Between Exodus and Egyptsrgsrhsrh

7/21/2019 Between Exodus and Egyptsrgsrhsrh

1/14

Between Exodus and Egypt

Page 1 of 14

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2015.All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of amonograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy ). Subscriber: University ofOxford; date: 11 April 2015

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online

African Athena: New AgendasDaniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon

Print publication date: 2011

Print ISBN-13: 9780199595006

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199595006.001.0001


IsraelPalestine and the Breakup of the BlackJewish Alliance

Anna Hartnell

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199595006.003.0008

Abstract and Keywords

This article argues that Martin Bernal'sBlack Athenaoccasions the opportunity to revisit

the strained relationship between blacks and Jews in the US, and in particular the

tendency to naturalize the antipathy that exists between them. It explores the African

American appropriation of two ancient tropes Exodus and Egypt through the prism of

the 1967 war in the Middle East. The article argues that while the war is often viewed as

a switchpoint in black American identifications from the JudeoChristian Exodus to the

PanAfrican and Islamic Egypt and indicative of a changing climate in which blacks were

increasingly identifying not with Jews but with Palestinians, as fellow victims of colonial

oppression, the truth is much more complicated. Though the establishment of Israel has

contributed to blackJewish hostility, its realization still chimes with black nationalist


2/14


Page 2 of 14


aspirations, and thus Exodus is still deeply implicated in the imagination of Egypt.

Keywords: Exodus, Egypt, Black Athena, African American, Jews, JudeoChristian, Islamic, Middle East,

Palestinian, Israel

The now legendary moment when the nineteenthcentury protoblack nationalist figure

Edward Wilmot Blyden encountered the pyramids encapsulates competing black Atlantic

identifications still evident in contemporary African American religious culture. On first

sight of the pyramids, Blyden felt that the blood seemed to flow faster through my veins.

I seemed to hear the echo of those illustrious Africans. I seemed to feel the impulse of

those stirring characters who sent civilisation to Greece. His experience of the

pyramidswhich, he imagines, were built before the tribes of man had been so generally

scatteredbut by that branch of the descendants of Noah, the enterprising sons of Ham,

from which I descendedcaptures a universal vision of humanity as well as one defined

by racial particularity. This reflects not only the dual sense that Egypt might represent

both a place of ancient black greatness and African slavery, but also the complex vision ofa PanAfricanist who deeply identified with that marvellous movement called Zionism.

Himself a Christian, Blyden regarded Islam as possibly the best vehicle for black self

determination, while he looked on at the synagogue in St Thomas, the Danish colony in the

Caribbean in which he grew up, with awe and reverence. The Jewish Question, in

Blyden's view, was the question of questions (Gilroy 1993: 2089). He thus intimately

identified with the three Abrahamic religions while laying the foundation for the Pan

African idea. This complicated mixture of (p.123) religious and racial affiliations is part of

black America's culturalpolitical heritage, a heritage to which the first volume of Martin

Bernal'sBlack Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization(1987) spoke

powerfully.

Bernal's account of the rise of the Aryan Model in nineteenthcentury interpretations of

the ancient world argues that this vision was shaped as much by antiSemitism as it was

by antiblack racism. While some of the Afrocentric scholars who have so welcomed

Bernal's thesis have chosen to overlook this linkan omission that has often given way to

some distinctly antiSemitic agendasI suggest that Bernal's invocation of a black Egypt

invites a far more nuanced account of blackJewish relations than the one typically offered

by most contemporary commentary. The portrayal of Barack Obama's presidential

candidacy is a case in point.

During his election campaign, Obama's overtures to the American Jewish community

were routinely viewed through the lens of opportunism, the assumption being that no

African American candidate could have any organic affiliations with Jews. That the interests

of blacks and Jews are widely perceived to be diametrically opposeda situation fuelled

by disputes between the two communities that became particularly bitter in the 1980s

and 1990swas compounded in Obama's case by his personal links with Trinity United

Church of Christ. An Africancentred church with links to the Nation of Islam (NOI),

combined with a commitment to a strong critique of the State of Israel, Trinity appears to

encapsulate a post1960s vision of black militancy, a vision that has arguably gained a

fresh set of associations in the aftermath of 9/11. It also collects a number of features


3/14


Page 3 of 14


associated with the Afrocentric scholarship so inspired by Bernal's work. Yet, as Obama

has himself so insistently stressed, Trinity's complex and often contradictory cultural

universe cannot be reduced to an essentialist caricature that brands it as any one thing.

