Troubling Idols: Black-Palestinian Solidarity in U.S. Afro-Christian Spaces
Keywords: 
Exodus
Eisodus
colonialism
racialization
intersectionality
Zionism
prophetic Black church
Black radicalism
coalitional politics
Abstract: 

This article claims that insofar as they continue to omit analyses of colonialism and racialization, retellings of the biblical Exodus and of twentieth-century Black-Jewish relations—two massively significant narratives in the U.S. Black Christian imaginary—will inevitably continue to fuel the Zionist impulse that prevents much of Afro-Christianity from intentionally engaging Palestinian justice. Furthermore, the religious trope of chosenness, along with the dominant narration of the European Jewish Holocaust moment, have provided a politico-ethical basis for a unique type of dispensation that filters the two aforementioned retellings to ultimately deselect non-Jewish Palestinians from a recognizably complex humanity. The tools of the Black radical tradition, however, coupled with a reimagining of coalitional politics, carve out a radical Black Christian sensibility that is best equipped to speak to the devastations of military occupation and racist exclusion and forge life-giving relationships within the freedom struggles against them.

Author biography: 

Taurean J. Webb serves as the director of the Center for the Church and the Black Experience and instructor of religion and race at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. At the intersection of Black studies, critical ethnic studies, liberationist theology, and U.S. religious history, Webb’s ongoing research looks at“Blackness” and “Palestinianness” as racial formations; he uses visual material culture to uncover how Black and Palestinian communities organically move against white supremacy and Judeo-Christian hegemony.