Slavery,
Genocide and the Politics of Outrage: Understanding the
New “Racial Olympics”
Hishaam
D. Aidi
Hishaam
D. Aidi is a researcher at the Middle East Institute at
Columbia University.
In
October 1999, PBS aired TheWonders of the African World,
a six-part documentary produced by the renowned African-American
intellectual, Henry Louis Gates, wherein the Harvard educator
travels from Egypt to Sudan and down the Swahili coast
of East Africa and up though parts of West Africa examining
the encounter between Africa and Arab civilization and
the role of Africans and Arabs in the enslavement of Africans.
In Egypt, Gates reflects on the “facial features” of monuments
in Aswan, noting the “blackness” of the pharaohs and pondering
whether construction of the Aswan Dam that inundated ancient
Nubia was an act of Arab racism. In the coastal Kenyan
cities of Lamu and Mombasa, and on the island of Zanzibar,
he talks to a number of natives who, to his dismay, define
themselves as being of “Arab” or “Persian” descent. “To
me, people here look about as Persian as Mike Tyson,”
Gates remarks, “It’s taken my people 50 years to move
from Negro to black to African-American. I wonder how
long it will take the Swahili to call themselves African.”
The
Wonders of the African World was guided by peculiarly
American conceptions of race and blackness, the most obvious
being the “one-drop rule,” by which anyone deemed possessing
so much as one drop of black blood was to be considered
fully black and subjected to the legal system of racial
domination known as Jim Crow. Asked by one critic why
he considered ancient Egyptians more authentically African
than modern Egyptians, Gates responds: “I suspect that
if the average ancient Egyptian had shown up in Mississippi
in 1950, they would have been flung into the back of the
bus. And that is black enough for me.”[1] By emphasizing the role of the
Arabs and Africans in the slave trade, Gates was engaging
in the common American practice of allocating “racial
guilt,” in this case underlining Arab and African “blame”
for slavery. As one African reviewer wrote, “Some of us
fear that in [his] efforts to repair relations between
White America and Black America, [Gates] may be sowing
the seeds of discord between African-Americans and the
peoples of the African continent.”[2]
Black
nationalists are not the only group in the United States
to claim certain cultures, spaces and eras of the Arab
world as theirs for their own purposes. Christian and
Jewish nationalists have long imbued the “Orient” with
redemptive significance. But while Christian and Jewish
cultural affiliations with the Middle East have historically
been staunchly Zionist and pro-Israel, African-American
constructions of North Africa and the Middle East have
been ambivalent about Zionism and more willing to engage
with other nationalist movements. Malcolm X, one of the
first to try to reconcile Arab and black nationalisms,
tells of a transforming encounter he had with an Algerian
diplomat in Ghana: “I was speaking with the Algerian ambassador,
who is extremely militant and is a revolutionary in the
true sense of the word…. When I told him that my political,
social and economic philosophy was black nationalism,
he asked me very frankly, well, where did that leave him?
Because he was white…he was Algerian, and to all appearances
he was a white man. And he said if I define my objective
as the victory of black nationalism, where does that leave
him?”[3]
The
presence of Arabs on the African continent—“white” ones
like the Algerian ambassador, but especially those who
appear phenotypically “black” but reject the label “African”—has
elicited numerous ideological reactions, from Malcolm’s
pro-Arab pan-Africanism to militantly anti-Islamic, anti-Arab
strands of Afrocentrism. In the early 1970s, a school
of black nationalism emerged that is strongly distrustful
of the Arab world. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks,
that school has become stridently political, making common
cause with movements, such as those of Christian evangelicals,
Zionists and neo-conservatives, with which it has historically
been at odds. The resurgence of this strand of black nationalism,
which sees Arabs as “not our people” and “guilty” of inflicting
the same devastation on Africa as the white West, is the
result of centuries-old tensions between African-American
Muslims and Christians, strained relations between African-Americans
and Arab-Americans in urban areas, and a reaction to the
clash between African and Arab nationalism in the Afro-Arab
borderlands, particularly in the Sudan. More broadly,
it comes in response to the de facto mission civilisatrice
of Arab nationalism vis-à-vis non-Arab African peoples
and cultures in North Africa and the Afro-Arab borderlands.
This
anti-Arab black nationalism has found expression in the
new initiative demanding reparations from the Arab League
for “Afro-Arab slavery” and the campaign to penalize Sudan
for the Darfur tragedy. Both efforts are inspired by the
view that Arabic-speaking North Africans (of all hues)
are an “alien race” on African soil. Since September 11,
this view has gained popularity outside black nationalist
circles, leading to a rapprochement between black nationalist
groups and rival Zionist groups over Sudan, akin to the
Jewish-evangelical reconciliation over Israel. Such developments
are best explained by an enduring feature of US politics—racial
scapegoating.
Historians
have argued that racial scapegoating was crucial to the
consolidation of the American nation-state, since intra-white
conflict was often resolved by institutionalizing common
prejudice against blacks.[4]
Various reports assessing the impact of the September
11 attacks on American politics argue that the attacks
reordered racial divisions. A survey gauging attitudes
towards various ethnic groups, for instance, found respondents
giving “more favorable ratings” to all groups except for
Arab- and Muslim Americans, who “received less favorable
ratings because they were associated with the attacks
on the World Trade Center.”[5]
These figures should come as no surprise. Nationalism,
after all, has been defined as the “wish to suppress the
internal divisions within the nation and define people
outside the group as untrustworthy as allies and implacably
evil as enemies.”[6]
The
September 11 attacks and the “war on terror” have thrown
American racial politics into flux, producing a new enemy,
new alliances and sending different groups scrambling
for a better spot in the ethnic pecking order. As in the
early years of the Cold War, the post-September 11 period
constitutes a critical juncture where past political alignments
are coming undone, as some ethnic and political groups
mobilize to resist reigning policies and ideas, while
others rally to reap political benefits by staunchly supporting
efforts to contain the Islamic threat. The “Save Darfur”
campaign in many ways captures the new racial climate,
as different ethnic and political divisions have been
set aside and grievances are “externalized” onto the Middle
East. As in the Cold War, “race” has emerged as an ideological
cudgel in the war of words between the US and the Arab
world, as various actors use charges of racism to expose
the other side’s alleged double standards.
Fears
about how mass immigration from Latin America may balkanize
the US in a time of war have also helped shape the post-September
11 racial landscape. Groups anxious about being superseded
by the “ethnic succession” produced by Latino immigration
have shifted right, becoming hawkish on foreign policy
and supporting tougher border controls. Latinos eager
to prove their patriotism are evincing conservative attitudes
on the Middle East and voicing centuries-old canards about
Moorish invaders and Oriental despotism. These trends
suggest that a shift is taking place in the American racial
hierarchy. If, historically, as Toni Morrison once argued,
the assimilation of immigrants was achieved and America
was kept united only after the “racial estrangement [of
blacks] is learned,”[7] today it appears that assimilation and unity
are achieved by “learning” the estrangement and ideological
exclusion of the Arab/Muslim.
Shifting
Currents
Cornel
West has argued that the most prominent African-American
leaders of the last century, Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du
Bois, Paul Robeson, Ralph Bunche and Martin Luther King,
were initially committed Zionists, but “by the mid-sixties,
especially [after] 1967 and the beginning of the occupation,
the mood in the black community slowly, but significantly,
[began] to be critical of Zionism.”[8]
The biblical trope of Exodus of the suffering Hebrews
being liberated from Pharaoh and returning to the land
of Israel has long resonated with African-Americans. In
the early twentieth century, many African-American leaders
saw Zionism as a model for the African diaspora’s eventual
emancipation and return to Africa. But the tide would
begin to shift against Zionism long before the 1967 war.