The same might be said of Afrocentrism itself, which, while tending to favour reductive

racial symbols, is much more complicated than the stereotype to which its critics often like

to reduce it (see Howe 1998).

This chapter, in the spirit ofBlack Athena's nonessentialist exploration into the origins of

Western culture, seeks to navigate two tropes central to the culturalreligious

imagination of African America: Exodus and Egypt. These are all too often posed as

representing opposite poles in the black struggle against US racism, but I suggest that

the genealogy of both tropes is intimately bound up (p.124) with the logic of the other.

The JudeoChristian narrative of Exodus has, since Martin Luther King's powerful

appropriation of the story during the civil rights movement, been overwhelmingly

associated with the more moderateeven conservativeelements of African American

antiracism. Egypt, on the other hand, has come to symbolize black nationalism as it was

conceived by Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam in the 1960s; more recently, it has

become a central rallying point for Afrocentrists. Where Exodus has signified a cross

cultural identification with Jews, so the dominant argument goes, Egypt has pointed to a

fantasy of racial purity and ancient greatness. Where the former might be associated with

racial integration and possibly accommodation, the latter might be seen to support a

narrative of black separatism and, by some accounts, black radicalism. This chapter

argues that these two traditions are much more closely intertwined than popular, and

some academic, accounts would have it. The perceived divergence of these two tropes is

intimately tied up with the souring of blackJewish relations in the mid to late 1960s.

In order to explore what I suggest are the hybrid and interconnecting narratives of

Exodus and Egypt, both of which have been central in shaping black religiosity, this

chapter focuses on a key moment in the 1960s black strugglenamely the reaction to the

1967 war in the Middle East. One of the stories that is often told about this moment is

that, where Jews had formerly been identified by US blacks as fellow victims of

persecution, the 1967 war, and the overwhelming support of diaspora Jews for the

Israelis in that war, meant that the Jews became synonymous in the minds of many with

the Israeli oppressors of the Palestinians. This led to the eclipse in the popularity of the

Exodus trope, favoured by Martin Luther King and the mainstream civil rights coalition,and a turn towards solidarity with other Third World and nonwhite peoples suffering at

the hands of colonial oppression. This turn was complementary to the rise in black

nationalist sentiment. Egypt, which had long functioned as an alternative to the Exodus

identification in Black American culture, captures the geographical, ethnic, and religious

orientation of this new identification. Another story picks up the tail end of this account by

claiming that this moment signifies the retreat of black activists from interracial politics and

particularly from the alliance with Jews. Egypt thus becomes synonymous with socalled

black antiSemitism and reactionary politics in general, including a racially charged

antipathy towards the State of Israel.


4/14


Page 4 of 14


(p.125) My analysis of the Exodus and Egypt tropes, and the function these perform as

imagined narratives of origins, hopes to complicate this story. It argues that the reallife

drama unfolding in the Middle East did transform black America's longstanding imaginary

identifications, but that these transformations cannot be interpreted along

straightforward left/right lines, or viewed simply as radical or reactionary. Analyses of

the reaction of the 1960s black struggle to this key moment in the Middle East, which was

a catalyst for the breakup of the socalled blackJewish alliance, affords considerable

insight into the relationship between racial politics and the desire to identify with various

aspects of the ancient world. It also illuminates the fallacy of the idea that African American

cultural identifications stand in natural opposition to those of American Jews.

The Exodus NarrativeIn 1993 Paul Gilroy (1993: 207) noted that black identification with the Exodus narrative

and with the history of the chosen people and their departure from Egypt seems to be

waning. Blacks today appear to identify far more readily with the glamorous pharaohs

than with the abject plight of those they held in bondage. Gilroy here identifies Exodus as

a slave narrative, and places emphasis on its account of suffering and oppression. Part of

Gilroy's interest in the story is the way it has functioned historically as a bridge between

blacks and Jews, one that points up the fact that the disapora concept of Jewish tradition

intimately linked to the original going out from Egypt told in Exodushas been mirrored

by the black experience of modernity. The dispersal borne of the triangular trade, Gilroy

seems to suggest, makes the experience of exile, rather than that of return, a more fitting

framework within which to understand black life. Where Egypt, according to Gilroy,

represents for Afrocentrists a return to a preslavery Africa and thus circumvents the

defining experience for blacks in modernity, the Exodus narrative is a vehicle through

which slavery might be confronted. By this account, the fact that the civilizations of slave

holding pharaohs appeal to black people represents historical amnesia if not the

imagination of a straightforward power reversal.

