There is a long long conversation that I want to participate in and highlight about race and the Palestinian liberation struggle because 4 things are true:
1. Hypervisibility is not a privilege of the exploited. It's a harrowing experience to be observed perpetually by a global audience as you resist your own murder. Black people globally are very familiar with this experience. The Palestinian people are both hypervisible and dehumanized to such an extent that their national cause has been used rhetorically by many who are willing to watch and cry and throw pennies but not provide actual support for their safety, which feels very familiar to Black people.
2. Nonblack people globally on average do not recognize Black suffering as human suffering because Black life isn't recognized as human life by the averqge nonblack person. If that feels accusatory, it is. Think before responding to that, ask yourself some questions before you ask me a half baked one because by ethnicity, nationality, status in the eyes of civil society and so on, all nonblack people benefit from the dehumanizing of Black people.
3. Palestinians have used their hypervisibility for the benefit of the struggles of others even at their own expense, even at the risk of their lives, Palestinians have been insistent, for years, that their struggle is connected to the suffering of the whole world and they've been extremely correct.
4. Antiblackness is and always will be a factor in how nonblack people are treated collectively by the media gaze and how that manifests is actually significantly more complicated than "nonblack = positive, Black = negative " because proximity to and empathy for Black liberation is a factor in the treatment of nonblack groups, and when you put yourself out there on your own behalf and the behalf of Black people, your humanity becomes conditional to empire. Empathy for Black struggle, let alone solidarity with Black struggles for liberation, makes targets.
