How can we as black women ignore the powerful connection between the struggle of Palestinian women and our struggle against systemic racism?
ETSU professor discusses Kamala Harris, race and Appalachian roots
Daryl A. Carter, a history professor at East Tennessee State University, appeared as a guest on the video show Tennessee Voices with host David Plazas.
Black women across the country are excited about Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential candidacy and have quickly begun campaigning to make her the first female president of the United States.
As with former President Obama, the main reason we are ready to carry her across the threshold to victory is because she is one of us.
We should support her, but our support should be accompanied by a demand that she commit to ending Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid and genocide against the Palestinian people. This would make her the first president in US history to take an objective and fair stance on this conflict.
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Harris must develop a concrete foreign policy
Black women are the Democratic Party’s most loyal voting bloc, so we are in a very strong position to hold Harris – and the party – accountable for America’s complicity in this ongoing human tragedy that primarily affects women and children.
“The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for their lives… We cannot look away from these tragedies. We must not become insensitive to the suffering and I will not remain silent,” she said on July 25.
But without a comprehensive foreign policy to end the genocide, their words are as empty as Obama’s earlier campaign slogan, “Yes we can.”
It is very disheartening that Black women, who have a history of oppression and advocacy for racial justice, are not holding them and the Democratic Party accountable for their role in the genocide and tyranny that has continued for over seven decades.
How can we, the descendants of women who survived slavery and Jim Crow, ignore the suffering of our Palestinian sisters while we fight for women’s rights and democracy in the United States? How can we ignore the strong correlation between their fight against systemic racism and ours?
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We must not turn a blind eye to pregnant women in crisis situations
We have had similar experiences resisting oppressive, racist governments and peoples in our struggle for human rights and self-determination. The Ku Klux Klan’s nighttime raids on our homes are comparable to the Israeli raids on theirs. We have both experienced mass incarceration without due process, forced to live in poor, segregated communities and closed ghettos, and denied opportunities solely because of our non-white ethnicity.
Before the 1950s, Black women were forced to give birth at home because they were denied access to care in the American health care system. Even today, Black mothers report cases of systemic racism linked to their high maternal mortality rate. In contrast, before October 7, 2023, over 40% of Palestinian women gave birth at home because Israeli forces denied them access to hospitals.
Currently, the International Rescue Committee reported in an April 2 press release that approximately 60,000 pregnant women in Gaza have virtually no access to adequate prenatal health care. At least 183 women give birth in Gaza every day without access to midwives, doctors, or health facilities during or after delivery. Pregnant and breastfeeding women are at high risk of malnutrition, premature birth, low birth weight babies, and maternal mortality, and babies are likely to experience infant deaths, which are negative health consequences for black mothers and babies in the U.S.
In her 2020 victory speech, Harris acknowledged the importance of “black women who are often, too often overlooked, but so often prove that they are the backbone of our democracy… I stand on their shoulders.”
And we stand on the shoulders of our forefathers, the women who sacrificed their lives and paved the way for Black women to run for public office. That is why we should defend democracy at home, but not look the other way when our politicians undermine it abroad. We must continue to be guardians of civil liberties and respectfully demand that Harris end U.S. complicity in the oppression of the Palestinian people.
Getty Israel is a population health expert, author, writer, mother, and executive director of Sisters in Birth in Jackson, Mississippi.