(p.126) Gilroy's text (1993: 207) does acknowledge the fact that the Exodus narrative

itself embodies the possibility of this contradictionfor he draws a tentative comparison

between the ideologies that drive the Israeli political situation and the practices of the

Africentric movement. As the creation of the State of Israel vividly highlights, part of the

appeal of Exodus is that it points in the direction of deliverance and redemption, and it is

these aspects of the biblical story that have overwhelmingly appealed to moderncontenders for the narrative. Exodus anticipates a triumphant, and perhaps even

triumphalist, return to a place of origin, and a gathering of religiousnational identity

potentially as problematic as the racial vision that Egypt represents for some black

nationalists.

And, indeed, these two stories of return have not always been held apart, as they were

in the 1990s when Gilroy penned The Black Atlantic, and as they largely remain today.

Marcus Garvey famously elevated the mystical prophecy of Psalm 68:31, which made the

redemption of Egypt and Africa more generally the horizon of the Exodus vision: Princes

shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.

1

In this


5/14


Page 5 of 14


prophecy, while the transformation of Hebrew slaves does not necessarily make them

Egyptian princes, somewhat paradoxically the place of slavery sows the seeds of royalty.

In this way, Garveyism converted a story about suffering and slavery into one about

power and prestige. And while, contrary to popular perception, Garvey's backtoAfrica

movement did not advocate the mass emigration of American blacks to the continent, his

sense that Africa, and not America, was the true spiritual home of US blacks was

bolstered by practical efforts to establish a colony in Africaefforts that Garvey explicitly

viewed as parallel to the aspirations of Jewish Zionists.

Black nationalist identifications with the Jewish story stretch back to the eighteenth

century and have long moved between being a source of identification and of rivalry. I

suggest that these two positions were pushed apart in the 1960s when black nationalism

came to be entirely associated with the latter position. The Nation of Islam, the sect that

brought Malcolm X to national prominence, is perhaps the best example of this: it adopted

the JudeoChristian idea of the chosen people, an idea first articulated in the Exodus

text, but it (p.127) claimed not that blacks share this special position with Jews but

rather that Jews had stolen it from black people (McAlister 2005: 98).

While the NOI chose not to discard but rather to revise Old Testament stories so

culturally resonant among black communities, Melani McAlister suggests that the mid to

late 1960s brought about a set of circumstances in which some African Americans were

seeking alternatives to JudeoChristian identifications. Identification with Egypt,

McAlister argues, gained in appeal among US blacks as events unfolded in the Middle

East. At this point the Exodus trope was left to the apparently more moderate wing of the

civilrights movement. It is an irony not often noted that the Exodus story so pivotal to

King's understanding of the civil rights struggle is one that has its deepest roots in black

nationalism. Because this fact is often overlooked, and because King's articulation of

Exodus has been by far the most influential and widely remembered version in African

American history, it is often anachronistically associated with moderate integrationists

whose political instincts are seemingly worlds away from those of Marcus Garvey or the

NOI. While acknowledging that the legacy of black invocations of Exodus is mixed, Gilroy

privileges this more moderate genealogy. Not only is Exodus for him primarily a slave

narrative through which blacks might confront the experience of suffering in modernity;

Martin Luther King, as one of the narrative's most powerful exponents, functions as a

moral touchstone in Gilroy's scholarship. And King's compelling engagement with thetrope did indeed conjure a very different picture from that of triumphant return to Africa

or to Israel.

Though King's allegory of the civil rights movement cast the US South as Egyptland, it

also imagined the redemption of black Americans taking place on US soil. The interracial

vision at the centre of King's version of the Exodus narrative also pointed to a deep

identification with Jews and Judaism. This is perhaps best demonstrated via his friendship

with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was one of King's most prominent Jewish allies

in the civil rights movement. Heschel's thinking was profoundly shaped by the Nazi

Holocaust, and the bond between Heschel and King thus involved an understanding of


6/14


Page 6 of 14


oppression that linked the histories of slavery and the Holocaust, as well as a shared

reverence for biblical history (see Heschel 2000). Consequently, King warmly embraced

the State of Israel, most notably following its victory in the 1967 war. Writing in the

Saturday Review, King claimed that all men of good will exult in the fulfilment of God's

promise, that his People should return in (p.128) joy to rebuild their plundered land

(Schneier 1999: 166). King's direct mapping of biblical narrative onto secular history was

very much at odds with growing black nationalist sentiment that was at the time gaining

ground with important sections of the civil rights coalition. Transnational identifications that

had linked a mythic Israel and Africa in US black nationalist thought at least since the

nineteenth century began to unravel in the years following the establishment of the

Jewish state. Even the prominent PanAfricanist figure W. E. B. Du Bois, for whom the

connection with Jews in general and Zionism in particular was a significant one throughout

his long career and up until his death in 1963, became partially disaffected by some of the

actions of the Israeli state. This fact is captured by Du Bois's literary response to the

Suez crisis of 1956, a crisis that brought the new Israeli state and the Egypt of Gamal

Abdel Nasser into direct conflict:

Young Israel raised a mighty cry

Shall Pharaoh ride anew?