By the mid-1950s, the anti-colonial, anti-racist rhetoric
of the Bandung conference and the pan-Africanism of Gamal
Abdel Nasser and Kwame Nkrumah had gained sway in black
America. The Nasserist regime explicitly appealed to African-Americans
suffering in the “pure white democracy” of the US: “Greetings
to the Free Negroes from Free Egypt, and from all Free
Men.”[9] After the 1956 Suez war, Du Bois published a poem excoriating
Israel for betraying the Jews’ historic suffering—its
own “murdered, mocked and damned”—and lauding “the great
black hand of Nasser’s power.”[10]
The young Malcolm X also saw Zionism and Jewish diaspora
politics as a paradigm for African-Americans to follow,
but as one biographer notes, “Interestingly, after making
a little-known visit to the Palestinian homeland on the
Gaza Strip in 1964, Malcolm stopped using Israel as an
example, giving instead a Chinese analogy.”[11] During the early years of the Cold War, Arab
nationalism enthralled many African-Americans. “We have
a unique and rare personality in the person of Gamal Abdel
Nasser,” a Harlem street orator declared in 1955. “This
man’s ancestry is African and Arabic, but he refuses to
follow the classic road of championing white supremacy
and exploiting black people.… He made the freedom of Africa
a major priority along with Arab unity and Muslim cooperation.”[12]
President
Harry Truman soon realized that in the propaganda war
with the Soviet Union and her allies, race was America’s
“Achilles’ heel,” used by rival states to expose American
double standards on human rights and undermine the US
position as leader of the “free world.” To combat Communist
propaganda about American racism, the State Department
sent prominent black athletes and artists as good will
ambassadors to tour the Middle East. In 1956, Dizzy Gillespie,
Louis Armstrong and other “jambassadors” toured Lebanon,
Syria, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, giving performances
with the objective of showing that, in America, individuals
of any race could achieve success.
But
the popularity of Islam and Arab culture in black America
continued to grow unabated, disquieting a number of black
nationalists and black Christians who were appalled that
hundreds of thousands of African-Americans were converting
to an alien faith. Islam has been viewed with suspicion
in black America since the era of slavery, when Muslim
slaves, often literate in Arabic, were often labeled “Moorish”
or “Arabian” and put in positions of power as “house slaves”
or “drivers” overseeing non-Muslim slaves.[13]
From the days of the plantation, the view existed of Muslim
slaves as arrogant people ashamed of being African, who
would try to “pass” for “Arab” or “Moorish” to get better
treatment from the white man. Reflecting that view, Booker
T. Washington, in his autobiography Up From Slavery,
scoffs at how a “dark-skinned man…a citizen of Morocco”
is allowed into a “local hotel” from which he, “an American
Negro,” is banned.[14]
These anxieties were revived in the 1930s and 1940s, when
the Moorish Science Temple and the early Nation of Islam
began gaining urban followers who wore robes and fez hats
and described themselves as “Moors,” “Arabs” and “Afro-Asiatics.”
The
belief that conversion to Islam constituted a form of
“passing” was only reinforced by the fact that many African-Americans
who embraced Islam were not “Jim Crowed.” As Dizzy Gillespie
famously pointed out, many jazz musicians who converted
and took on Muslim names could enter “whites only” restaurants
and even had “white” stamped on their union cards. As
Gillespie put it, “‘Man, if you join the Muslim faith,
you ain’t colored no more, you’ll be white,’ they’d say.
You get a new name and you don’t have to be a nigger no
more.”[15] The growing influence of Islam in black America in the 1950s
troubled prominent African-American liberals like Thurgood
Marshall, who in 1959 referred to the Nation of Islam
as “run by a bunch of thugs organized from prisons and
jails and financed, I am sure, by Nasser or some Arab
group.”[16]
The
popularity of Malcolm X’s message of Islamic universalism
as an answer to Western racism and imperialism was drawing
critics beyond the African-American community. In 1971,
Bernard Lewis wrote that although ”Malcolm X was an acute
and sensitive observer…the [Islamic] beliefs which he
had acquired,” “prevented him from realizing the full
implication of ‘the color pattern’ he saw” in the Arab
world. Rather than an “interracial utopia,” Lewis argued,
a quick reading of The Arabian Nights showed the
“Alabama-like quality” and “Southern impression” of Arab
life.[17]
That same year saw the publication of Chancellor Williams’
The Destruction of African Civilization, which
would emerge as one of the founding texts of the Afrocentrist
movement. Williams described how since the time of pharaonic
Egypt, Arabs had attempted to conquer Africa while Nubians
and Ethiopians heroically resisted the white “Arab-Asian”
effort to destroy the single black empire which originally
extended from the shores of the Mediterranean to Zimbabwe.[18]
More
recently, another prominent Afrocentrist, Molefi Asante,
has argued that the Arab-Islamic invasions of Egypt destabilized
the entire African continent: “The Arabs, with their jihads,
or holy wars, were thorough in their destruction of much
of the ancient [Egyptian] culture,” but fleeing Egyptian
priests dispersed across the continent spreading Egyptian
knowledge.[19] Given the Arabs’ historic hatred of blacks and their guilt in
the destruction of indigenous Nile Valley civilization,
the Afrocentrists are adamantly opposed to African-Americans
embracing Islam, seeing it as “contradictory.” In the
words of one critic, for the Afrocentrist, African-Americans
espousing Islam were “cultural heretics” and “self-hating
wannabes who had moved from the back of the bus to the
back of the camel.”[20]
This
notion of Arabs as invaders who destroyed African civilization
and drove North Africa’s “indigenous” inhabitants below
the Sahara is repeated ad absurdum by influential
African and Afro-diasporan scholars, despite evidence
to the contrary. In this view, the lighter-hued inhabitants
of North Africa today are not “indigenous,” but are the
descendants of invaders and enslavers, or worse yet, a
mulatto class used to oppress the indigenous black population.
But most scholars concur that North Africans have always
been multi-hued, and there is no evidence of a black North
Africa obliterated by invaders. One prominent geographer
writes, “It was not that Arabs physically displaced Egyptians.
Instead, the Egyptians were transformed by relatively
small numbers of immigrants bringing in new ideas, which,
when disseminated, created a wider ethnic identity.”[21]
Another historian argues that both skeletal and ancient
pictorial evidence “show ancient Nubians as an African
people fundamentally the same as modern ones” and that
the advent of the Arabs “has had a powerful linguistic,
religious and cultural impact but has…not had a great
influence on the appearance of the people.”[22] Even Cheikh Anta Diop, the grandfather of pan-Africanist
historians, has called the idea that
Arabs caused mass racial displacement into sub-Saharan
Africa a “figment of the imagination.”[23]
The
Politics of Blame
Nigerian
Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka is probably the most renowned
proponent of the view that Islam and the Arabs are as
guilty of the “the cultural and spiritual savaging of
the continent” as the West.[24] He has repeatedly argued that,
because of Arab “racial guilt,” North Africa should not
be considered part of Africa: “Africa minus the Sahara
North is still a very large continent, populated by myriad
races and cultures.”[25] Soyinka has also forcefully
called for reparations from the Arab-Muslim world and
the West. This thinking reveals the subjective treatment
of slavery in black nationalist writing. Most historians
concur that Africa was the victim of three slave trades:
the “Occidental” that took slaves across the Atlantic
Ocean to the New World, the “Oriental” which took slaves
to markets in North Africa and Arabia, and the “African”
slave trades—also called “internal” or “indigenous” slave
trades—which transported slaves from one region in sub-Saharan
Africa to another and which peaked after 1850.[26] Pan-Africanist thinkers of different political
persuasions have always had to decide which slavery to
downplay and which to emphasize as critical to Africa’s
identity. Thus, Malcolm X, who came to believe in a pan-Africanism
that was “race-transcendent,” inclusive of Arabic-speaking
North Africa, was well aware of the role played by Arabs
in the “Oriental” slave trade, but saw it as an affair
of the past, with American racism and imperialism in more
urgent need of attention.
Similarly,
Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui has called for a pro-Arab pan-Africanism
that includes North Africa, and demands reparations from
the West but not from the Arab world, because the Western
system of slavery (“first-degree slavery) was worse than
both the Oriental (“second-degree slavery”) and the “indigenous
African slavery” (“third-degree culpability slavery”),
the latter two being more racially assimilationist than
the Western system.[27] This typology outrages many black nationalists, who see Mazrui
as an apologist for Oriental slavery, treating it as “benign,”
a position that is indeed held by many Arab and Muslim
scholars. But Soyinka, like other black nationalists,
is mysteriously silent on the subject of African slavery,
generally abolished in the early twentieth century, but
still existing in Niger, Mali, Benin, Mauritania and Haiti.
