You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people's pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you suffer less.
James Baldwin, "The Artist's Struggle for Integrity"
It happens every day. I'm walking in my neighborhood or I'm sitting in a seat at my neighborhood restaurant. At the neighborhood grocery store. It's at the local library. At the hospital. Anywhere, really.
When the manager of the building where I live feels free to speak to me, a 71-year-old educated Black woman, about my behavior! The problem is my behavior! Hear it?
The smile and, more telling, the piercing eyes. Accusatory, and it's hard to stay facing her. To look her straight in the eye. But I do. Does she think she's back in the day when America was "great, and I was still a girl and she the woman? What leasing rule have I violated? What law? Or what crime committed? Although I'm well aware that thinking while Black is criminal. So is writing while Black. That might be worse!
I've come to ask I ask what she planned to do about the white woman below me, mentally ill and racist, opening her living room window to tell another neighbor who is coming to see me that I have been to jail! What will you do about this defamation of my character ? What about this lie?
And it's all about my behavior !
And the message: You're out of place!
In "civilized" countries, white dominate, writes James Baldwin. Blacks, therefore, "clearly know their place." Never forget, sister. They remind us daily : You dared to speak up to her, a white woman ! You spoke out about the white women below you ! You are criminalized !
I, nonetheless, displayed a little attitude, anyway, and I stood up, and walking toward the door, I said to the manager, how dare you !
I could swear I heard something fall. And break!
**
When I bear witness, not just to what happens to me daily, I do so as Baldwin did in his time. I do so for those "who cannot because they didn't survive." That would include the more than 4500 people in Gaza, or thousands more under the ruins of schools, businesses, churches, hospitals, and homes, and it would include the many Black ancestors kidnapped, starved and ill-treated, shipped and sold, and forced to labor to build this nation called the United States of America. I bear witness to the practice of genocide within this "civilized" country as well as in countries where my people's place is to contribute tax dollars for the funding of genocide in Gaza.
I bear witness "for those who survived it all, wounded and broken."
Neve Gordon, writing in the London Review of Books ( LRB ), explains his effort to conduct "non-violent direct action against Israel's military siege of the West Bank and Gaza" in 2018. Then, he not only objected to the siege but also joined "the Palestinian people in their struggle for self-determination." It wasn't long before he was accused of being anti-Semitic."
This "new anti-Semitism" seems to suggest, Gordon writes, that his "form of criticism of Zionism and of the actions and policies of Israel" should be understood by all as a claim that Jews are to be hated. Jews are inferior. By this logic, Gordon explains, Zionism "is identical to Jewishness."
In London, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism protested in front of universities the visit of Francesca Albanese, an International lawyer and UN Special Rapporteur invited to speak at the London School of Economics and Political Science on November 11, 2024. Albanese, another bearing witness, has declared that Israel isn't "just committing was crimes or crimes against humanity in Gaza," ( The Guardian ). Israel is also carrying out a genocide in Gaza. Calling for the UN to suspend Israel's membership, she, in turn, is denounced as anti-Semitic!
A criminal of sorts. Equal to fascists in her hatred of Jews, Albanese is "unfit" for the position she holds at the UN.
Albanese's retort is to point to the destruction in Gaza, to the dead babies, to the starving survivors. They are victims of a genocide! Israel, she insists to a Guardian reporter, is intent on destroying Palestinian life.
When the protesters at the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism rally carried "Ban Fran" banners, they were sending a message to all those who dare to bear witness: Albanese "is not welcome at British universities."
Those who want to bear witness by protesting Zionism and genocide are criminalized! They too are told to watch their behavior! You are speaking up and marching in the streets, challenging the power of Israel supported by the power of the United States. I will continue to bear witness to the practice of anti-Semitism, but I will also continue to bear witness against Zionism. Know you don't belong in a "civilized" world if you don't remain in your place!
While college students and Jewish organizations around the global marched on behalf of the Palestinians, I started reading Nehisi Coates' The Message.
At first, I was hesitant, until I saw him interviewed on television. He looked like a Black who has experienced a thousand cuts. He has that familiar problem too. Sounds like he's not so well behaved.
I decided to read The Message .
I'm coming along with Coates in the second half of the book. I'm journeying with him to Israel and Palestine. I'm along side him in the streets and when he stops to talk to people. I too see how I'm responsible. It's my mess too! Here! I don't have the "luxury" of "detachment." Baldwin, again. Thanks to a reminder by professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. in Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. Everything, for Baldwin had become political; and yet, unlike Emerson, he couldn't afford to detach himself "from the ugliness of the day or the belief that it own identity was bound up with the idea of America itself-- because that idea, in part, relied on a lie about him ."