But Nasser grimly pointed West,

They mixed this witches brew!

Israel as the West betrays

Its murdered, mocked, and damned,

Becomes the shock troops of two knaves

Who steal the dark man's land.

(Weisbord and Kazarian 1985: 30)

Du Bois's admiration both for Nasser's Egypt and for Israel led him to cast Israel as the

dupe of the racist imperial powers. Du Bois's response is indicative of the fact that, where

the weight of leftwing commentary in the West still enthusiastically embraced Israel as a

progressive project at the time of Sueza tide that was to turn steadily from 1967

onwardsmany leftidentified black Americans, along with their Third World

counterparts, had been suspicious of the Israeli state since its inception. It is, therefore,

no surprise that by 1967, the year that many later identified as that which sealed Israel's

identity as an occupying power, the increasingly militant Student NonViolent

Coordinating Committee (SNCC)formerly a mainstream civil rights organizationwas

outspoken in its view that Israel represented an outpost of Western imperialism.

In response to the war, SNCC issued a newsletter accusing Zionists of massacre and

implicitly comparing their actions against Arabs to (p.129) those deployed against the

Jews in Nazi Germany. SNCC's pamphlet explained to African Americans that they were

part of a Third World, and that as such their loyalty lay with the Palestinians, who were

part of the nonaligned Arab states resisting Western colonialism alongside the

decolonizing African countriesas opposed to an Israel increasingly identified with the

West. The majority of academic scholarship follows SNCC's lead in casting the growing


7/14


Page 7 of 14


African American disaffection with Israel, and the consequent unravelling of the coalition

with American Jews, as a refusal of an imperialist ideology at the heart of Zionism. The

Jews as historically oppressed people, so this logic goes, had seized the mantle of

oppressor and were therefore no longer vulnerablea possibility, as already noted,

captured by the Exodus motif.

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore the veracity of the equation between

Zionism and Western imperialism; of interest here is the status of this equation in the

thought of black nationalists. For their analysis leaves King in the rather incongruous

position of championing an apparently imperialist ideology, on the one hand, and a non

violent philosophy, on the other. And there were undoubtedly contradictions in King's

position, contradictions that I suggest are not always fully scrutinized in Gilroy's work,

which is on occasion too quick to equate the Exodus identification with the memory of

suffering and slavery.

Yet King's own thinking is both dialectical and pragmatic, and his theologicalpolitical

position was driven by the notion of redemption, he had always firmly believed in the

worldly need to transform religious promise into reality, into the secular domain.

Because this promise involved delivering a historically oppressed people into the safety of

a much yearned for national home, he was even willing to countenance the violence

intrinsic to the 1967 war, despite the enormous price paid by the Palestinians. So for King

identification with the Jews did not stop the moment vulnerability was converted to

strength, and for him the Exodus narrative maintained its potency precisely as a slave

narrative that points in the direction of a triumphantand arguably triumphalist

destination.

Given that black nationalists were much more outspoken than King in their desire to

strengthenand in some cases armAfrican Americans, there are multiple ironies in

their rejection of Zionism as chauvinism. McAlister's excellent account of this per iod in

African American cultural politics provides a partial explanation by showing (p.130) that

anticolonial sentiments in black American culture were accompanied by shifting attitudes

towards black Christianitywhich were beginning to project Islam as an alternative

religious identity for blacksas well as more general black nationalist trends. McAlister

suggests that the symbol of Egypt collects these converging currents, both by

referencing the actual Egypt and the rise of Nasser as a symbol of the anticolonial

struggle, and by viewing Egypt as the geographical confluence of the Muslim world and

black Africa. As McAlister (2005: 99) claims, Egypt embodied the link between ancient

black greatness and contemporary Islam.