Nigerian poet J. P. Clarke has criticized this selective
outrage: “If the European states are to pay, so must the
Arab states, and so must the African states set up by
the Europeans…if the eminent personalities now addressing
the matters of redress are not to be accused of casuistry
and of applying double standards.”[28]
The
subject of “African slavery” is still rarely discussed,
despite the facts that slavery was necessary for the consolidation
of the nineteenth-century West African states of Sokoto,
Masina, Futa Jallon, and the Chokwe and Zulu states of
southern Africa, and that slavery endured in Sierra Leone
until 1926 and in Ethiopia until 1923.[29] Western anthropologists have
tended to avoid the subject or portray “indigenous slavery”
as “entirely benign…for fear of contributing to unfavorable
stereotypes held by the wider public about cultures that
[they] were committed to defend.”[30]
The leaders of newly independent African states deliberately
suppressed public discussion of “indigenous slavery,”
also dismissing it as “benign” for fear of inflaming ethnic
tensions.[31]
Black
nationalist intellectuals in the diaspora rarely address
the subject of slavery in Africa, treating it as an internal
African matter (“black-on-black”) or a harmless form of
servitude (“non-chattel”), for fear that such a discussion
may, by shifting the blame onto Africans, undermine the
black freedom struggle in the New World. Rather than a
solidarity based on political objectives as put forth
by Malcolm X and Nkrumah, black nationalists champion
a pan-Africanism based on reconciliation between blacks
in Africa and the African diaspora, which can be achieved
by “forgetting” African slavery, eliding sub-Saharan Africa’s
myriad ethnic and political differences, and coming together
against the West and the Arab World (“the Orient”), two
civilizations which have brutalized “the African.” The
issue of slavery in Sudan thus emerged as a cause in the
African diaspora only when it began to be seen not as
an African form of slavery, but as an “Oriental” one,
with “Arabs” enslaving “indigenous” Africans and with
northern Sudan as part of the expansionist Orient. This
approach involves a good deal of intellectual gerrymandering.
How can one distinguish between Oriental and African slavery?
The trans-Indian Ocean slave trade, like its Atlantic
counterpart, took African slaves to markets outside of
Africa, but why is the trans-Saharan slave trade, which
took slaves to North Africa, considered “external,” while
the trade that took slaves to different regions of sub-Saharan
Africa is termed “indigenous”? Why is the Sahara seen
as a divide akin to the Atlantic Ocean simply because
sahil means coast in Arabic?[32]
Historians of different persuasions—not just black nationalists—seem
to begin with the premise that North Africans are not
“Africans,” thus making their participation in slavery
on the African continent ethically different from African
slavery.
These questions were dismissed at the Conference on Arab-Led
Slavery of Africans organized in 2003 in Johannesburg,
South Africa by the Center for Advanced Studies of African
Society in Cape Town and the Drammeh Institute of New
York, demanding reparations and an apology from the Arab
League for “Arab slavery and depredations in Africa.”
This reparations initiative is underpinned by the view
that the Arabs displaced the indigenous African populations
of North Africa. Some of the reparations advocates hold
all non-black North Africans—most often using the one-drop
rule—to be “guilty,” while others direct their wrath at
all those who self-identify as Arab, including dark-skinned
northern Sudanese, but exculpate Berbers, who though “white”
are also victims of Arab invaders.
How
did Arabs transmute, almost overnight, from being seen
by African-Americans as allies in the struggle against
Western racism to a slave-trading “intruder race” occupying
Africa? How did the pro-Arab pan-Africanism of Malcolm
X lose out to the anti-Arab black nationalism of Asante,
Williams and Soyinka? Some, like Sherman Jackson, have
attributed this change to the “exploitative” relations
between Arabs and African-Americans in urban America—and
the anti-black bigotry of some Muslim immigrants. Malcolm
X defended Middle Eastern immigrants from the bigotry
charge thusly: “Now a lot of Arabs might like for
you to think that they are white, but whenever you see
them involved in the international picture, they are lined
up with the dark world. They can come around here and
pose as white. But when they get back, they’re not
white.” But even this defense began to ring hollow, as
many African-Americans began to feel not unjustifiably
that Arab nationalism was turning its back on pan-Africanism
and the “dark world.” Equally important in inflaming black
nationalist rage are the supremacist strains of Arab nationalism
and Islamism espoused by various North African states
that openly speak of subjugating or civilizing non-Muslim
and non-Arabic speaking groups. The militant Arab-Islamist
nationalism of the Khartoum regime, in particular, figures
prominently in Afrocentrist and black nationalist thought,
with many, like Chancellor Williams, arguing that the
Sudanese civil war is merely a continuation of a centuries-old
race war between invading Arabs and indigenous Africans.
But how did the Sudanese civil war and its most recent
permutation, the Darfur conflict, come to be so widely
seen as pitting “Arabs” versus “indigenous” Africans?
(Mis)Representing
Sudan
The
challenge in examining Sudan’s long-running civil war
is to understand how, unlike other African civil wars,
the conflict came to be “racialized” and not “ethnicized.”
While popular representations of the Sudanese civil war
as pitting the “Arab Muslim” north against “African Christian/animist”
south may be simplistic, it is equally inaccurate to argue,
as do many Arab apologists, that racial distinctions and
prejudice were introduced by British colonialists. Historians
have argued that by the sixteenth century, Muslims in
the north were claiming Arab ancestry, and the labels
one hears today—‘abd or slave for southerners and
Fallata for those of Western African origin—derive from
the late eighteenth century when the kingdoms of Funj
and Fur were raiding the south for slaves and northern
Sudanese Muslims “invent[ed] derogatory ethnic and racial
categories to refer to non-Muslim groups in the South.”
Centuries before the advent of the British, northern Muslims
were claiming a superior Arab identity asserting descent
from either the Prophet Muhammad or other distinguished
Arabian ancestors, and viewed the peoples of southern
Sudan, the Upper Blue Nile and the Nuba mountains as “enslaveable”
non-Arabs. These categories, explains one historian, “demarcated
and racialized the people of the Sudan. Color in itself
became quite irrelevant; many ‘Arab’ Sudanese were and
are darker than some Southerners. But descent did and
does matter; even conversion to Islam could not fully
compensate for the absence of accepted Arab ancestry.”[33]
British
colonial policy built upon “the existence of these two
invented opposing identities.” The British administration
carved up the Sudan into an “Arab North” and an “African
South,” and divided the peoples into three racial categories—“Arabs,”
“Sudanese” for ex-slaves and “Fallata,” and in the 1930s,
attempted to develop the south along “indigenous and African
lines” through a return to “tribal” law and ”indigenous
languages.”[34]
The idea of an “indigenous south” juxtaposed to an Arab
north was thus a British innovation that would have far-reaching
political repercussions. In the parts of Africa where
colonialists categorized a particular group as a race
instead of an ethnicity, that group would be ideologically
and “legally constructed” as non-indigenous, and via the
“migration hypothesis,” in effect deracinated and depicted
as having originated elsewhere.[35]
When Sudan gained independence, the state builders in
Khartoum embraced an Arab nationalism based on “a genealogy
that stretched into the Islamic Arab past” and attempted
to impose an Arab identity—and later Islamic law—not only
on the north, but also on the southern territories. In
consolidating the Sudanese state, the leadership would
use a racial language that dated back to the seventeenth
century, but they also adopted the racial categories and
idea of “indigeneity” introduced by the British. Yet although
many in the north self-identify as Arab and claim descent
from noble Arabians who supposedly immigrated to Africa,
that does not make them non-indigenous.
