Gaza Follows Joe Biden Into The Black Church
Palestinian suffering and Black pain converge on the world stage
There’s nothing contradictory about politicians pandering to Black parishioners from their pastor’s pulpit.
Democrats know we’re their most reliable electorate and Black pastoral leadership have long served as power brokers in our communities, a tradition dating back to slavery. If Democrats want to win, they need the Black church to get them across the finish line.
(It’s one of the reasons Republicans have attacked Sunday voting)
So, it would be deemed a lack of respect if a powerful politician–even a candidate for president–didn't frequent Black churches on the campaign trail. Usually, presidential candidates are given the pulpit and are afforded the niceties of decorum only God’s house can allow.
That’s how it usually works.
But U.S. President Joe Biden’s campaign stop at Mother Emanuel AME Church, in Charleston, S.C., this Monday was the exception for two reasons: it’s the site of one of the most horrific, racially-motivated mass murder sprees in U.S. history; however, the visiting president paying respect to the tragedy is aiding and abetting what experts claim is the genocide of the Palestinian people.
But only one of the two was on the agenda that day.
The president was at Mother Emanuel to appeal to Black voters about the urgency of fighting the white supremacy that ex-president Donald Trump vows to usher into a second term, if he wins. It was a poignant location for his message. Mother Emanuel is the site of America’s recent nadir. On June 17, 2015, white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine of members of the historic Black church and injured another. Few places were more appropriate for such a message. However, the messenger and the parishioners were confronted with a conundrum .
A handful of protesters rose the pews to remind Biden of a separate nadir his policies are perpetrating.
"If you really care about the lives lost here, you should honor the lives and also call for a cease-fire in Palestine," a woman shouted, followed by chants of "cease-fire now!"
Biden, for his part, addressed them.
"I understand their passion and I've been quietly working with the Israeli government to get them to reduce and significantly get out of Gaza, using all that I can to do that," Biden responded.
The protest evoked strong emotions from Black Americans online, arguing the activists desecrated hallowed grounds and that they picked the wrong time and place to voice their grievances. Some Black folk pushed back, saying the president dishonored the sanctuary with his very presence.
What’s clear is that a very local, somber event ignited a foreign policy debate that reveals how intertwined the destinies of Black people and Americans of Middle Eastern descent truly are.
Polls show that many Arab Americans are uncommitted to Biden over his unwillingness to reign in Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruthless response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks that has displaced nearly two million people and killed nearly 23,000 in Gaza, including more than 60 reporters.
Hillary Clinton lost Michigan in 2016, in part, because she failed to campaign in the state as she should have. Biden may fall short there because he hasn’t shown compassion for Arab death. Metro-Detroit has the highest Arabic-speaking population in the U.S. and reporting show they are undecided because of Biden’s reaction to Gaza, even though they helped him win the state in 2020.
There, too, is a chasm: Detroit is the biggest Black city in the U.S. Black voters there not only helped him win in 2020, but eventually got Michigan Democrats a slim majority in the state legislature and all of the statewide offices.
But Michigan is a swing state nationally. And while Black voters haven’t lost faith in Biden, Arab Americans feel the president doesn’t see their humanity. Michigan isn't the only critical swing state with conflicted Arab-American voters. Georgia and Arizona have consequential Arab-American populations that are equally disillusioned.
While Black folk are sympathetic, they feel equally exasperated that their fellow Americans would risk letting Trump win, and who’d be markedly worse for them than Biden.
So we say.
My own impulse is to say that Trump will intensify their suffering in ways unseen in his first term. I want to yell at the top of my lungs that Trump wants to return my people to the days of Jim Crow: no police accountability, attacks on voting rights, gutting of Affirmative Action and seating federal and High Court judges that will overturn any lower court legal victors we achieve to reclaim whatever legislative protections his racist policies attempt to undo. But I’d be wasting my time because Arab Americans know this.
We can’t navigate their disaffection with Biden with reason and linear arguments. Arab Americans aren’t suffering from a logic deficit. They’re yearning for some sign this administration recognizes their humanity. Just as Biden spoke to our hearts at Mother Emanual, he needs to appeal to theirs as well.
Israel’s collective punishment campaign has left nearly ten thousand children dead. Parents raise their dead babies before television cameras, hoping their fractured bodies will evoke similar world outrage as images of those slaughtered Ukrainian children did when Russia invaded in February of 2022. But, unlike Ukraine, National Securty Council spokesman John Kirby hasn’t shed tears over spilled Palestinian blood. Biden dismissively doubted Palestinian death figures in October, saying, “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s a price of waging a war.”
Echoing the message of the Biden Administration, Kirby called South Africa’s suit accusing Israel of genocide “meritless.”
Arab Americans know Trump hates them. They also know that Biden gives weapons to hatemongers in Israel who prove over and over and over that they want to wipe them off the face of the earth.
There seems to be no inflection point in the western world for dead Arab babies or disdain towards Israeli officials who seem to enjoy the carnage. Just stone cold, heartless, dismissive silence.
So when Biden appears at a Black church to commemorate Black suffering, should we really be shocked that protesters showed up in that very space to call out his hypocrisy?
Trump supporters, meanwhile, appear to be closing ranks around their shared hatred for anything not white. No matter their political diversity (if there is such a thing in the GOP), the one thing they all agree on is that their whiteness is under threat and coalescing around that is essential for their survival.
That message has global appeal.
Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, Trump’s peer in Europe, appears on Tucker Carlson’s airwaves and gets invites to CPAC. France’s Marine Le Pen, a right-wing opposition leader and Kremlin-paid perennial threat to win the French presidency every five years, wants to replicate Trump’s hatred in Europe. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni became prime minister on a fascist campaign. Europe is full of mini Trumps spewing Islamophic hatred designed to capitalize on white fear. Their targets: people who look like the Black church folk Dylann Roof murdered and civilians in Gaza killed by U.S.-made weapons.
Unfortunately, Biden’s presence at Mother Emanuel created a competition for empathy. That fissure could give way to an even bigger chasm between people whose survival depends on their ability to calibrate their individual grief with collective political action.
The anger over the brief protest at Mother Emanuel is real. How we constructively work through it is crucial. Biden can no longer appeal to Black anguish while dismissing Palestinian suffering. We need to organize around our shared destinies as vigorously as white nationalists pull ranks around their whiteness—and that includes challenging Biden to be morally consistent in using his office to reverse Israel’s barbaric response to October 7, as he’s used executive powers to advance our interests.
Most importantly, Biden needs to show that he has a heart.
If Biden can’t show compassion for Palestine, Black America will endure even more pain and disruption that’ll extend well beyond the pews of God’s house.
Question: What would've been the ideal way for Israel to have responded to October 7th?