ajamu Baraka provides his analysis in conversation with Executive Editor Margaret Kimberley.
Margaret Kimberley: Every time I think I’m not going to be surprised by anything new, something like this happens, seeing Black people demean the Palestinian cause and ahistorically accuse all of them of being anti-Black racists, actually saying that everybody is an anti-Black racist, and that Black people have no friends and no reason to to be in alignment with anyone else anywhere else in the world. Is this new? I don’t recall voices like this being so prominent. What do you think is behind this new narrative?
Ajamu Baraka: You know, Margaret, I think it is relatively new and is I think reflective of a certain kind of political and ideological trajectory that we’ve seen emerge over the last few decades beginning in the 1970s. Even though the “civil rights,” Black Liberation and anti-Vietnam war movements emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, the state launched its most sustained and coherent counter revolutionary and counter insurgency strategy against the “new left” but primarily the Black liberation movement in the 1970s. The Black liberation movement was subjected to, of course, violent repression, but the ideological component, the ideological and the cultural component of that suppression took on very sophisticated forms in the 1970s.
The objectives in the 1970s were primarily ideological and cultural. The main task for the state, as they saw it, was to create the conditions in which there’ll never be a repeat of the generation that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s that rocked the entire world. And they have been fairly successful in undermining the continuity of Black struggle in the U.S., the Black radical struggle, ensuring that there was an effective, what I call Americanization of the African in the U.S., with the result being that there are Black folks who are more American, who identify with the so-called American experience, than with the African and colonial experience that has really informed our existence in this country and around the world.
The other element that capped off this process of Americanization, politically and culturally and ideologically, was the ascendancy of Barack Obama beginning in 2008. In that last vestiges of critical thought of this survivalist ability of Black people to separate themselves from the perspectives and positions of white America and the American state. Always being suspicious of moves made by the American state, especially as it related to other people of color. That suspicion was almost completely eliminated. There was this wholesale identification with the U.S. state, people proudly embracing their “Americanism.” And Barack Obama led our people to some of the most backward political positions ever held by Black people in this country. Barack Obama was able to carry out criminal activity that could not have been carried out by a white leader, like the attack on Libya, the expansion of the U.S. Africa Command, AFRICOM, that had just been put in place a few months before he took power, an expansion that saw the U.S. military footprint on the African continent increased by 1,900% . The 2,400% expansion of the Department of Defense 1033 program, the program responsible for shifting military grade weapons from the military to police forces across the country, resulting in their military enhancement.
These are moves that could not have been made without significant opposition from Black folks, if they had been attempted by a white politician. So this sort of move toward a more conservatism among Black folks was the foundation that was laid. Connected to that was in the emergence of this philosophical political framework referred to as Afropessimism.
This framework has been one of the most detrimental frames that I think has ever emerged among Black folks, because using this frame, where, as you said in your intro, everyone is supposed to be anti-Black, including other colonized people. And so therefore the ability to empathize with other colonized people, to stand in solidarity with them, to build the kinds of coalitions we used to build as a normal part of the Black radical tradition has been undermined by the popularity of this frame. Emerging first in academia, where most of this backwardness develops, it then bleeds into our movement spaces.
So that you have young folks, new to the movement, not very well grounded in the radical history of our movement, not understanding the concept of internationalism, embracing this nonsense that politically and ideologically, has us trapped in a corner and with nowhere to go, with no allies, and therefore the only route that can be taken is to beg white folks, for example, for “reparations.” There’s no no desire to build movement, because it can’t be built. There’s no attempt to try to change the world, because, as Frank Wilderson, one of the creators of this psy-op, claims that the only way that you can deal with the ongoing and unrelenting racism of white folks is for the world to end.
And so this kind of petty bourgeois passivity and resignation has become part of the discourse among some elements in the Black community. So this move toward criticizing and rejecting Kamala Harris because she’s not black, or suggesting that there’s no affinity with Palestinians who are being slaughtered by the U.S. state is just the latest manifestation of this kind of political backwardness that has gained a bit of a foothold in our community.
Some who identify as Afropessimist try to disassociate themselves from this new reactionary development. But it is disingenuous for the proponents of Afropessimism to pretend that there is no connection between Wilderson’s Afropessimism creation and the right-wing positions of ADOS. The ADOS movement and its pork-chop nationalist positions on Palestine, immigrants and non-Black coalitional politics represent a natural rightist logic of Afropessimism presumptions and worldviews.