The
“Arab” versus “indigenous African” dichotomy runs through
most discussions of the Darfur conflict. Alex de Waal
has argued that, “The Arab-African dichotomy is historically
and anthropologically bogus. But that doesn’t make the
distinction unreal, as long as the perpetrators subscribe
to it.” The perpetrators, in this case, the Darfuri Arabs
who are attempting to exterminate the “indigenous” people
of Darfur, “are ‘Arabs’ in the ancient sense of ’Bedouin,’
meaning desert nomad…. Darfurian Arabs, too, are indigenous,
black and African. In fact, there are no discernible racial
or discernible religious differences between the two:
all have lived there for centuries; all are Muslims.”[36] Ethnic identities and categories have long
been fluid in western Sudan, but have recently hardened
around the political labels of Arabs and African. In the
1990s, in imitation of the southern Sudan People’s Liberation
Army (SPLA) and to gain political traction, leaders of
the Darfurian separatist movement embraced the label “African”
instead of the alternative “Muslim.” An attempted alliance
between Darfurian separatists and the SPLA had failed,
but as the SPLA continued to resist the Khartoum regime
and “gained a high international standing, [Darfurian
leaders] too learned to characterize their plight in the
simplified terms that had proved so effective in winning
foreign sympathy for the south: they were the ‘African’
victims of an ‘Arab’ regime.”[37]
Discordant
Historiographies
The
clash between Arab nationalism and African nationalism
in Sudan has occurred less violently in a number of North
African states. In fact, what has enraged black nationalist
opinion in the US is not simply the Sudan war, but the
wider Arab world’s “conspiracy of silence” about the presence
of racialism and slavery in the region, coupled with the
arrogance of Arab nationalist and Islamist regimes and
movements toward non-Arabs in North and sub-Saharan Africa.
Many African and African-American observers note that
Arab heads of state will spout a pan-African rhetoric
while being deeply contemptuous of Africa. Nasser supported
the civil rights movement and spoke passionately of continental
solidarity, but also said: “We are in Africa… We will
never in any circumstances relinquish our responsibility
to support, with all our might, the spread of enlightenment
and civilization to the remotest depths of the jungle.”[38] Likewise, Libyan strongman Muammar
Qaddafi, another champion of Africa known for his grandiloquent
appeals to black America, is the author of TheGreen
Book, which holds that blacks have more children than
other races because they “are sluggish in a climate that
is always hot.” Qaddafi has attempted to annex northern
Chad, arming groups along the Chadian and Sudanese borders
in an effort to build an “Arab belt” across the Sahara.
These supremacist attitudes permeate Arab intellectual
circles. Egyptian historian Hilmi Shaarawi, arguably the
Arab world’s most renowned Africanist, has tartly observed
that most Arabic-language scholarship on Africa treats
the continent as a “cultural vacuum,” a “continent without
any culture and civilization” waiting to be fecundated
by Islam and Arab culture.[39]
The
conflict between Arab and African nationalism is also
an ideological “war of visions.” While many sub-Saharan
African regimes sought to celebrate their indigenous languages
and cultures after independence, many North African regimes
that joined the Arab League would embrace their own “migration
myth,” retroactively tracing their populations’ national
origin to Arabia (a claim that would provide ammunition
for black nationalists and others seeking to portray North
Africans as settlers). Most North African states made
Arabness (‘uruba) the official identity, Arabic
the official language and suppressed—or even criminalized—the
expression of indigenous, non-Arab languages and identities.
The homogenizing historiography of the state builders
is now coming under attack by self-described “indigenous”
nationalist movements in the Sudan and the Maghrib. In
Morocco, the Berberophone movement has successfully pressured
the government to change history textbooks that claimed
that the country’s entire population, Arabic- and Berber-speakers
alike, originated in the Middle East.
Unaware
of this conflict of historical and political visions,
many African-Americans are galled by the Arab nationalist
and Islamist disdain for non-Arab and pre-Islamic culture,
in particular that Egypt’s pharaonic heritage does not
figure more prominently in the country’s political discourse.
African-Americans note that Egyptian intellectuals and
officials often refuse to even engage with different Afro-diasporan
groups drawn to ancient Egypt’s culture—even dismissing
them as “pyramidiots.” In March 1989, for instance, a
controversy arose over an exhibit about Ramses the Great
at the Texas State Fairgounds in Dallas. An urban group
called the Blacology Speaking Committee threatened to
boycott the exhibit, alleging that the organizers had
not placed sufficient emphasis on the blackness of Ramses
II. Abdellatif Aboul-Ela, director of the cultural office
of the Egyptian embassy in Washington, responded with
an op-ed in the Washington Post which captured
many Egyptians’ attitudes toward race and Africa: “They
should not…involve us in this racial problem that I thought
was solved and buried a long time ago. We are not in any
way related to the original black Africans of the Deep
South. Egypt, of course, is a country in Africa, but this
doesn’t mean it belongs to Africa at large. This is an
Egyptian heritage, not an African heritage…. We cannot
say by any means we are black or white.”[40]
Groups across Africa and the African diaspora may also
reject the labels “African” or “black” in favor of more
local identities, but black nationalists see the refusal
of North Africans to identify with pan-Africanism as particularly
offensive because they are “sitting on” on a glorious
African heritage.
This
background is crucial to understanding why Sudan emerged
as a cause after September 11.
Marketing
Darfur
In
December 1999, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared
that, much as she deplored Sudan’s suffering, “the human
rights situation in Sudan is not marketable to the American
people.”[41] Less than three years later, on October 7,
2002, Congress passed the Sudan Peace Act by a vote of
359-8, condemning Sudan’s human rights record and promising
stepped-up US involvement in the peace process. The bill
was praised as an “expression of unity” that brought together
sundry political interests and leaders. “Republicans and
democrats, blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians, men and
women,” crowed radio personality and long-time Sudan activist,
Joe “The Black Eagle” Madison, about the diversity of
the lobbying effort. Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) joked
that in his 30 years in Congress he had never before been
on the same platform with Texan Republican Dick Armey.
As
the Bush administration was attempting to broker an end
to the war in the south, the Darfur crisis captured America’s
imagination. In April 2004, the US Holocaust Memorial
Museum issued a “genocide alert” about Darfur—the first
in the institution’s history. At a Darfur Emergency Summit
convened on July 14, 2004 by the American Jewish World
Service and the Holocaust Museum, Nobel laureate Elie
Wiesel stated, “Sudan has become today’s world capital
of human pain, suffering and agony.” The American Jewish
World Service subsequently helped establish the Save Darfur
Coalition, comprising more than a hundred American organizations
to lobby the US government and the United Nations. Also
in July, Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking before
Congress, described the Darfur tragedy as “genocide.”
As the fall semester began, vigils took place on college
campuses across the country, as students attempted to
start a Sudan divestment campaign similar to that waged
against apartheid-era South Africa. “This is the most
impressive and widespread coalition on an African crisis
that we’ve seen since the anti-apartheid movement in the
1980s and early 1990s,” said John Prendergast, a top Africa
aide at Clinton White House, now with the Brussels-based
International Crisis Group.[42]
Meanwhile,
Khartoum’s harboring of Osama bin Laden in 1996 made it
central to the war on terrorism. The presence of oil,
eyed by Europe and China, made Sudan increasingly relevant
to a Bush administration looking for alternatives to Persian
Gulf oil. To many Americans, moreover, the Sudanese civil
war was part of the “clash of civilizations,” with southern
Sudan a “civilizational faultline” where Islam bloodily
bordered a rival civilization and where it was crucial
to contain the expanding Islamic threat. The conservative
Christian lobby, working with Democrats and the Congressional
Black Caucus, had helped push through the Sudan Peace
Act. What surprised many observers was that Darfur suddenly
became a domestic political issue threatening to undermine
the administration’s peace efforts. Darfur brought together
Wiesel and Jimmy Carter, civil rights leaders, human rights
activists, entertainers Dick Gregory and Danny Glover,
conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, retired
Sen. Jesse Helms and Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of
Ben and Jerry’s ice cream company. Referring to the “black/white-left/right”
“coalition of conscience” for Darfur, evangelical leader
Franklin Graham proudly said, “You have groups that don’t
agree politically, who have a totally different view of
world events. Yet when it comes to Sudan, we are working
together.”[43]
Given
that there were no Christian victims in Darfur to mobilize
the Christian right, the Darfur campaign puzzled many
Africa watchers. In August, the Washington Post
observed: “[Darfur] is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions—except
that with hardly a turn of the globe, other calamities
easily can seize our imagination. For if there were an
international misery index, Darfur would have lots of
company.” The piece contended that Darfur had become “one
of the world’s hot causes” because the refugee camps are
accessible, there is a preexisting network of African-American
and Christian activists and the Rwandan genocide had just
turned ten. Two months later, the Los Angeles Times
similarly inquired why the Ugandan civil war, just south
of Sudan, which had displaced two million and caused the
rape of tens of thousands of women, went “virtually unnoticed
by the outside world.” The article theorized that Darfur
had won the “lottery of world attention” because it had
resonated with an “unusual constellation of interests,”
namely evangelicals, African-Americans and Jewish American
groups “brought in [by] charges of genocide, with their
echoes of the Holocaust.”
