University of Michigan’s Black Student Union Cuts Ties To Anti-Zionist Group

Now with the necessary history of Arab mistreatment of blacks in mind (I covered it yesterday here and here), let’s return to the present day’s University of Michigan, where the Black Student Union has resigned from the anti-Zionist student group Tahrir Coalition, claiming that its Muslim leadership created an atmosphere of “pervasive” anti-black discrimination. More on black student anger at the way Arabs on campus have been treating them can be found here: “University of Michigan Black Students Accuse Anti-Zionist Group of ‘Pervasive’ Racism,” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, September 6, 2024:

The University of Michigan’s Black Student Union (BSU) has resigned from the anti-Zionist student group Tahrir Coalition, citing “pervasive” anti-Black discrimination fostered by its mostly Arab and Middle Eastern leadership.

“Black identities, voices, and bodies are not valued in this coalition, and thus we must remove ourselves,” BSU said in a statement posted on Instagram. “The anti-Blackness within the coalition has been too pervasive to overcome, and we refuse to endure it.”

Proclaiming its continued support for the anti-Zionist movement, the group continued, “The BSU’s solidarity with the Palestinian people is unwavering, but the integrity of the Tahrir Coalition is deeply questionable. We refuse to subject ourselves and our community to the rampant anti-Blackness that festers within it. For this reason, we will no longer be a part of the Tahrir Coalition.”

BSU did not cite specific examples of the racism to which Black students were allegedly subjected, but its public denouncement of a group which has become the face of the pro-Hamas movement at the University of Michigan is significant given the history of cooperation between BSU and anti-Zionist groups on college campuses across the US.

BSU’s Black members are not, however, the first to openly clash with anti-Zionist Arabs.

When Arab and Palestinian anti-Zionist activists launched a barrage of racist attacks against African Americans on social media in August, Black TikTok influencers descended on the platform in droves to denounce the comments, with several announcing that they intended not only to remove Gaza-related content from their profiles but also to cease engaging in anti-Zionist activity entirely. The conversation escalated in subsequent posts, touching on the continuance of Black slavery in the Arab world and what young woman called “voracious racism” against African Americans.

“What’s even crazier is that earlier people were like, oh these are bots, no — this is how people really feel. And she made a video that’s a real human being that feels exactly that way,” one African American woman said. “These are people who feel like they are entitled to the support of Black people no matter what, that they get to push us around and tell us who the hell we get to vote for if we support them … They’ve lost their minds.”

An African American male said, “Why don’t we talk about the Arab slave trade? And keep in mind that the Arabs have enslaved more Black people than the Europeans combined.” Another African American woman accused Arabs of not denouncing slavery in Antebellum America.

The history of anti-Black racism in the Arab world runs deep, experts have argued. In 2021, writer Cirien Saadeh said that Arabs living in the city of Detroit, Michigan often call Black men in their communities “abeed,” which means “slave,” and she alleged that Arab business owners “drain financial resources and don’t work to build relationships” with their African American neighbors and customers. The following year, Jenin Al Shababi wrote in Diverse Educators that “racism is a virus that has embedded itself into the heart and soul of Arab communities,” explaining that it was a Palestinian store owner who prompted the killing of George Floyd in police custody in the spring of 2020. A decade earlier, Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa, who has herself spread antisemitic conspiracies and tropes, noted that a Black Ethiopian domestic worker, Alem Dechesa, committed suicide after being abused, physically and emotionally, by her Arab employer. Thousands of Black domestic workers in the Middle East, she added, suffer similar violations of their human rights.

Sayyid Qutb, one of the most acclaimed Muslim intellectuals of the 20th century, once described jazz music, widely regarded as one of Black America’s greatest contributions to American music and culture, as “artistic primitiveness.” Writing in his 1951 essay “The America I Have Seen: In the Scale of Human Values,” he said, “[Jazz] is this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires, and their desire for noise on the one hand, and the abundance of animal noises on the other.”…

The anger of the black students at their Arab “allies” at the University of Michigan who do not listen to them, who take their support for granted, who berate them for supporting the quasi-black Kamala Harris, is palpable. Let’s hope that black students elsewhere take a good look at how they are being treated by their “Arab allies” and decide to follow the example of the BSU at the University of Michigan.