"A Palestinian American’s Place Under the Democrats’ Big Tent?" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Maybe more than in any other year, this DNC has urged its various constituencies to highlight their identities and the collective pain that animates them. Racism, forced birth, land theft. It has been an exhibition of what the Palestinian scholar Edward Said called “the permission to narrate,” and it is that permission that Palestinian Americans have been denied. They have heard their names mentioned fleetingly by a handful of speakers but have not been granted the right to speak their names themselves. Perhaps that is for fear of what else a Palestinian American speaker might name. I cannot say that fear is unwarranted.

Last summer I spent ten days traveling the lands under Israeli rule. What I saw was hauntingly familiar. For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel is a state where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person...

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Israel and its defenders often claim that it is the “only democracy in the Middle East.” But what I saw was an ethnocracy, where half the people are first-class citizens, and the other half are something less. And this is a system sponsored and endorsed by the United States of America. The endorsement is not contradictory. For most of its history, America too was an ethnocracy in democratic clothing. The ostensible triumph over that old system, which we call Jim Crow, is one of the most uplifting stories America tells itself, one that has been repeatedly invoked at the DNC. How odd I find it that a people, presently brutalized by a similar system, whose relatives are being erased by that system’s wanton violence, are also being erased from the stage.

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