Many
African observers were also perplexed by the American
public’s attention to Darfur. An editorial in the Kenyan
daily The Nation stated that Darfur was attracting
“undue attention” and overshadowing more important “problem
areas.”[44]
After Congress passed a resolution, terming the Darfur
crisis a genocide, contradicting the African Union, the
European Union and the UN, the respected weekly Jeune
Afrique wondered how the main lobby group behind the
bill, “the Congressional Black Caucus, came to be persuaded
that Sudan was genocide perpetrated by ‘whites’ on blacks.”[45]
When Powell and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan traveled
to Darfur, flying over the tortured region of northern
Uganda, one prominent African intellectual asked: “Why
didn’t [Annan] stop here [in Uganda]? And why not in Kigali?
And Kinshasa? Should we not apply the same standards to
the governments in Kampala and Kigali and elsewhere as
we do to the government in Khartoum, even if Kampala and
Kigali are America’s allies in its global ‘war on terror?’”[46]
The Arab and Islamic press, suspicious of the attention
the Darfur campaign, have seen it as either the Bush administration’s
prelude to regime change in oil-rich Sudan or a public
relations ploy to shift attention away from Palestine
and Iraq.
But
the Save Darfur campaign is better understood by looking
at the post-September 11 domestic political scene. Unlike
other “hot spots” across Africa, the Darfur tragedy reverberates
deeply in the US because it is represented as a racial
conflict between “Arabs” and “indigenous Africans,” because
Sudan is where the “moral geographies”[47] of black, Jewish and Christian
nationalists overlap and because the Darfur crisis offers
a unique opportunity to unite against the new post-Cold
War enemy.
Cultural
critic Stanley Crouch has skewered the African-American
community’s silence on the “unprecedented sexual holocaust”
in Uganda, Sierra Leone and the Congo, and the “double
standard for oppressive behavior” protesting loss of life
in Africa only when the victimizers are “white.”[48]
Crouch may have added that, in recent years, a new trend
has emerged, wherein violations committed by Africans
who self-identify as “Arab” resonate profoundly in black
America, because the perpetrators’ “Arabness” is seen
to cancel their “blackness,” since they are claiming the
identity of the slave-owner. By this reasoning, Sudan
came to be seen as a racial conflict and the US refusal
to act in Darfur was viewed as governed by a racist double
standard. As comedian and veteran civil rights activist
Dick Gregory told radio commentator Tavis Smiley on July
22, 2004, “If that was Arabs raping white women and killing
white folks like that, [the Bush administration] would
have shut that down the next day.” African scholars and
Africa-based activists have repeatedly warned their counterparts
in the West that the “Arab versus African” binary does
not capture the fluid situation in Darfur. But, for mobilization
purposes, the Darfur campaigners insist on the bifurcation.
As Samantha Powers has argued, the more you “nuance” the
discussion of Darfur, the less possible it is to “mainstream”
the issue.
The
Christian right’s activism on Sudan has allowed many conservative
leaders opposed to affirmative action and resistant to
reparations for American slavery to appear “good on race”
by shifting attention onto the Muslim world. As one conservative
put it, “The United States find itself apologizing for
slavery (at least when Bill Clinton visits Africa), handing
out huge amounts of foreign aid (partly from a sense of
guilt) and giving at least passing thought to financial
reparations for the descendants of its own slaves. Yet
when Muslim countries gather at international forums,
they discuss none of this—and instead spend their time
writing resolutions bashing Israel and the West. They
appear to feel no remorse for the past, and no responsibility
for the present.”[49] Just as Israel led to a closing of ranks between
the Christian right and Jewish groups, the latter willing
to overlook the former’s anti-Semitism, Sudan has brought
together segments of the African-American community long
at loggerheads with the Christian right.
More
interestingly, the Darfur camapign and the “Arab reparations”
initiative adumbrate a new rapprochement between segments
of the African-American community and the Jewish American
community. Many of the African-American advocates for
Sudan, and not just black evangelicals, are strongly pro-Israel.
Many in the “Arab reparations” movement are sympathetic
to Israel, which they see as a check on “Arab expansionism.”
As Arab reparations advocate B. J. Bankie declared, “Africa
was saved from aggressive pan-Arabism by the Jewish settlement
of Palestine.” Many of the Sudan and Arab reparations
advocates deliberately use the language of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, speaking of “Arab settlers” and the “Arab occupation”
of Sudan to highlight Arab hypocrisy. Those who have lamented
the end of the black-Jewish amity forged during the civil
rights era have maintained that it “takes a common threat
to revive the relationship.”[50] To many blacks and Jews, the
perceived Arab-Islamic threat is that common threat.
Reviving
the Black-Jewish Alliance
American
Jewish activism in Sudan did not begin with the explosion
of state-sponsored killing in Darfur into the global consciousness.
Charles Jacobs, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group,
has argued that Jews should be active in opposition to
Sudanese slavery: “What can we former slaves do to help
those in bondage today?”[51] Israel and Zionist organizations have long been interested in
issues of race and ethnicity in the Arab world. Israel
has a long record of training and arming groups in Kurdistan
and southern Sudan “fighting for their freedom from [Arab]
imperialism.”[52] The Zionist concern for minorities
in the Arab world is strategic: by focusing on how Arab
states (mis)treat their minorities, pro-Israel scholars
can shift the spotlight from Palestine, highlight Arab
double standards, demonstrate how the subordinate status
of minorities in the Middle East necessitated a Zionist
project to lift Middle Eastern Jews “up from dhimmitude”
and show how Israel protects minority rights better than
any other state in the region.[53] Given the American Jewish community’s
silence over the Congo, Uganda and Sierra Leone, it seems
the outrage over Darfur is as moral as it is political.
“Now millions of African people face genocide and the
UN’s top priority is condemning the Israeli security fence
that saves lives on both sides of the security barrier,”
stated Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY).[54] Moreover, Jacobs is also the founder of the
David Project, which monitors the teaching of Middle Eastern
studies on American campuses and promotes a Sudan divestment
campaign expressly to counter the Israel divestment campaign.
As Jacobs put it, “Israelis are put to a test that is
not applied to anyone else. You will not hear any murmur
about the people of Sudan but…Israel is singled out in
a way that is racist.”[55]
Jewish
activists’ involvement in Sudan activism—like African-American
leaders’ support for Israel—is seen as a sign of “reciprocal
respect” for each community’s historical suffering, a
linking of the Holocaust and slavery that can close the
social distance between blacks and Jews in America. In
2001, in an effort to ameliorate black-Jewish relations,
Rabbi Schmuley Boteach tried to organize a trip for Michael
Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton to Sudan that would help
the King of Pop “reconnect to his people,” and then a
trip to Israel for the reverend to meet with Israeli victims
of terrorism. Although Jackson withdrew at the last minute
and Sharpton angered trip organizers when he visited Yasser
Arafat, many praised Sharpton’s trip to Sudan and Israel.