MK: You know, Ajamu, one of the things I find most interesting about this ideology is that in order to believe in it, you have to separate our experience here from everything else that happens in the world, including things that the state here carries out around the world. So we have people who believe that the same state that carries out a genocide in Gaza will, for some reason, decide to do right by Black people and pay us reparations. It’s just illogical to me, but that is a central part of this ideology.
AB: It really is. It’s really irrational in some ways. Now we understand that the reparations demand is a legitimate demand being made by African peoples and other indigenous peoples here in the Americas and on the African continent. It emanates from very real historical realities that emerged as a consequence of the peoples of Europe that became “white” spilling out of Europe into the Americas, beginning in 1492 and the subsequent creation of what we refer to today as Western civilization and the West. That power dynamic between the “West” and the rest of us is what shapes contemporary social, national and most importantly, economic relations. It was the creation of the West, a parasitic process that came at the expense of peoples of the global South, their freedom, development, and humanity.
This oppressive power dynamic is the basis of the solidarity work that all of us have been involved in over the decades as part of the Black radical tradition. But this kind of understanding of the centrality of internationalism, an internationalism driven by an understanding of the interconnectedness of the struggles against Western colonial/capitalist domination no longer occupies a prominent place among contemporary activists or the general Black population. This is because of the lack of continuity in our movement and resistance work. Consequently, not only is the general public largely unaware of this tradition, younger people coming into movement spaces have a very underdeveloped awareness of elements of the Black radical tradition. And when you have that sort of political vacuum, then all kinds of mischievous ideological formulations can get a foothold.
One of the consequences of this, which makes it new, is that part of embracing this concept, for example with the Palestinians, there’s no connection to their struggle and ours, is that it results in people taking positions that are fundamentally immoral. Here we see the U.S. state supporting the fascists in Israel engaging in racist terror in Gaza, murdering primarily women and children, starving people to death, raping both women and men, denying them medical care.
This is one of the most egregious and outrageous developments we have seen in the post war period, and is being live streamed for Black folks. We have never stood on the side of the oppressor in that way, this notion that there’s no connection, and therefore no concern, is basically an immoral position. In fact, I would argue that is an anti-Black position that’s not part of our tradition at all.
There is a new political tendency in the U.S. that captures this backwards sentiment – the “American Descendants of Slaves,”(ADOS). These individuals embody the devastating impact of the racist colonial experience in the U.S. in which their identification with the “master” is total. They are in effect still slaves or at best dark skinned white folks. In fact, cracker white folks, because in their attitudes and their worldviews, they sound just like them in their their attitudes toward migrants who’ve been forced to come to the U.S. as a consequence of the U.S. destroying the economies of peoples here in the Americas, their position on the suffering of Palestinians, their hyper identification with their relationship to the U.S. state, their inability to identify with Africa and being an African, but their embrace of “Americanism” and America, which, in my estimation is white nationalism.
So these are phenomenal political trajectories. They have never been part of our tradition. In fact, as I said, it’s anti-Black. But the other element too, with this Afropessimist phenomenon, is that, in some ways, it is so typically, “American”, and is very U.S. centric. It’s a form of intellectual imperialism that exceptionalizes the U.S. Black experience, and then attempts to universalize that experience onto the rest of the African world.
It posits that the experiences of Black people in the U.S. represents something unique. That enslavement and the colonial process during the post-slave period we were subjected to is in some way fundamentally different fromthe enslavement and colonial experience of the African people throughout the African world. And part of that motivation we all understand is this, I think, the irrational belief that, as you said in your question, that a system, a society, that can rationalize the wholesale murder of a non-white population in Gaza is somehow going to turn around and do right, if you will, with African people in the U.S. by giving them cash reparations.
This position has moved the reparation demand from a progressive position to a position that is now much more dubious, and perhaps, even reactionary because of that demand being captured by these right-wing elements. Unless radical Black forces are able to recapture and define reparations progressively, the demand has the possibility of becoming a real detriment for radical work in the U.S. It is starting to be used as a weapon to undermine our political oppositionality in this country, because it is starting to mean that we have a stake in the continuation of the U.S. state in order for us to get our money! Articulated by these right-wing ADOS elements, the demand suggests the belief that the enemy can repair you, that some money in your pocket is somehow going to offset the centuries of exploitation and oppression, and the cost of that is to identify with the American state, as opposed to identifying with the oppressed around the world that are still being destroyed by the same American state that these elements so fervently identify with.
