Racist oppression is not contained within national borders

Biden’s belated acknowledgement of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre means little in the face of his silence over last month’s massacre in Gaza.

Two weeks after the end of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, Joe Biden became the first United States president to acknowledge the Tulsa race massacre in the US state of Oklahoma, where, a century ago, a white mob killed as many as 300 Black Americans, and devastated the prosperous Black neighbourhood of Greenwood. His sombre reflection at Tulsa – which he described as an atrocity “told in silence, cloaked in darkness” – reflected his own silence over the massacre in Gaza and his administration’s blocking of international efforts to stop the air attacks which killed more than 250 Palestinians, including 66 children. The twin struggles against racist oppression in the US and colonialism abroad have historically coalesced along the oppression of Black people in the US and on the African continent. But, as acknowledged by former South African president and global liberation icon, Nelson Mandela, they are intimately tied to struggles against oppression elsewhere. Speaking nearly a quarter of a century ago, on the occasion of the 20th International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People, and just six years after the formal end of apartheid in his nation, Mandela famously declared that the freedom of Black South Africans was “incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”. Mandela noted that “we would be less than human” if “having achieved our own freedom, we [fell] into the trap of washing our hands of difficulties that others face” and spoke “in muffled tones about an issue such as the right of the people of Palestine to a state of their own”.