“If Sharpton returns to New York proclaiming the Arab-Israeli
conflict to be nuanced and complex with justice somewhere
in the middle, it will have a positive impact on race
relations in the city,” wrote one columnist. “On the fringe
of black (and white) America are some, like Minister Louis
Farrakhan, who are trying to sell a blame-the-Jews explanation
of Islamic anti-Americanism. Personal witness by Sharpton
that Israel isn’t the devil—or even the sorcerer’s apprentice—will
make that kind of scapegoating harder.”[56]
More recently, Sen. Jon Corzine (D-NJ) flew to Darfur
and then to Israel, with a symbolic trip to Yad Vashem,
and likened the Darfur situation to the Shoah: “I think
this ties together with the concerns I have about Darfur.
I believe we must challenge the genocide there.”
The
cause of Sudan has become a way to ease what some have
sardonically termed the “comparative victimology” plaguing
African- and Jewish-Americans.[57] Relations between African-American and Jewish communities began
deteriorating in the late 1960s, for reasons including
conservative Jewish opposition to affirmative action and
left-leaning African Americans’ support for the Palestinian
cause. As an angry Michael Lerner told Cornel West, “We
have a genocidal slaughter of hundreds of thousands of
people in Rwanda, and yet African-Americans have more
to say about the undemocratic nature of Israel than they
do about the oppression of blacks by blacks in Africa.”[58]
But many have argued that the main reason for the tensions
was that the Holocaust, as a tragedy, had gradually come
to overshadow slavery in American political discourse.
According to a 1990 survey, a clear majority of Americans,
when presented with a list of catastrophic events, said
that the Holocaust “was the worst tragedy in history.”[59]
As one historian put it, the “[African-American] grievance
was that in America, the group that was by a wide margin
the most advantaged was using European crimes to trump
American crimes against what was, by an equally wide margin,
the least advantaged group.“[60] Black criticism of this “hierarchy
of victimization” goes back at least to 1979 when Rev.
Jesse Jackson visited Yad Vashem and infuriated many when
he described the Holocaust as “tragic but not necessarily
unique.” More recently, Randall Robinson, the former president
of TransAfrica whose book The Debt launched the
debate over reparations in the US, observed, “Slavery
was and remains an American holocaust. It lasted 20 times
as long as the Nazi holocaust. It killed at least ten
times as many people.” Yet while there is a Washington
museum honoring the victims of the Nazi genocide and the
Native Americans’ tragedy, “nowhere on the Mall can anything
be found—monumental, memorial or stone tablet—to commemorate
the hundreds of millions of victims of the American Holocaust.”[61]
In
the same vein, the US government’s refusal to partake
in the reparations debate at the UN Conference on Racism
at Durban, South Africa in 2001—only a few years after
creating a presidential commission demanding that Swiss
banks pay recompense to the victims of the Holocaust—incensed
many African-Americans. “Slavery is more than 150 years
in the past … We have to turn now to the present and to
the future,” rejoined Condoleezza Rice, then George W.
Bush’s national security adviser. “I think reparations,
given the fact that there is plenty of blame to go around
for slavery, plenty of blame to go around among African
and Arab states and plenty of blame to go around among
Western states, we are better to look forward and not
point fingers backward.”[62]
Since
a number of Jewish American figures have argued that the
Atlantic slave trade and Native American tragedy did not
constitute genocides akin to the Holocaust,[63] many in the African-American community were
exhilarated by the Holocaust Museum’s labeling of Darfur
as a “genocide” and the support that conservative Jewish
groups were lending to the Save Darfur campaign. They
hoped that Jewish support would confer much-needed legitimacy
on the reparations initiative and on the claim that the
Atlantic slave trade did constitute “a crime against humanity,”
helping African-Americans to inch up the “victimization
scale” and, subsequently, the country’s racial hierarchy.
Jewish progressives have long argued that Jews are uniquely
qualified to help African-Americans in their reparations
initiative because of their “less guilt-ridden history
vis-à-vis black oppression,”[64]
and many reparations advocates now see the Darfur campaign
as a chance to bring Jewish conservatives on board. One
journalist talking to Joe Madison, president of the Sudan
Campaign, made exactly this point: “Do you see that if
we can get past this Darfur and Sudan issue in a positive
way that the Jewish political establishment would lock
arms with you on the issue of reparations for black America?”[65]
The
Darfur and Sudan campaigns have their critics within black
America. Jesse Jackson has been harshly criticized for
refusing to take part in Jacobs’ anti-slavery campaign,
which he has called “anti-Arab,” and material published
by Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition avoids the Arab/African
dichotomy when referring to Darfur. Bill Fletcher of TransAfrica,
the black advocacy group that led the sanctions campaign
against South Africa, strongly protests that binary: “The
Arabs in Africa are African….They are African. And it
is important to understand the important role that North
African Arabs and Berbers played in supporting continental
independence.”[66] Others have quipped that the
US is only able to reckon with slavery when it is in the
Islamic world. Yet despite the critiques and calls for
nuance, the Darfur campaign is gaining momentum, propelled
by powerful nationalist forces and the racial flux unleashed
by September 11.
Trading
Places
9/11
was a nigger-ass wakeup call. White folks were so concerned
with the land niggers, they forgot about the sand niggers.
—Comedian
Paul Mooney on ABC’s Nightline, September 30, 2002
When
I heard that Osama destroyed the World Trade Center because
he was tired of having the white man humiliate him in
his country for the last ten years, I said, “Please! We’ve
been humiliated by the white man for 400 years, and you
never see a black man crash a Cadillac into a chicken
stand!”
—Rickey
Smiley on BET’s Club Comic View
Many
black humorists have been joking about their post-September
11 “racial reprieve.” Shortly after the attacks, the African-American
strip Boondocks featured a hilarious vignette where
the ten-year old protagonist, Huey Freeman, announces
that “the annual Newsweek ‘Most Hated Ethnic Group’
poll showed that black Americans went from first to third
most hated among white Americans this month—the biggest
jump in history.” But while many have noted that a shift
has taken place in the American racial hierarchy, few
can pinpoint who moved where.
Conservatives
have been warning of a new peril facing America—what some
have termed the “Latino tsunami.” Samuel Huntington, who
famously argued that America faces an external Islamic
threat, now admonishes the literati to watch the internal
“Hispanic challenge.”[67] Others have linked the two threats,
cautioning that Latino immigration could balkanize America
into a “Euro-Anglo nation” and a “Latino nation” during
a time of war, and that a non-integrated Latino underclass
could become sympathetic to the Islamic world. “It is
probably too much to predict that there will be widespread
fear of Latino terrorism in the Euro-Anglo nation, although
young Latinos in the United States may learn something
from their [Arab] counterparts in Europe,” wrote one scholar.[68] Others have cautioned that while Latino evangelical
Christians strongly support Israel, there are troubling
levels of anti-Semitism among new immigrants.[69] Many may be more sympathetic
to the Palestinians than to Israel, which has led Jewish
organizations to woo Latino leaders and voters, for instance
organizing trips to Israel through programs such as Israel
Project Interchange.
One
way the government has sought to integrate Latino immigrants
is through the military. The Pentagon‘s recent recruitment
drive targeting the Latino “recruiting market aims to
boost Latino numbers in the military from roughly 10 percent
to 22 percent.”[70] Some conservatives have argued that an interventionist
foreign policy provides minorities with an excellent opportunity
for upward mobility. “It’s just possible,” wrote Niall
Ferguson, “that African-Americans will turn out to be
the Celts of the American empire, driven overseas by comparatively
poor opportunities at home. Indeed, if the occupation
of Iraq is to be run by the military, then it can hardly
fail to create career opportunities for the growing number
of African-American officers in the army.”[71] The presence of tens of thousands of Latino
and African-American troops in Iraq has not been well-received
in the Arab world, however, and seems, in some cases,
only to have stirred up a vicious nativism. One Iraqi
insurgent profiled by The Guardian said that some
rebels deliberately target black soldiers: “To have Negroes
occupying us is a particular humiliation… Sometimes we
aborted a mission because there were no Negroes.”[72] The Iraq war and the Darfur
campaign, with the prominent roles of Powell, Rice and
Annan, have led to charges of “African-American imperialism”
and much racialist talk.
