The Democratic Party's political strategy amounts to nothing more than doublespeak and a consistent denial of the reality we see before us. The DNC was a case study of how shameless the Democrats are in their willingness to carry on their murderous charade.
Last week during the Democratic Party’s annual convention in Chicago, the story wasn’t just about the speakers who took the stage. For all of the hoopla surrounding compelling speeches offered by Democratic Party brass including the Obamas, the Clintons, and the Vice President herself, all of this was overshadowed by who was not allowed to speak - Palestinian Americans and, in particular, the Uncommitted Delegate movement who secured over 700,000 protest votes against the Biden administration for their continued military support of the State of Israel and its ongoing genocide of the people of Gaza.
Even the parents of Hersh Goldberg, a young man being held by Hamas, while speaking from the main stage of the convention, beseeched an end to the suffering of Gazans and suggested that Palestinian/Arab Americans should be heard during the convention. The fact that the DNC was able to find space for two Jewish Americans, for more billionaires than the RNC had on stage during their convention, but not for one Palestinian, acted as a metaphor for the overarching dehumanization of, and disregard for, the suffering of the Palestinian people prior to and since the offensive operation against Israel carried out by the Palestinian resistance on October 7, 2023.
This profound and lucid denial of Palestinian voices and that of their accomplices to be heard engendered an acute case of insomnia for me. When it became clear that the DNC would not acquiesce to Uncommitted I could not even close my eyes as the images of the open skull of a Gazan baby split open by weapons sold to the State of Israel, in part by my tax dollars, act as an incendiary brand that burns my conscience as if it were skin and flesh. I could not diffuse from my mind the imagery of my dear brother and comrade, Abbas Alawieh and his colleagues from the Uncommitted Movement staging a sit-in, in front of the DNC Convention showing the apotheosis of moral conviction and political valor begging, pleading, and demanding space for Palestinian Americans to be heard and granted a speaking slot at the convention.
However, what’s really kept me awake is the miasma formed by the gaslighting of the Democratic Party and their liberal acolytes who purport their support for ending the genocide in Gaza and the carnage of Israeli apartheid that has acted as a great plague in the Middle East for nearly eight decades. I was moved when the Prime Minister of Ireland said, in part, that as an Irishman, “I see the suffering of the Palestinian people through the lens of the oppression that we suffered under the colonial rule of Great Britain.” In that same light, my profound anger and outrage as a proud, anti-zionist, Black Jew is through the lens of the oppression that I suffer every day in this settler colonial nation due to racist economic policies, racist educational policies, racist environmental policies, and the racist police state that unleashes unprincipled and undisciplined law enforcement officials, many of them trained by the same military force that’s currently carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
During the convention, we witnessed Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez take the stage to proclaim, “[Kamala Harris] is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza,” a suggestion so egregious that even fellow “Squad” member [though it’s really more the “Squ..” now after the AIPAC generated defeats of Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman] Representative Ilan Omar seemed to take umbrage with it. Moreover, Keith Ellison, a Black Muslim American and Attorney General of Minnesota spat in the faces of Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims and all people of conscience when he went on the stage and uttered blatant and bold face lies when he remarked, “They're listening, friends. They agree with us...Kamala and Tim hear you.” Really, it would be nice if you prosecuted the case for Palestinian self-determination and the end of a genocide playing out in front of us with the same conviction that you did Derek Chauvin - because just that same morning Al Jazeera reported that Israel conducted an airstrike in the West Bank and that Israeli forces operating in Deir el-Balah, Gaza have forced more Palestinians into just 11% of the Gaza Strip.
But the real question becomes, how can Ellison even think his words ring true when his Democratic Party won’t even let Palestinian Americans take the stage like they did for two Jewish parents of a young hostage currently being held by the Palestinian Resistance? The answer to this question is simple - Palestinians are simply not offered the same level of humanity as Jewish people by the Democratic Party or the United States as a whole. Don’t get me wrong, it was a beautiful thing to allow those parents to speak, and my favorite part about their speech is that they upheld Jewish values when they lifted up the plight of the Gazan people and called for an end to the suffering for ALL, in effect, shining the same light on Gazans as they did for their son in the midst of their own suffering.