Nowhere in her analysis, though, does McAlister use this racialized discourse of ancient

greatness, on the one hand, and contemporary Black Power, on the other, to interrogate

the idea that the Exodus trope was rejected by black nationalists on account of its

conflation with the Zionist success in gaining territorial power. Thus she claims that, while

suffering and slavery had served as a potent link between blacks and Jews, it gave way

to a situation in which Jews have come to be identified less by their suffering than by

their power, both in Israel and in the United States (McAlister 2005: 123). Perhaps,


8/14


Page 8 of 14


though, a more convincing explanation is that the black nationalistand particularly the

Islamicrejection of Zionism was more about religious and racial solidarity and the

perception of Israel as part of a JudeoChristian white colonial West, as opposed to a

rigorous critique of the powerful as such.

McAlister (2005: 122) takes Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic(1993) to task for refusing

to see black identifications with the Arab world as anything other than a failure to identify

sufficiently with Jewish history. While Gilroy does acknowledge elsewhere in his work

(2000: 11213) that identification with the victim perspective can entail its own brand of

power, McAlister is right that Gilroy does not account for black identifications with the

Arab world; what McAlister fails to make clear is that Gilroy's target in the section of The

Black Atlanticentitled Children of Israel or Children of the Pharaohs is the ancient

Egypt of Afrocentric identification, as opposed to the slightly different variant imagined by

black Islam and particularly the NOI that is the focus of McAlister's analysis. In this sense,

Gilroy's work can equally be seen as a corrective to McAlister's tendency to centralize a

Muslim Egypt and thus to cast the black disarticulation of the connection with Jews as one

directly related to a rejection of the status quo in the Middle East.

(p.131) Taken together, these two very different interpretations of the meaning of

Exodus remind us that it is both a powerful account of the road from bondage to national

liberation, and a cautionary tale against the excesses of group identity politics. Likewise,

Gilroy and McAlister complement and nuance the other's conception of the Egypt trope,

to which this chapter will now turn.

The Egypt trope

Interestingly the shift towards Islam that occurred in black culture in the 1960s, and that

represented one manifestation of the claim to Egypt as opposed to Exodus, was

precisely a recognition of an experience that US blacks historically share with Jews: racial

discrimination within the context of a Christian society. The fact that Jews in both the US

and Israel had gone some way towards overcoming this discrimination does not explain

the turn towards Egypt in African American culture, for this alternative trope, I argue,

in no way points to an embrace of identity based on suffering. Yet I also suggest that this

trope needs to be approached in its complexity. As Gilroy notes, Egypt has been an

important touchstone for the black imagination of modernity. Like the Exodus narrative, it

has been mapped onto myriad political programmes that often conflict as much as they

collaborate with one another.

It is important to recognize that the various manifestations of the Egypt metaphor

claimed by black nationalists was not a claim to the flipside of the Exodus legacythat is, a

straightforward identification with the Egyptian masters rather than Hebrew slaves. For

Egypt represents an attempt to think a point of origin outside the JudeoChristian West.

In spite of this, the claim to a powerful Egypt did sometimes function in this way, as the

assumption of mastery, and indeed the embrace of an ancient civilization that had

sanctioned slavery. This was certainly the case with the Egypt claimed by the Nation of

Islam, which was quite explicitly adopted as a form of black empowermentintegral to

which was the idea that black cultures are superior to those of EuroAmerica. However,


9/14


Page 9 of 14


in spite of the fact that the NOI called upon Egypt as a bridging symbol between African

and Muslim worlds, and while Islam is of course hardly unknown in subSaharan Africa, I

suggest that the Egypt symbolthat went some way (p.132) towards displacing the

identification with diasporic Jewsin fact points to a number of strains in the transnational

affiliations imagined by black nationalism.

Sherman Jackson's work on black American Islam is illuminating in this regard. InIslam

and the Blackamerican, Jackson charts the transference of authority from the NOI to the

Sunni tradition that occurred within black American Islam in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Like many other scholars on this subject, Jackson casts the Nation of Islam as a

transitional movement caught between the contexts of US black religion, which he argues

is largely defined by resistance to slavery and racism, on the one hand, and the politics of

the Muslim world, on the other. The eventual dominance of the Sunni tradition among

black American Muslims is characterized by Jackson as the triumph of the super

tradition of historical Islamone that issues from the Muslim world and is centred on the

Middle East. According to Jackson (2005: 778), these new foreign identifications placed

black Americans at a fateful distance from their own experiences, for their own realities

could not be treated directly but only analogously on the basis of conclusions reached in

contemplation of the situation in the Muslim world.