Despite
protests over their targeting for military recruitment,
Latinos remain strongly pro-war. The suspicion that Latino
immigration could undercut the US national interest, may
have led Latino voters to be hawkish on the Middle East.
According to a Zogby poll done shortly after Powell’s
February 5, 2003 presentation to the UN, 62 percent of
whites and 60 percent of Latinos, but only 23 percent
of blacks, supported the invasion of Iraq. In November
2004, President Bush was able to win five heavily Latino
battleground states—Florida, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada
and New Mexico—in part because Latino voters have conservative
stances on abortion, religion and same-sex marriage,[73] but also, increasingly, on the Middle East and the war on terrorism.
“As a general rule, Puerto Ricans tend to sympathize with
Palestinians, because of the colonialism of the island,
the camaraderie of an occupied people and because Puerto
Ricans have long been stigmatized for links to terrorism,”
explains Howard Jordan, who teaches Latino studies at
Hostos Community College in the Bronx, in an interview
for this article. “Recall that four Puerto Ricans and
Nelson Mandela were on the State Department’s terrorist
list. Dominicans are similar because of the 1965 American
invasion of the Dominican Republic. But Mexicans, and
more recent arrivals from Central and South America, tend
to be more pro-war, more Republican and more conservative
on the Middle East. That’s their American credential….
That’s how they show their patriotism, and prevent the
animosity of the US government. Richard Pryor used to
joke that ‘nigger’ was the first word an immigrant would
learn to fit in. Now the word is ‘Islamic terrorist.’”
When
the US Census Bureau announced on January 21, 2003 that
Latinos, numbering 39 million, had surpassed African-Americans
as the largest minority group in the US, leaders of other
groups wondered aloud what that development meant for
them. Some Jewish leaders worry about rising anti-Semitism
as Hispanic immigration is augmented by Muslim immigration.
African-Americans have expressed anxiety over how the
growing Latino presence could “destabilize” the historic
”black-white dialogue on race,” jeopardizing hard-won
political concessions as Latinos press for the recognition
of their “long history of suffering at the hands of America.”[74]
Some Latino intellectuals have already called for a museum
on the Mall “in honor of the many, many undocumented immigrants
from south of the border and from Cuba who have died anonymously.”[75]
Despite
the historic enslavement and continued marginalization
of Afro-Latinos across Latin America, the Latino is rarely
seen as “guilty” in black America. In fact, according
to one Latino scholar, what distinguishes the Latino immigrants
from their European counterparts is that the “African-Americans
cannot hold Latinos responsible for their historical social,
economic or political conditions. The [Latino] psyche
is devoid of guilt…. They come to the table with a clear
conscience.”[76] Given the competition for jobs
and economic resources, the growing conservatism of Mexican-American
voters and the growing tendency of Hispanic immigrants,
once naturalized, to identify as “white,”[77]
black-Latino relations could deteriorate and the Latino
might very well emerge as “guilty” for past crimes against
blacks. In the meantime, however, a variety of grievances
are being “externalized” onto the Arab world. Blacks may
not be as pro-war as their Latinos, but polls after September
11 showed African-Americans overwhelmingly supporting
measures to profile and track Arab- and Muslim-Americans.[78] In the Latino community, one
hears a litany of accusations regarding los Arabes,
notably that immigration reform has not been undertaken
because of Arab terrorists trying to “pass” for Mexican
and enter the US via Mexico. After the Madrid bombings,
which sent shock waves throughout the Spanish-speaking
world, one is also hearing, especially from Hispanic evangelicals,
warnings about Moorish invaders and how the “Orient” had
tainted Hispanic civilization in Islamic Spain, introducing
a mentality of machismo, racial intolerance and despotism
that is still afflicting Latin America.
Another
factor that has led many Latinos and African-Americans
to evince hawkish attitudes towards the Middle East involves
what one Hispanic scholar described as the “tragic American
inability to discern racial combinations.” Given the widespread
angst about al-Qaeda sleeper cells, and given that Arab-Americans
make up less than 1 percent of the population, much mainstream
anxiety is displaced onto other minorities who “look Arab.”
As African-American novelist Ishmael Reed recounts, “Within
two weeks after the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings,
my youngest daughter Tennessee was a called a dirty Arab
twice. An elderly white woman made such a scene on a San
Francisco bus that my daughter got off.”[79] The mistaking of non-Arab minorities
for Arabs has led to the “double profiling” of Latinos
and African-Americans. One African-American legal scholar
describes how her NYU-attending son, who can “phenotypically
pass for Arab,” goes to the airport dressed “in the popular
ghetto-styled baggy pants,” wearing corn rows and intentionally
speaking in “an Ebonics dialect” to “ensure that he is
not racially profiled as an Arab. Of course, when he lands
in New York, his failure to be able to hail a cab indicates
he is clearly seen as a black—too risky to pick up.”[80]
This “double profiling,” what some have called “DWB plus
FWA” (“Driving While Black” and “Flying While Arab”) has
angered many African-Americans mistaken for Arab. The
idea of the Arab as “basically white” and “guilty” has
since September 11 come to coexist uneasily with the realization
that many Arabs are “black,” and that many African-Americans
can be mistaken for Arab. Every time the media flashes
images of dark-skinned Arabs, whether of the janjaweed
militia in Sudan or “twentieth hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui,
conventional views of Sudan and “the Arabs” are jolted.
Comedian
Drew Carey has joked that “Arabs in America should just
say they’re Mexican and they’ll be fine,” but Hispanic
intellectuals who have reflected on the “Arab-Latino resemblance”
find it no laughing matter. Sociologist Ramon Grosfoguel,
who studies how different “looks” and identities are racialized
in the West, notes that in France he is often harassed
and prevented from entering different venues because he’s
mistaken for Algerian (“le look beur”), but when
he tells his harassers that he is Puerto Rican, he is
allowed to enter. In the US, by contrast, when waylaid
by a gang of anti-Latino white supremacists, he said he
was Algerian and the confused youths let him go.[81] After September 11, however,
few Latinos would try the same ruse. When the Pentagon
began targeting Latinos for higher recruitment in the
military, conspiracy theories abounded that Hispanics
were being sent to Iraq because they can “pass” for Arab.
As one blogger put it, “The enemy is brown. We need brown
troops. [Hispanics] blend in better.” While some Latinos
and African-Americans may embrace a position of pro-Arab
solidarity, others try to signal that they are not Arab
or Muslim, most often by vociferously adopting anti-Arab
positions.
The
“looking Arab” phenomenon is further complicated by the
fact that, since September 11, many Arab- and Muslim-Americans
are trying to “pass” for black or Hispanic. “After September
11, shave your head, grow a goatee, that’s it—you’re Dominican,”
said one Yemeni grocer in Harlem.[82]
The sudden interest of Arab-Americans, who have long dissociated
themselves from minorities, in racial politics and black
and Latino identity has annoyed more than a few observers.
“Arabs and black Americans have had a quiet disdain for
each other…and it has been brewing unabated for a decade
or better,” commented one African-American writer. “Why
did whites have to come for you, before you sought my
friendship, before you realized you were from Africa after
all? Why did you wait until you were the new American
nigger to become mine?”[83] The racial baptism of post-September 11 discrimination seems
to be pushing many Arab- and Muslim-Americans toward black
America. A recent study of black-Arab relations in New
York and Detroit shows that Arabs and Muslims who had
experienced racial harassment—either in the form of verbal
insults or physical attacks—showed higher levels of “trust”
in their African-American neighbors than those who had
not experienced racial harassment, and the survey showed
an overall sharp increase from pre-September 11 trust
levels.[84] The fact that Arabs today are drifting toward black America
and “passing” for black or Hispanic, in contrast to yesteryear
when African-Americans were converting to Islam and donning
robes and turbans in an effort to “pass” for Arab, is
a clear sign that a shift has taken place in the American
racial hierarchy.
