Since the October 7 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza, race and religion have loomed large in debates over appropriate solidarities linking the United States with Israel and Palestine, with the breakdown and reorientation of durable Black-Jewish U.S. civil rights alliances, mounting pressure coming from African American Christian clergy for a ceasefire in Gaza, and even organized Black clergy denunciations of U.S. military aid for the State of Israel as enabling “mass genocide.”
These trends illustrate a shift in U.S. Black religious politics in global terms and in its potential to disrupt long-standing coalitions in American electoral politics, as Black churchgoers—a historically reliable demographic for the Democratic Party—were increasingly less enthusiastic about President Biden’s prior candidacy in 2024 in key electoral states like Michigan. And this was in line with Biden’s plummeting approval ratings among African Americans in general, with a poll showing a drop from 81% approval among all African American adults in 2021 to 50% in December 2023.
In this context, we ask how race matters when progressive U.S. Christians travel abroad to forge solidarities with Palestinians in overlapping religious, racial, and political terms. Between 2015 and 2018, we traveled separately with different American Protestant Christian solidarity tours of Palestine and Israel—some primarily white (Sara Williams) and some primarily Black (Roger Baumann). We conceptualize these kinds of tours as either “journeys to the margins” or “journeys among the margins.” Journeys to the margins are solidarity tours grounded in liberation theologies that take the form of packed experiences and promise ethical and spiritual transformation through encounters with marginalized people and groups. Journeys among the margins are tours aimed at linking the struggles of marginalized groups across national borders.
So, how does race matter in each?
In comparing majority-white and white-led American Christian Palestinian solidarity tours with majority-Black and Black-led tours, we point out that race and racial identity are important to both kinds of trips, but manifest in different ways that matter for understanding transnational religious and racial solidarities. For white participants on white-led journeys to the margins, appeals to race and racial identity offer opportunities to reckon with inequitable power arrangements in conversation with progressive Christian values like social justice and inclusivity. For Black participants on Black-led journeys among the margins, overlapping experiences of racial marginalization and discrimination afford the cultivation of empathy, offer new transnational perspectives on racial identity, and forge new bonds of solidarity with Palestinians.
These outcomes, however, are far from determined. Journeys to and among the margins not only have the capacity to conscientize, but also to reinforce the paternalistic and asymmetrical “humanitarian reason” that animates white engagement with Black and Brown communities in the United States and abroad. And bonds of solidarity can come into tension with participants’ religious schemas that place values such as reconciliation and dialogue over justice and accountability, particularly among evangelicals.
Journey among the margins
Consider the following experiences of African American participants on evangelical solidarity tours of Palestine that involved a guided tour and discussion with an organization called Roots. Roots is a dialogue group founded by an Israeli-American Orthodox Rabbi and a Palestinian activist. It affirms both Jewish and Palestinian claims to the land as well as civil, political, and national rights for each group. Baumann visited Roots in 2015 with an all-Black group of pastors and lay leaders from The Perfecting Church (TPC), a large independent majority-Black evangelical congregation in the South New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia that travels to Palestine regularly with an evangelical theological mandate of peacebuilding and reconciliation. The TPC group began its ten-day trip to the Holy Land with a walking tour in the Judean hills (the Palestinian West Bank) guided by Shimon, a Jewish settler and spokesperson for Roots. TPC’s founding pastor, Kevin Brown, shared his hope that Roots would help TPC members understand a Jewish settler perspective on the land so they might relate to “both sides” in Palestine and Israel.
The TPC Roots tour began with a drive from Bethlehem to the Gush Etzion settlement bloc about five miles southwest, where the Palestinian van driver dropped the group off for a walking tour of a Jewish settlement area. Following that tour, the group visited a plot of land the organization maintains, gathering on a concrete platform under a tent in a semi-circle of plastic chairs. Shimon introduced the group to Bassem, a Palestinian Christian who also works with Roots. They took turns telling personal stories of how the organization’s work had become important to them, followed by a shared lunch of lentils, salad, and roasted chicken. Over lunch, Baumann talked with Don, a return visitor from TPC and a pastor in training who was preparing to plant a satellite branch of the church in his hometown of Camden, New Jersey. Don candidly shared that his younger brother had been murdered as a teenager. He also described how common police harassment of Black men is in Camden.
“I’m mindful when I’m in a neighborhood where there aren’t a lot of people who look like me,” he said. “And I’m praying that I won’t appear as a threat.”
When asked if he saw that kind of situation in the Holy Land, Don responded, “I saw it with our bus driver when Shimon got on the bus.”
Recognizing racialized experiences and power imbalances linking African Americans and Palestinians was a common theme of the trip. Participants shared frequently that their experiences of being Black in a white-dominated society conditioned how they interpreted the lives and experiences of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.