One day, not long after the presidential elections in November, I mentioned to a Puerto Rican woman, the new resident coordinator in the senior complex where I live, if she felt the heightened concern with Blacks, Indigenous, Haitians, Caribbeans? She didn't understand why people she knew where talking about leaving the country. Some even talking about moving to another state. When she arrives at her home at the end of her work day, she showers, eats, and goes to bed"
The lie this country tells is about me. It's about me and anyone who isn't white. Anyone terrified about a deportation campaign, to be spearheaded by authoritarians, fascists. I'm at the center of that lie, and, if I don't remain in my place, that lie shatters into tiny pieces.
I read The Message. I was in that Israeli hotel the day Coates returned from viewing the plaque . T hat "glare of racism" greets us"
Are you are guest ? Coates showed the man blocking the way his passkey and, moving on, he, we, heard the message, loud and clear: " 'What the f--- are you doing here.'"
The people of South Africa remembered. They remembered that time when Menachem Begin took office in the late 1970s. There was "no single country was buying more Israel arms than South Africa." Black South Africans didn't belong and, consequently, were "deprived of their rights." In other words, Black South African labor funded Zionism's agenda to deprive Palestinians of their rights.
Coates ends up bearing witness to genocide too.
**
I studied the Holocaust as part of my doctoral studies in modern American literature, 1900-1945. How is it possible to read most writers of that era and not read the historical discourse on the Holocaust. As Coates writes, the Jews had been "abandoned" to the gas chambers. They had endured "Dreyfus and Shylock," the "expulsion from Spain," and "two thousand years of degradation--
Now, however, the Jews have a "home." The Jewish people, he continues, have "taken their place among The Strong." So, in return, is Israel, Coates asks, like the US, where Blacks weren't considered "the equal of any white man,: to now see the Palestinians as not equal to the Jew? Are the Israelis exceeding the administration of Jim Crow?
And Coates supplies an example of Israel going above and beyond even the American ideology of white supremacy, evident in Jim Crow laws. For it's not a matter of standing at a "For Coloreds Only" water fountain. The consumption of water for an Israeli Jew is "nearly four times that of Palestinians living under occupation." Yet, Coates adds, if someone speaks on this disparity and calls it out, as say Dr. Martin Luther King called out injustice in his time, they would be considered anti-Semitic today.
It would seem, Coates argues, that Israel embodies the "West and its contradictions." There isn't a democracy in Israel, no more than there is here in the US, he adds. But worse, in Israel, the Palestinian is subject to second-class citizenry, if you can call it that, subject to check points, inhibiting their mobility throughout Israel, let alone Gaza. Besides a shortest of water, the people are being starved. Palestinians are dying from starvation because Israel is limiting the amount of aid allowed to enter what's left of Gaza.
Palestinians, he continues, have "shorter lives," are poorer, and are forced to "live in more violent neighborhoods." Yet, the US and Israel consider themselves "civilized" democracies; yet writes Coates, both have their "foundations in exploitation." Jim Crow era in the US overflowed with injustices. Consider how "the flag of slavery" waved "above a state capitol" until many came toppling down my young, brave protesters. Jim Crow, too, writes Coates was "a balcony of the Lorraine Motel," a "'poll tax,'" "'redlining,'" "'grandfather clause,'" and "'whites only'" signs.
For all of that, it's much worse in Gaza!
Hear the message loud and clear: only one side has the power, the weapons, the laws, writes Coates, and, therefore, how is it possible for him, a survivor of those daily cuts and blows, insults and criminalization, how could he be expected to have an interest in hearing the Israeli defense for occupation?
As a Black American, his presence in Israel is questionable. Questionable because the government knows enough to know the history of Black people, African Americans, in America. They know the history of the Palestinians at least since 1948. They suspect Coates, an intelligent man, knows that the systemic segregation of the Palestinians is expected, as Coates writes, to erase from the argument and purge from the narrative their existence.
You can't be at home where you are not wanted. Yet, on the other hand, it felt like home . America was far away and, yet, not so far away. He could connect the dots and see in Israel's oppression of the Palestinians America's Jim Crow era and the segregation of Black people.