“Conspiracy
of Silence”
Bernard
Lewis has lamented the “remarkable dearth of scholarly
work” on race and slavery in the Muslim world, noting
that the subject remains a “highly sensitive topic, the
mere mention of which is often seen as a sign of hostile
intentions.”[85] Decades after Lewis first broached the subject, wariness on
the part of Muslims and Arabs remains entirely justified.
Most Western scholars, journalists and activists who approach
the subject of race in the Arab-Muslim world impose Western—most
often American—racial categories, speaking glibly of “white”
Arab masters and “black” slaves, “settlers” dominating
indigenous Africans and “Arab culpability.” Slavery in
the Arab world, especially in North Africa, requires a
different analytical language than in the New World. The
one-drop rule cannot help distinguish the descendants
of slaves from the descendants of slave-owners, because,
unlike in the West, in the Arab world people of European
as well as Turkic and sub-Saharan stock were enslaved.
While many Arab states, like Egypt, are indeed “pigmentocracies,”
many of Egypt’s political elites are descendants of the
Turkic Mamluk slave dynasty. Does their slave descent,
which many black nationalists deem crucial to African
identity, render them bonafide Africans, free of racial
guilt? In addition, despite the North African regimes’
insistence on the primacy of Arab identity, the northern
tier of the African continent is home to an extraordinary
ethnic, linguistic and phenotypical diversity, and one
cannot treat North Africa as geographically distinct and
detached from a racially unified, indigenous “Black Africa.”
Furthermore,
most of those who address the subject of race in the Arab
world—starting with Lewis himself—have a political axe
to grind. They seek to use race as an ideological weapon
to counter African-American claims that Islam is “better
on race” than the West, or to shift attention from Palestine
to Arab oppression of some minority. Many in the Arab
world believe that if the victimizers in Sudan—the Khartoum
regime and its proxy janjaweed militia—did not self-identify
as “Arab,” Darfur would hardly be an issue. Many also
wonder why the moral indignation behind the Sudan campaign
in the United States rarely stirs on behalf of Palestine,
why the same voices so eager to term the Darfur tragedy
a “genocide” would be quite loath to use the term to describe
the forced removal of Palestinians in 1948. When New
YorkTimes columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that “Israeli
brutality” in the Palestinian territories “is small potatoes
by Arab standards,” that two million people had died in
the Sudanese civil war “with barely anyone [in the Arab
world] noticing,” and that, after all, Sharon is the “Middle
Eastern leader who gives his Arab citizens the greatest
political freedom,” he confirmed suspicions that his writing
on Darfur was intended, in large part, to highlight the
“hypocrisy” of Arab rage (“the frenzy”) over Israeli policy.[86]
American
discussions of race and ethnicity in the Arab world also
tend to mirror the parochialism of American identity politics.
Thus, African-Americans will write movingly of whomever
they adjudge as “black” and “indigenous,” evangelicals
will defend Coptic rights and the “Gay International”
will agitate for homosexuals in Egypt, always casting
these communities as victims of the “Arab Muslim majority”
and possible allies of the West, but rarely placing their
very real oppression in the larger context of Arab countries
where the entire population, including the “Arab Muslim
majority,” chafes under dictatorial rule. Such a selective
concern for minorities by different American interests
is seen as self-interested, divisive and all too reminiscent
of European colonial powers’ coopting of minorities and
Western Zionists’ efforts to “rescue” the Jews of the
Arab world.
Arab
leaders have certainly used Palestine as an ideological
weapon to stifle talk of minority rights, ethnic pluralism
and slavery in Sudan. When asked about Darfur, the Sudanese
foreign minister shrugged, “Aren’t more children dying
daily in Palestine?”[87] In Arab and Muslim eyes, the
issues of Palestine and Sudan are not political equivalents.
Historic Palestine is soaked with a nationalist and theological
significance that southern Sudan is simply not imbued
with. Most importantly, discussion of racism, ethnic pluralism
and the Sudanese civil war has long been taboo, considered
divisive and even treasonous as “the Arab nation” faces
“the Zionist threat.” Not only is talk of racism suppressed
in individual states, but discussion of human rights violations
in other Arab states is also smothered.
But
things are changing. With the rise of independent media,
the forbidden subjects of race and racism in the Arab
world are being raised. Al-Jazeera’s critical coverage
of the Darfur crisis led to the arrest and conviction
of its Khartoum bureau chief, Islam Salih, for “disseminating
false news.” Calling on the Arab League to act, the Daily
Star of Beirut opined, “Darfur. The name is becoming
synonymous worldwide with shame and outrage, and it is
a purely homegrown calamity. There is not an outside hand
to conveniently blame.” Recently, Egyptian pro-democracy
activist Saadeddin Ibrahim denounced the “racist tendencies
of the Arabs” noting that Arab silence in face of killings
of non-Arabs by Arabs was “a cowardly and hidden racism.”[88] Similarly, Gamal Nkrumah has written forcefully
against color prejudice (“shadism”) in the Arab world,
as symbolized by the penchant for hair dying and skin
bleaching creams.[89]
Arab scholars are also increasingly challenging the age-old
claptrap about “Muslim colorblindness” and the “benignity
of Oriental slavery,” and questioning national myths of
origin. Hilmi Shaarawi recently called for a new “Afro-Arab
cultural dialogue,” warning that the more Arab intellectuals
rebuff the overtures of African intellectuals, the more
the latter will gravitate toward theories of Arabs as
slavers and destroyers of African civilization.
The
discourses of Palestine and the Holocaust are linked.
Political developments since World War II have turned
both tragedies into causes on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict, in the Arab world and America respectively,
and the discourses of both causes are all too often based
on reciprocal denigration. Arab nationalists will thus
deny the Holocaust because it is seen as the justification
for the conquest of Palestine, so that in rejecting the
Shoah they think they are undermining the Zionist case—a
non sequitur if there ever was one. Similarly, Holocaust
consciousness in the US is often predicated on the denial
of the Palestinian tragedy. Both discourses also rest
on the downplaying of other tragedies and injustices:
“Palestine” has long been used by Arab and Muslim ruling
elites to justify or gloss over the oppression or killing
of different populations, while Holocaust consciousness
in the US, according to many African-Americans and Native
Americans, has sidelined the Native American genocide
and the Atlantic slave trade. The growing political influence
of African-Americans following the civil rights movement
has translated into increasing demands that American slavery
be recognized as a crime against humanity and given its
pride of place in American history. To evade a head-on
collision with different domestic political actors who
think slavery is a painful and divisive issue, and to
avoid being seen as trivializing the Holocaust, segments
of the African-American community have discovered that
the discourse on slavery and African-American suffering
can receive a tremendous boost if “externalized” onto
the Arab world. So to the “Arab maladies” of misogyny,
terrorism and authoritarianism, one can now add racism.
Since
September 11, Arabs thus find themselves linked to and
caught between the American discourses on slavery and
the Holocaust, two tragedies that took place in the West
but have somehow been projected onto the “Orient.” Jewish
nationalists’ decades-old portrayal of Arab nationalists
as Nazi-like and wanting to annihilate Israel dovetails
with black nationalists’ portrayal of Arabs as invaders
and genocidal slavers. Despite common diasporan and scriptural
roots, the discourses of Zionism and black nationalism
in America have evolved largely separately over the past
decades, but the two worldviews seem to have merged following
September 11, making common cause with evangelical Christians
over the Middle East. The myriad moral and cultural connections
that different communities in the West have with North
Africa and the Middle East are fascinating, if not endearing,
but when they begin to make irredentist or redemptive
demands, as with the reparations campaign, such movements
must be countered with the truth that slavery and genocide
(like misogyny, terrorism and authoritarianism) are not
unique to the Arab world. But presently any effort to
remind African-Americans that slavery existed and exists
in various parts of Africa, not just in the Sudan, is
as impolitic as mentioning that there were other genocides
besides the Holocaust. This state of affairs was made
possible by the Arab world’s long-standing refusal to
discuss the issues of race, ethnic difference and Afro-Arab
identity.