Journey to the margins
A year later in 2016, Williams visited Roots with a tour organized by progressive evangelical peacemaking organization, The Global Immersion Project (TGIP). Twenty of the participants were white; the remaining two were young Black evangelical leaders. The visit was led by Noam, a Jewish man originally from Minneapolis who had made Aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel) almost half a century earlier.
The group made its way to Beit Zakariyyah, a Palestinian village made up of makeshift tin-roofed cement structures lacking electricity and running water. Noam was quick to point out the disparities between Beit Zakariyyah and the neighboring Jewish settlement of Alon Svut, with its gleaming stone buildings and lush farmland. To underscore his point, Noam called over Munir, a Palestinian man from a nearby village accompanying us. Noam asked him,
“When you go from your village into [the settlement] … and you see the way they live [and] the way you live, does it feel like there’s something wrong?”
“It’s very different,” Munir responded. “There’s a big difference between the Arab life and the Jewish life. We don’t have 10 percent [of] what they have.”
A few minutes later, Williams noticed Munir whispering in hushed tones with Derek, one of the two Black participants in the group. After a while, one of the TGIP group leaders asked Derek whether he wanted to share their discussion with the group. He politely declined.
The next morning, in a small group debriefing, Derek shared about this encounter:
“I had a really hard moment when [Munir]… came and sought me out in the midst of everybody talking. [Munir asked me], ‘Why are you here? You came all the way here to learn about this tension between the two groups?’ He was just taken aback by that. [And] I was like, ‘Tell me a little bit about what it’s like to be you here in terms of the military occupation and stuff… Are the officers violent?’ And [Munir] said, ‘Yeah, all the time…I just worry about getting shot for no reason.’ And I was like, ‘You should tell the group that.’ And [Munir] said, ‘My Israeli friend [Noam] doesn’t like when I talk like that.’”
Reflecting on this conversation, Derek said,
“I don’t even know if [Noam] knew that the power dynamic of their relationship [was] inhibiting [Munir] from being fully honest with him. I can’t fault people, but I think when you’re in a position of privilege, oftentimes you’re blinded to how those relational dynamics function.”
After Derek spoke, a white member of the group, Sue, asked him whether he thought Munir had approached him because he is Black. When Derek responded with an unequivocal “yes,” she replied in a didactic tone,
“There’s another area people don’t understand. Probably from the outside he views you as the stereotypical — may I say? — and to be honest, you’re not. You’re highly educated, you have huge visions and plans. But he automatically stereotyped you, that’s what I find interesting.”
Derek gently redirected Sue’s interpretation of the encounter.
“I figure either he stereotyped me or he said, ‘He will get what I’m going through.’ It was one of the two.”
What can we learn from these journeys?
These two encounters between American evangelicals and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories share several common features. First, the evangelical theological imperative for reconciliation and peacemaking dominate the framework for participant meaning making. Second, Black evangelicals experience particular points of connection with Palestinians based on what the religious historian Judith Weisenfeld calls “religio-racial identity,” where some marginalized group identities function at the conjunction of religion and race, which takes on additional significance as Black religious politics shift from the national level to the transnational level. Third, the religio-racial frameworks Black evangelicals brought to their meaning-making processes functioned for them as ethical affordances, anthropologist Webb Keane’s term for aspects and perceptions of an experience that people may draw on in making ethical evaluations.
But we also see important differences that lead us to think of the majority white TGIP trip as a journey to the margins and the majority Black TPC trip as a journey among the margins.
Derek’s conversation with Munir suggests the limits of a “both sides” reconciliation paradigm. Yet the racial experiences of white participants like Sue did not afford them the same attunement to this dynamic. For Sue, Munir’s overture was the result of racial stereotyping; ironically this exposed her own racism in posturing Derek as a “model minority” Black man. Derek, by contrast, adeptly read this encounter as a kind of clandestine solidarity. It was the admission of what the reconciliation paradigm renders unspeakable: when structural power imbalances persist, reconciliation can actually become a tool for reproduction of those imbalances.
On journeys to the margins, like the TGIP trip, Black religio-racial experiences exist as whispers on the peripheries of the overall meaning making framework of the trip, where it is difficult for them to interrupt or destabilize white progressive Christian racial frameworks. Even with an attempt to contextualize his connection with Munir, Derek’s explanation didn’t register with Sue. This suggests limits to the reach of racialized perspectives into theologies and rhetorics of “both sides” engagement so central to American evangelicalism. For Black evangelicals on journeys among the margins, there are more opportunities for the limits of symmetrical “both sides” theological and ethical imperatives to become disrupted and reworked in a context where Black religio-racial experiences are more centered, more openly discussed, and more available to participants.
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