The situation that Jackson argues increasingly eclipses the American context so crucial for

African Americans Muslims is the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. Thus in this view it is the

suffering of Palestinians, rather than the Jews, that is brought into competition with black

America. Rather than reflecting an authentic touchstone for the black experience, the

identification with a Middle Easternas opposed to an AfricanEgypt devalues the

experiences of African Americans. Jackson's arguments are themselves problematic for a

number of reasonsnot least a clear antipathy that emerges in relation to immigrant

Islam, a monolithic and homogenizing label that undergoes a catalogue of generalizations

in his text. Yet his work is illuminating on the subject of the growing cultural power of

immigrant Muslims, and underscores the fact that, while this moment in the mid to late

1960s forged an alliance between Islam and panAfricanism, the relationship would

arguably be just as tenuous as that between blacks and Jews.

Where Jackson critiques the NOI for being too rooted in the particularistic concerns of

black religion, Algernon Austin (2006) argues that the organization's orientation is

essentially Asiatic and not really PanAfrican at all. And indeed Islam emerges in many

Afrocentric texts as both an alien and a slavetrading religion on a par (p.133) with

Christianity (see, e.g., Asante 1980: 5). This is the context for Molefi Asante's (1993)

embrace of Malcolm X as cultural hero, which all but ignores Malcolm's Muslim identity.

In ways arguably much more significant than the NOI, Malcolm X as an individual political

and religious leader captures the tensions at the heart of the Egypt construct. After

Malcolm had broken with the NOI, he undertook extensive travels in the Middle East and

in Africa, thus staging an encounter between imagined identifications long cultivated by

black nationalist contexts in the US and his actual experiences. Significantly, Malcolm spent

a large proportion of his time abroad in Cairo. While his correspondence from the Middle


10/14


Page 10 of 14


East repeatedly highlights the essentially colour blind and antiracist thrust of the Muslim

world (see, e.g., X 1990: 5863)masking over the very real colour castes that operate

in Muslim societieshis letters also hint at the growing tension between his engagements

with Sunni Islam and his interventions into African politics. Consequently, prior to his

assassination, Malcolm X was to found not one but two new organizationsMuslim

Mosque Inc. and the Organization of AfroAmerican Unitywhich separated his religious

and secular work in a way that belied his insistence elsewhere that an Islamic world view

was integral to his racial politics. Malcolm's theologicalpolitical evolution, and in particular

his time spent in Cairo, is thus indicative of the fact that Egypt was not the unifying

symbol in African American politics it was often called upon to be. The powerful

convergence of anticolonial politics in the Middle East with those of black American

Muslims in the US did not survive the closer scrutiny afforded by actual travel to Egypt,

any more than the Exodus narrative had survived as a symbolic identification for black

America once it had been translated from biblical to secular history in the Middle East.

In fact, as previously suggested via McAlister's account of the NOI, the claiming of

Egypt involved not a rejection of the Exodus narrative as such, but rather a substitution

in which blacks displace Jews as a chosen people. Here we come full circle from the idea

that the Exodus trope was rejected on moral groundson account of its conflation with

Zionism and by extension Western colonialismand back to the idea that this rejection

was a claim to power itself. Consequently I suggest that McAlister's understanding of the

growing popularity of the Egypt metaphor as representative of the claim to an

alternative moral geography requires scrutiny.

(p.134) Stokely Carmichael's 1968 essay The Black American and Palestinian

Revolutions (see Carmichael 1971), which raises the issue of black identification with

Egypt, is an ideal vehicle through which to begin examining some of these assumptions.

Carmichael's essay, which was originally presented as an address to the Organization of

Arab Students (OAS), states that a few years ago I was for the Jewish people of Israel,

and he charts the path whereby black Americans came instead to identify with the

displaced Palestinian Arabs as fellow nonwhite victims of colonial oppression. Carmichael

dismisses the Zionist claim that Palestine is the motherland, the homeland of the Jews, as

imperialist propaganda. Yet, paradoxically, he then goes on directly to compare the Jewish

attachment to Israel with black American attachments to Egypt. The Jews, he writes,

established a state in 1948 and yet they feel such a strong tie with it. There is no

difference in black people [from the US] going to fight for and defend Egypt. Egypt

is in Africa and Africa is our homeland. The oldest civilization in the world comes

from Egypt. We must feel we are part of it. There are many of us who are slowly

beginning to prepare for that propaganda and prepare for the actual fight. We

intend to fight imperialism wherever it is, in the United States or in our homeland.

