The Mathematics of Solidarity
Black and Palestinian solidarity is essential.
Day 321 of the genocide. Over 40,000 Palestinians are known to be dead. The number is likely higher.
The United States gives over $3 billion in military aid to Israel every year. Actually, this is just aid to US-based weapons manufacturers since the money primarily goes to them. Israel gets the weapons. The weapons are used against Palestinians.
Since 9/11, US police forces have increasingly received military-grade weapons which they have deployed against people within US borders, particularly people protesting war, violence against Black people, and economic violence.
One of the ways many US police forces militarize is by training with organizations that teach them to behave more like the military. The Israel Defense Force (IDF) is one of the organizations that trains a lot of American police.
The tactics that IDF practices on Palestinians with American-made and funded weapons are then taught to American police officers who subsequently use these tactics on American residents and migrants, whether at protests, in the barrio, in the hood, or at the border.
These deadly exchanges link Palestinian death with Black American death and migrant death. They cannot be separated.
There is no saving all Black people if the laboratories of death in Palestine where they practice how to kill us more efficiently are allowed to remain up and running.
The argument before us today is how to confront these facts while in the midst of a colonial presidential election. (Yes it’s a colonial presidential election.) One of the candidates for president of the settler colonial state is a Black and Asian American woman of Jamaican and Indian heritage.
As we say, “Someone who looks like me, who shares my heritage.” Her Marxist Jamaican father and my Marxist Trinidadian grandfather have been cited alongside one another. Her enslaved Jamaican ancestors, like my enslaved Barbadian ancestors, like all our enslaved Black ancestors in this hemisphere, were liberated first by the Black Jacobins of Haiti.
She is planning to take a hard line on immigration at the southern border. The Black Jacobins of today, Haitian migrants, are among those at the border who face the violence of this hard line, which is not just a rhetorical trick but a fact.
This politics of aligning with the border fractures the diaspora. We are made un-whole by this. This too is a mathematical form.
The alternative is worse. The other guy wants to do what will amount to many genocides, including one that targets queers, not just one or a couple like the current guy. A terrible calculation, one we’ve all been turning over in our minds.
A calculation that will not matter to the Palestinians who are killed tomorrow. They will already be dead. The worst has already happened to over 40,000 people. Some of them are my colleagues, fellow physicists. But their level of education, the fact of their intellectual curiosity, is immaterial. Whoever they are, the worst case scenario for them is already unrelentingly underway.
Palestinian children are starving and now there is polio. Polio should be eradicated. No one should have polio. There is no reason for polio. Except US. With weapons sales, we the people of the United States of America make polio in Palestine a possibility, an increasing statistical probability.
The current presidential administration has sent more military aid to Israel than anyone ever has before them.
The suffering of Palestine is familiar. Black Americans are suffering and have been suffering for centuries. Everyone who grows up in this country has been touched by Black suffering. Maybe it is their own Black suffering that touches them. I know I live with mine. The other guy, the one who does not look like us, he promises more of this suffering. An exponential growth of it.
The one who looks like us does not promise to end it. But she looks like us, a kind of psychological wages of her Blackness. She is a symbol that our minds can apparently feast on.
We are told, you have to choose: to cry out for Palestine is to not love your own people enough. Another calculation: someone sat down and wrote there are more Black Americans than Palestinians, so Black Americans simply matter more.
This utilitarianism is an interesting game for a group that will never be more than 12% of the US population to play. If the argument that the concerns of the bigger group come first, where does that leave us?
We actually know the answer to this question because the white supremacists have been answering it for centuries. They answer it daily with their military grade weapons, which IDF has taught them to wield. It is the premise of the other guy’s campaign, that our needs are a thorn in the side of the people who have to come first. We know of mathematics black life. The spirits of Zong! cry out to us: we are not numbers.
The mathematics of solidarity demands a different calculation. We should never want to become the people who come first, unless that is all people together. All of us or none of us.
Palestine was always part of the Black Power vision of liberation.
Know the difference between seeking liberation and seeking to join the ruling class. We are allowed to disagree on the strategy, but we should firmly understand what prize we have been told to keep our eyes on.