The Problematic Dream Of A Black Israel

In her review of Ta-Nehisi Coates' latest book, The Message, Helen Andrews offered a controversial explanation for Coates’ objections to the discrimination he saw in Israel and the West Bank:

...the real reason Israel bothers Coates so much […] is that it shames him. How can it be that the Jews carved their Israel out of the desert, and yet no place in Africa, least of all Liberia, remotely resembles Wakanda? […]

All the excuses for why his father’s black paradise remained a fantasy applied equally to the Jews, but they overcame the hostility of the world to succeed where [Marcus] Garvey & Co. failed. That, and not any resemblance to Jim Crow, is the reason Coates hates Israel so bitterly.

There's a lot you could say about this eighty-eight-word indictment of Coates’ motivations.

You might notice the almost Freudian reframing of advocacy for the humanity of Palestinians as “bitter hatred” of Israel.

You might find it odd that Andrews believes Coates is jealous of a society he likens to the Jim Crow South. Or that she describes being handed someone else's home as “carving Israel out of the desert.”

You might even note the country club racism of assuming a man born and raised in Baltimore feels “shamed” by Liberia's failure to “resemble” an African nation from a comic book.

But sooner or later, you have to admit that Andrews has a point.

In many ways, Israel is the perfect expression of Marcus Garvey's “race first” vision of black separatism.

A sanctuary where black people would be free from the persecution and racism that Garvey believed was inevitable, an ethnocracy where blackness would be a marker of belonging and even superiority, a national home where it would “matter not what white people say, but what black people do.”

Garvey was willing to lie, cheat and even saddle up with the KKK to make his dream come true (their common goals of “racial purity” and sending black people far, far away outweighed the KKK’s occasional attempts to exterminate him).

The question is, how far would the rest of us go?

Unluckily for Garvey, building an ethnostate is all about timing.

While Herzl was laying the groundwork for a Jewish State in 1897, forty-seven years before the Holocaust focused the world's sympathies on the Jewish people, Garvey wasn't even born until 1887, twenty-two years too late to capitalise on whatever goodwill emancipation earned black people.

Abraham Lincoln had already signed the Emancipation Proclamation, General William T. Sherman had already promised the slaves their “forty acres and a mule,” and President Andrew Johnson had already yanked away their promised land and given them ninety-nine years of racial segregation instead.

But what if he hadn’t?

What if, instead of forty acres each, Johnson repaid the slaves with an entire state, Arkansas, say, and displaced ~750,000 white Americans so black people could “carve their nation” out of the Ozarks?

What if, as would almost certainly have happened, the neighbouring white-majority states attacked the fledgling state of Blackansas, but thanks to support from a powerful nation (maybe the British Empire gave them $3 billion worth of muskets every year to spite those insolent colonies), Blackansas was finally powerful enough to fight back?

And what if, enamoured by their newfound military strength and unconditional British support, Blackansas began placing neighbouring states under military occupation and helping black-supremacists to force white farmers from their land?

Does anybody believe that a black state, operating in this way, would be allowed to exist? Come on now, a few decades of Affirmative Action were already a bridge too far.