(Carmichael 1971: 141)

Carmichael wants to say both that black identification with Egypt is no different from

Jewish attachment to Palestine and that the Israeli state is an imperial oppressor . The

Zionist aspiration is here without doubt brought into comparisonand competitionwith


11/14


Page 11 of 14


PanAfricanist sentiments among US blacks. That Carmichael is ultimately hostile to

Zionism supports George Orwell's sense in 1945 that the Palestinian issue is partly a

colour issue; thus, while the socialist bent of early Zionism had captured the imagination

of many on the left in Europe and America, an Indian nationalist, Orwell argued, would

probably side with the Arabs (Wheatcroft 2009).

In fact, though Carmichael's essay is not, despite its title, a neat reflection of the

identification between black American antiracism and anticolonial politics in the Middle

Eastby way of the bridging vehicles of black Islam and the Egypt trope. Carmichael's

invocation of Egypt, which does involve a very explicit expression of solidarity with the

Arabs and particularly with the Palestinians, arguably has as much in common with the

Afrocentrist Egyptthat would later become mainstream in black Americaas it does

with the black (p.135) Islamic one. Many of the cultural nationalists associated with Black

Power would flirt with Islam, mainly as a consequence of Malcolm's influence, but Black

Power's political articulationas exemplified by SNCC and the Black Panther Partywas

explicitly secular; its rejection of the Christianled civil rights movement largely eschewed

religion altogether. Thus Carmichael's comparison between African Americans and

Palestinians works by way of the colonial analogy and the oppression of two nonwhite

peoples, an analogy that would become more marked as Israel moved closer to the racist

apartheid regime in South Africa. Carmichael does express solidarity with Arabs through

the suggestion that Egypt is Africa and Africa is our homeland, but in this his influences

were just as likely to be the long tradition in African American thought that has identified

ancient Egypt as a point of origin for black identity. As McAlister points out, long before

the rise of black American Islam in the 1960s, intellectuals like Du Bois had been

enthusiastic advocates of this idea, which received a boost in the 1950s when Africanhistoriography began to circulate Cheikh Anta Diop's thesis that the origins of African and

European culture lay in Egypt and that ancient Egyptian and Pharaonic civilization was a

Negro civilization (King 2004: 240). Axiomatic to Afrocentrism, this thesis is arguably at

work in Carmichael's sense (1971: 141) that the oldest civilization in the world comes

from Egypt. This is not to suggest that the NOI did not share this idea, but rather that it

would be a mistake to conflate its vision of Egypt with the more decisively PanAfrican one

in the same way that it would be a mistake to equate its mythological Egypt with that led

by Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Scholars heavily critical of Afrocentrism, like Stephen Howe, tend to collapse thedifference between organizations like the Nation of Islam and individuals like Molefi Kete

Asante, in spite of the marked antiIslamic and Orientalist tendencies of the latter. An

examination of the Egypt trope reveals that, rather than functioning as a pure point of

origin for what is imagined as a homogenous black culture, it is shot through with a set of

contradictions that are just as complicated as the reality it reflects. Part of this complexity

is the fact that, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary, the black identification with Egypt is

intimately linked to Exodus and the now routinely disavowed connection to Jewish

culture.

(p.136) Conclusion


12/14


Page 12 of 14


Events in the Middle East in the midlate 1960s, I have argued, were a crucial catalyst

for this disavowal. The ways in which Jesse Jackson's Middle East identifications were

portrayed during Obama's election campaign are a contemporary indicator of this trend.

Jackson has long been a vocal advocate for Palestinian selfdetermination. This fact meant

that the media tended to portray Jackson's proximity to Obama as politically damaging to

the latter's attempts to appeal to Jewish American voters. This narrative was perhaps best

exemplified in October 2008, when Jackson was reported to have claimed that Obama's

Middle East policy would shift power away from Zionists who have controlled American

policy for decades; though Jackson himself denied much of the report, including having

even used the word Zionist, the American Jewish Committee responded by claiming that

Jackson was echoing classic antiSemitic conspiracy theories (Mozgovaya 2008). Obama

was quick to distance himself from these reported remarks and Jackson's position on the

Middle East in general.