MK: I saw something on the X platform, Twitter, a post from Iddo Moed , who is Israel’s ambassador to Canada. So now we have Israeli officials weighing in on this issue, and he said, “Demanding black Americans to stand up for Palestinians is absurd in so many ways. Read why.” And then we see comments from someone named David Saranga , who is from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a former ambassador to Romania, Director of the Digital Diplomacy Bureau. In other words, I would say, head propagandist, making very racist statements about Arab people, condemning them by saying they had slavery, they did. But he doesn’t mention European slavery, for some reason. But at any rate, he is backing up these people who are telling us that we should not have solidarity with Palestine. And this is not really surprising, but it tells us how dangerous this new narrative is.
AB: It really does, and it should cause people who are trying to be critical, people who still have some degree of a critical faculty to question their political and ideological position. It’s the same message we have for elements of the broader left when they continue to find themselves on the same side of U.S. imperialism on various Issues and subjects from Nicaragua to Ukraine. When these ADOS forces, when these Black- “white nationalists” find themselves being appealed to and in alignment with Israeli fascists, then it should be something that would cause them to pause and maybe at least attempt to rethink their positions.
But of course, they don’t, because there’s not a historical grounding in their positions. There’s not any ideological substance to it. In fact, because they are so disconnected from the Black radical tradition, they don’t even understand that it was in the U.S. that the revolutionary pan Africanist movement really emerged before it moved to the African continent. They’re completely disconnected from that. There’s no understanding among these forces of the reality of colonialism and why part of the Black radical tradition always connected the struggle against racial oppression in the U.S. with the anti-colonial struggle globally. There’s no understanding of that, and therefore that’s why they take these backward political positions, and that’s how such a reactionary framework like this Afropessimism can, in fact, take hold and fundamentally confuse people and undermine the kind of traditional leadership role that Africans in the U.S. (Black people) have played at phases of history as part of the global anti- colonial struggles.
The ADOS folks have no understanding of the kind of solidarity that has been expressed toward struggles in the U.S. They have no understanding of the significance of a Kwame Nkrumah going to an HBCU in the U.S. and then ending up as the first President of Ghana, or even Namdi Azikiwe, who also attended HBCUs and became Nigeria’s first president, the role of a WEB Dubois, Queen Mother Moore, Claudia Jones, the African Blood Brotherhood, and even someone like Malcolm. The Afropessimists will argue that they understand the role of Africans in the U.S. in global struggles but that it is the unprincipled appropriation of Black energy in “other” struggle that is the problem. And here again lies the link between Afropessimism and ADOS and the degeneration of Black politics in the U.S.
Afropessimists and their ADOS offshoots are so deluded in their thinking that for them and their aggressive identification with the U.S., they have come up with a theory of blackness and anti-Blackness in which everybody non-Black is or potentially anti-Black. If you can’t trace your lineage to what they call foundational Black folks in the U.S., then, as Biden told Charlamagne tha God, you ain’t really Black. Therefore, even someone like Malcolm, whose mother was from Grenada, wouldn’t qualify as Black according to this framework that they operate from. This is the kind of backwardness that we see, and that’s the kind of backwardness that racist fascist like the Israelis see as an entry point to continue spreading the confusion, and that’s why we can’t play with this movement.
Luckily, this tendency still represents a minority tendency in our people, but we can no longer ignore them. This anti-Black tendency has to be directly confronted. And, you know, we’ve been engaged in conversation with some of them, and they’ve been coming after me, but I’m fully prepared to deal with the conversation, because some of them can be won back. They’re just confused. They have no real foundation. But the main thing that I’m confronting is this immorality. Black people never, have never supported genocide. We’ve never stood on the side of these forces that are responsible for the massive death and destruction throughout the so-called Middle East or West Asia and Africa. We’ve always been a force that understood that because of our own experiences, we had a sensitivity to oppression. We’ve always stood with the oppressed. This phenomenon represented by these individuals is essentially anti-Black.
MK: And lastly, let’s talk about what’s going on now between the U.S. and Israel. Secretary of State Blinken, is in Israel now on one of their phony ceasefire negotiations. The only ceasefire that can come about is for the U.S. to stop arming Israel, but they simultaneously say they will never do that. Biden has said that. Kamala Harris has said that. So any talk of ceasefire
is phony, but the Democratic National Convention is going on now, and I’m guessing that’s part of the impetus for doing this is to give the impression that there is going to be some change in U.S. foreign policy vis a vis Israel, when no such thing is going to happen. What are your thoughts on these public relations stunts and the movement against Israeli war crimes?