We even witnessed Democratic Convention attendees cover their ears and their eyes when peaceful, anti-genocide protestors simply read the names of Gazan children who have been wiped out by the perpetual targeting of civilians in an open-air prison. In some cases, we saw some of these attendees mocking the pain of these protestors. But in covering their eyes and ears, what these ignorant and malevolent liberals were really doing was covering their hearts, and in the process elucidating their hypocrisy and dehumanization of Palestinian people, which we must never allow to be covered up. Because just as we see and hear the suffering of the Palestinians, we must also see the abject hypocrisy of liberals and the Democratic Party, as well as the putrid detritus that it forms. Do the Democrats really expect us to believe they are doing everything, every day to let Gazans live when they didn’t even do anything to let Palestinians speak at their convention for five minutes?
And like the colonial cadres of the West are telling Palestinians to shut up and die, Democrats and their liberal sycophants are telling those of us in inexorable solidarity with Gaza, and all of Palestine, to shut up and vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the name of “saving democracy and restoring decency to the White House,” or some nonsense like that. They want us to believe they will “save democracy” and “restore decency” when they won’t do everything to stop genocide and apartheid, just as they continue to do nothing to deracinate the white “supremacy” ideology ensconced in the DNA of this settler colonial nation.
Ironically, a recent YouGov poll revealed voters would be more likely to support Harris/Walz if they committed to an arms embargo against the State of Israel. So you have to ask yourself what kind of candidate for the highest office in the world prioritizes a rogue, genocidal, settler colonial state, and the AIPAC blood money that comes with it, over policies that would actually help her win an election for the highest office in the land
In 2020, when the Democratic Party reduced the lynching of George Floyd and the murder of Briana Taylor to a series of photo ops depicting themselves taking a knee while wearing a kente cloth, I was reminded of the sage words of Ella Baker who once remarked, “I am starting to get concerned with some of the people taking notice of and supporting our movement.” Mama Ella knew then as many of us know now that movements can be co-opted as quickly as allegiances can be broken. Palestinian flags and Ceasefire Now banners have in too many cases been replaced by Harris/Walz yard signs.
So what does it really say when the Democrats won’t even let Palestinians speak at their pomp and circumstance conference that costs thousands of dollars to attend and which has featured more billionaires on stage than the GOP’s national convention? It says that we should not expect to see any shift in policy on Gaza/Palestine from Harris/Walz and the Democrats, just as we did not see any major policy shifts from them after the Summer of 2020. If anything, law enforcement agencies have received more government largesse with the metastasization of “Cop Cities” from Atlanta, to California, and to Minnesota. Hell, nearly a year before being hand-picked as the vice presidential running mate by the Democratic establishment, Governor Walz awarded his state’s law enforcement agencies with $300,000,000 even though “crime” has reduced significantly.
I would be remiss if I did not offer some words for the far too many Black liberals I see on social media and in the bourgeois press attempting to sow divisions between Black and Arab peoples. Simply put, you’re embarrassing yourselves to serve a party that has demonstrably shown less solidarity with Black liberation than our comrades in Palestine have and continue to do. And like Attorney General Keith Ellison just did, you are desecrating the legacy and the sage wisdom of our ancestors and elders of the Black Radical Tradition from Harriet Tubman, to Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Martin King, Kwame Ture, the Black Panther Party, El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, Angela Davis, Fred Hampton, and Assata Shakur - to name a few. I won’t go as far as Joe Biden in saying, “you ain’t Black,” but if you lack the moral clarity to comprehend that just as Black and Indigenous liberation in this country is connected, so too is the liberation and self-determination of Palestine. You lot are vindicating Franz Fanon’s paradigm of Black Skin, White Masks.
Intersectionality is not supposed to be convenient, that’s why it’s an exercise and not a nonprofit organization - it must not be reduced to an en vogue fashion statement be they kente cloths in 2020 or keffiyehs in 2024 when there’s no conviction to live up to the ideals, morality, and call for liberation that each garment represents.
To my comrades in the Uncommitted Movement, I certainly am in no place to tell you what to do, but I do believe that the Democratic Party has given you every reason to not believe that they hear you, see you, and care neither for your votes nor the lives of the people you are standing for in Chicago right now. What I can offer you is some wisdom from the Prophet, James Baldwin who wrote in 1963:
“Now we are here not only to mourn those children, who cannot really be mourned. We are here to begin the American Revolution. It is time that we the people took the government and the country into our own hands. It is perfectly possible to tap the power of this country. There is a vast amount of energy here, and we can change and save ourselves. We don’t have to be at the mercy forever of these sordid political machines. It is possible to create a third party, you know.”
You have power, and you also have choices of what to do with that power, I beseech you to use it wisely, morally, and with inexorable principles.
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is a national racial and climate justice advocate, and host of the WPFW Network program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” which airs Tuesdays at 6:00 PM EST. He’s a proud member of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and The Black Hive @ Movement for Black Lives.
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