" This putative "Jewish democracy' is like its American patron," Coates, continues, "an expansionist power" And every expansionist power needs a good story to justify its plunder." So the powerful are always on a civilizing mission, in which land is simply taken from those who have no idea of what to do with it, given their lack of humanity, anyway. Furthermore, in a "web of subsidies," Coates explains, there "is an incentive to further colonize the land of the Palestinians. Colonization "advances a primary interest of Israeli state-- the erosion of any grounds for a future Palestine state." It's no wonder that settlers "colonize" as "armed perpetrators of violence."
The Nakba, on the other hand, was a catastrophe. Becoming "displaced persons," many were forcefully removed from their homes and, thus, communities. I didn't need Coates to see in the Nakba decimated Black communities in Tulsa or Wilmington or Rosewood. Communities wiped out by believers of the lie , people who adhered to the laws enabling the continuation of white supremacy and the belief that only white people matter.
Jewish settlers building walls, home, shrines to "Jewish superiority or Jewish supremacy" was familiar to Coates. The "displacement" of Black Americans too!
What is America if not a country filled with hypocrisy?
Like most Black children, Coates recalls recognizing that while white Americans had more material possessions, they, nonetheless, "knew less." White America had "seen more of the world than I had-- but not more of humanity itself." They were "deeply ignorant of their own country's history, and thus they had no intimate sense of how far their country could fall."
The murder of George Floyd went viral, so many Americans decried the racial violence, claiming, this isn't America ! But for Black Americans, this is America 24/7!
If you live in fear, as most whites do, then existence is a nightmare filled with dark, monstrous beings. Beings who don't know they meaning of freedom! Therefore, wokeness haunts whites in fear. Their children are perceptually in danger of being exposed to Toni Morrison's Sethe, sitting and rocking, spilling the beans.
The state of Israel became part of the Strong, the powerful and, therefore, part of white identity. During the 20 th Century, Jewish immigration to the US was kept to a minimum as a result of the 1948 immigration bill; however, "the cause of Jewish whiteness was advanced." Hypocrisy succeeds anyway. As long as the Jews, "' over there," waged war "against natives and savages,'" also over there, their identity in whiteness was assured. The "'mass mutation' into whiteness," writes Coates, "was advanced." It's no accident that the IDF, Mossad, and Shin Bet all became "synonyms for righteous manly violence."
**
The last leg of the journey is the City of David, home to the slayer of Goliath. Or so the story goes. Nonetheless, as Coates learned, it's the city where the narrative justifies theft of the land. Tourist sites abound! It is a city where Coates confronts a profound truth that makes for a profound understand of the world white identity created.
I had never heard about this plaque . I, as some opposed to the funding of Israel with my taxes. As someone who finds it increasingly frustrating to see these mangled bodies of little Palestinian children, frustrating to see these anguished mothers and fathers" When will it end? When will there be a ceasefire! A cessation of all the maiming and killing?
" The plaque," writes Coates, "bore the flag of the United States and the name of one of its former ambassadors to Israel." Moving closer, Coates reads the following inscription: "'The City of David beings Biblical Jerusalem to life at the very place where the kings and the prophets of the Bible walked.'"
A shunned Coates continues reading: "the spiritual bedrock of our values as a nation comes from Jerusalem. It is upon these ideas that the American republic was founded and the unbreakable bond between the United States and Israel was formed."
It's no wonder, he continues, that the Evangelical church and the settlers are "a perfect match."
Coates had to sit and think. The writer read again using his mind's eye the inscription, "the spiritual bedrock of our values as a nation-- What has happened in Palestine and whatever will take place will be as a result of him! Genocide committed against another state will be done. And done in his name! Our name!
I don't want to belong in this world !
But then, isn't this the message?
"' You'd really be better off somewhere else.'"
But then, no witnessing !
And there's the man at the hotel, waiting. And there's the "glare of racism," the thousand cuts, and the behavior that makes criminals of us who witness and protest!
It's understood by Palestinians living in Gaza and those living in Israel. To understand Palestine, writes Coates, is to "understand the Nakba as a particular thing, ranging even beyond any analogies with Jim Crow, colonialism, or apartheid."
**
Writing is a powerful tool. Formed in the tradition of Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. Du Bois, Coates writes that our writing is often denied access "to leading journals or publications." The narrative of the powerful will deny us to advance white supremacy.
Palestinians write too, and they want to be heard. But the Strong and powerful and white control the narrative. There will be narratives, stories to witness. And there will be Palestinians doing the witnessing. "To save the world." To save the world !
We stand here. Sit here. Remain here. Immortalize here.
And we have only one goal
to be.
Mahmoud Darwish, "A State of Siege" 2002