The dominant view seemed to be that relations between blacks and Jews were naturally

strained, in part because of the tendency of African Americans to identify with the wrong

side of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. Yet such views betray marked historical amnesia

Jackson is a veteran of the civil rights movement and King was his primary mentor. The

weight of African American opinion did shift against the State of Israel following the 1967

war, but this shift could not wipe out the longand indeed often vexedhistory of

identifications with Jews. Thus, when Obama claimed in 2008 that he deeply understood

the Zionist idea and invoked the Jewish redemptive project of tikkun olam, repairing the

world, he was not only exercising political opportunism but was also calling on the

memory of a figure whose moral vision, to which Exodus was central, towers over the

African American tradition (Obama 2008). Indeed, while the sanitized version of MartinLuther King that is floated on America's airwaves is seemingly worlds away from the

angry image of Obama's former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright's Afrocentric church

is itself an amalgamation of the complicated legacies of civil rights and Black Power that has

informed the majority of politicized black churches since the 1960s. One need only look to

Obama's description of his first experience of the church (Obama 1995/2007: 2915), or

to Trinity United Church of Christ's (p.137) mission statement,2to see that this is a

church that emphasizes its African roots, identifies with the plight of Muslims all over the

world, lauds the notorious and arguably antiSemitic leader of the Nation of Islam, while

naming its congregation a chosen people along the lines of a certain JudeoChristian

narrative.

The irony is that the appeal of the Exodus narrative waned as the aspirations of black

nationalists increasingly mirrored those of Jewish nationalists; but Trinity is a living

reminder of the fact that the realities of the situation in the Middle East did not exclude

the Exodus vision from black American cultural horizonsand neither did it preclude

identifications with Jewish oppression, as Wright's sermons (1993) clearly show. Indeed,

while some versions of Afrocentrism do clearly dream of a racially homogenous ancient

Egypt in a move that wants aggressively to purge the black cultural link with Jews,

Afrocentrism's critics have appeared to be similarly invested in this project. In this vein,

Stephen Howe (1998: 202) claims that the ideologies of political Zionism and of Pan


13/14


Page 13 of 14


African or Afrocentric assertion, despite (or perhaps because of) their substantial shared

ancestry, have long been bitterly opposed. He thus not only collapses the long and

varied histories of PanAfricanism and Afrocentrism into a singular entityalongside the

various forms of black Islam that his book also discussesbut he overlooks the long

history whereby PanAfricanists have identified with Zionists, and vice versa. Howe is

thus complicit with the more problematic strands of the Afrocentrism that he critiques, by

presenting the cultural politics of blacks and Jews in the United States as radically

separate.

Howe makes these claims in order to flesh out his point that Martin Bernal's emphasis on

the Judaic influence on ancient Greece is somehow incompatible with his embrace of the

Afrocentric admirers ofBlack Athena. Howe argues that if Bernal wants to suggest that

ethnopolitical identities determine scholarly enquiry, then Bernal himself cannot logically

identify both with blacks and with Jews. Howe's exacting, even dogmatic, line of reasoning

seems to want to deny that Bernal can both claim that race and racism played a

determining factor in nineteenth century scholarship on the ancient world, and that his

own twentiethcentury text is somehow free of such concerns. The larger point that is

implicit in this argument is (p.138) that issues around race do not play a determining

role in scholarship. Moreover, Afrocentrism, in what Howe perceives to be its obsessive

focus on racial identity, actually distracts from the economic circumstances that plague

black American communities. Yet, in his desire to dismiss Afrocentrism as a middleclass

indulgence, Howe fails to address the fact that ideas about race pride emerged in the US

at precisely the moment that the 1960s black struggle turned its attention to economic

and social rights. Afrocentrism may not have perpetuated this link, but it is a movement

predicated on the view that race and class intersect, powerfully. Indeed, political

scientists have found that black nationalism, undeniably the most racialized of black

ideologies, is most fully embraced by poor black communities at times of economic

hardship (see Dawson 2001: 85134). To claim that these communities would be better

off exclusively focusing on their material needs does not fully consider the right of the

economically marginalized to express themselves culturally.

Bernal's work struck a chord with Afrocentrists because it offered evidence to flesh out

their claims about the centrality of a black Egypt to Western civilization. Whether or not

Bernal's evidence withstands scrutiny, his contribution, unlike Howe's commentary on

Afrocentrism, works as a powerful corrective to more simplistic versions of Afrocentrismthat wish to portray the histories of blacks and Jews as irreconcilable.Black Athenathus

opens up rich possibilities not only for exploring the African and Semitic influences on

Western culture, but also for getting to grips with the complex processes whereby

ancient stories are adopted as allegorical commentary on contemporary politics.

Notes:

(1) I have quoted from the Authorized King James Version of the Christian Bible.

(2) See Trinity's mission statement at www.trinitychicago.org/index.php?

option=com_content&task=view&id=20 (accessed 26 Mar. 2010).


14/14


Page 14 of 14

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2015.All Rights Reserved Under the terms of the licence agreement an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a

Access brought to you by: University of Oxford

Documents

Between Exodus and Egyptsrgsrhsrh