AB: It is fundamentally immoral, the kind of game that’s being played at the expense of Palestinian lives. As soon as the Frenchman, Antony Blinken, announced that he was going back to Israel again. I knew that the jig was up that they were going to meet with Netanyahu, and they were going to agree to the so called Bridging Proposal, which is nothing more than the introduction of new elements into the negotiation that went beyond the agreement that the Hamas and Palestinian leadership embraced back in May, the framework that was advanced by the Biden administration. And it was the Netanyahu government that began to put, you know, new elements into the game, because they don’t want to see any kind of ceasefire. They want to maintain control of the Gaza Strip. And that is reflected in the elements that were part of the so-called Bridging Proposal. They want to remain. They want to control the Rafah crossing. They want to control the Philadelphi corridor, the strip along the border between Gaza and Egypt. They even want to have an IDF presence in what is known as the Netzarim Junction, a corridor between southern and northern Gaza in which, if people are allowed to go back to Northern Gaza, to reoccupy the destroyed northern Gaza, the ruins that used to be their houses and communities, the Israelis want to be able to, in essence, screen and search everyone moving from the South back to the North. Continuing the degradation and undignified treatment of Palestinians before they are allowed to go to Northern Gaza.
The Palestinian resistance under the leadership of Hamas, have rejected those as non-starters. But now Antony Blinken says it is on Hamas to basically accept this “Bridging Proposal,” and if they don’t accept it, then basically, then they’ll be blamed for the collapse of the talks. It is fundamentally immoral. It is a game, a game that is really quite troubling. And turning to the gathering of democrats in Chicago related to this issue, it’s not just ADOS that’s implicated in the whitewashing of U.S. criminology and the support of Netanyahu and the fascists in Israel. It is the broader Black community also that votes Democrat. Black democrats, many who are now party bosses, are celebrating their new found unity at the expense of the people of Palestine. They want to avoid the issue of the Biden/Harris administration giving active support to a racialized genocide. Harris pretends to have more concern for the people of Gaza but her administration continues to send weapons of mass destruction to Israel to use against an oppressed, occupied people whose only crime is that the Israeli colonists want their land.
This is something we can’t we can’t allow to to go forward without critique, you know, and we don’t need to care about what the consequences of that might be in terms of who gets elected, who gets a chance to sit in the white people’s house, because the Democrats or the Republicans, vis a vis the Palestinian issue, there’s no difference between those two positions. Both are hawkish. Both are abetting criminality, and so therefore we should not give our vote, which means our consent to the immoral and criminal activity of this administration.
However, people are supposed to forget about the slaughter in Gaza for the greater good of the party. Just embrace the Democrats and this new phony generation of hope being fueled by the bourgeois press around Kamala Harris, who nobody really knows what she stands for. It is outrageous, immoral.
Kwame Ture reminded us that whenever you talk about the contradictions of the people but you don’t mention the role of the enemy in producing those contradictions you will always end-up blaming the people and diverting attention away from machinations of the colonial/capitalist system.
The immorality and opportunism of ADOS has its foundation in the bazaar and afro-American ( I used afro intentionally) elitist formulations of Afropessimism. But is not just Black folks who identify with ADOS that represent the success of the state’s counterrevolutionary efforts, it is also reflected in the millions of our folks who are ready to deny the moral culpability of the democrats with the racist rampage being waged by the Israeli fascists in Gaze. The racist “othering” of Palestinians by Black folks in the U.S. is a new phenomenon. One that must be aggressively confronted if we are to save the soul and sanity of our people in this wasteland called the United States of America.
It is still possible to win our folks back to themselves and to rebuild a politics of resistance informed by a vision of a new world in which all forms of exploitation and oppression are defeated.
Authentic revolutionaries embrace that spirit of optimism. This approach distinguishes us from the cynicism of the bourgeoisie and the despair and resignation of the petit-bourgeois Frank Wildersons of the world.
MK: Thank you so much. Ajamu, we will have to continue our conversations as this campaign season moves forward.
AB: Thank you.
Ajamu Baraka is the Chairman of the Coordinating Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.
Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents . You can support her work on Patreon and also find it on the Twitter , Bluesky , and Telegram platforms. She can be reached via email at margaret dot kimberley at blackagendareport.com.