More than 100 Arizona Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and progressive Democrats and community leaders have signed a letter making the case for those reluctant to support Kamala Harris against Donald Trump.
“We know that many in our communities are resistant to vote for Kamala Harris because of the Biden administration’s complicity in the genocide,” the letter, published Thursday night, reads.
“Some of us have lost many family members in Gaza and Lebanon. We respect those who feel they simply can’t vote for a member of the administration that sent the bombs that may have killed their loved ones,” the letter continued. “As we consider the full situation carefully, however, we conclude that voting for Kamala Harris is the best option for the Palestinian cause and all of our communities.”
As a brown person myself I want to know if you agree with the leaders or if you’re saying you know better than us. It’s hardly racist to wonder if we’re being patronized by people who claim to know better than us.
What’s racist is calling the group simply Muslim and then taking a tokenizing approach to them.
Maybe you should read the letter they signed before defending support for genocide, and before trying to weaponize your own identity against solidarity with Palestine.
Shameful.
Who said I was supporting the genocide and the defense of it? I take the same approach as them in the letter. It’s an undeniable genocide and horrific, but the situation is most likely to get better under Harris, not Trump.
If agreeing with that letter is weaponizing my identity against solidarity with Palestine, what do you think of the letter writers?
Do you not believe that is what you are doing when you try to wield this letter as an identity-based cudgel against people that say you should not vote for someone genociding Palestinians? Please do some introspection if you don’t.
As who? You broad-brushed them as muslims before. So eager to push back! Have you read the letter yet?
The genocide already has unconditional support from the Biden-Harris administration and they are extremely competent at securing support from Europe and, as you can see here, earning your complacency, complacency in those around you, and an explicitly Zionist party.
I think that if Trump were doing this you could be mobilized to actually materially oppose the genocide instead of making excuses for why you will support literal genociders, even going after people that reject genocide with bad faith arguments and racist tokenization.
That is, actually, not how you weaponized your identity. Please review what you wrote to me.
I have already answered this question in my criticisms of the letter. If you have read the letter and looked at the signatories, you will find that they correspond to a specific class of people, they have very particular relationships with the party and the wider political apparatus. In short, they are almost entirely the heads of NGOs and party insiders.
This is not a new playbook, Democrats often tokenize identities in this way to have a party-aligned subset of people, people with direct material interests tied to the party and its wider apparatus, sign statements or otherwise present themselves as representing “The [X] community”. Imagine how the process for creating this letter and having it signed happened. How they networks were created, why they exist, who is doing the asks, how they organizations are funded, whose connections they rely on for their work, what the career ambitions of young party leadership groups are. And ask why it is almost exclusively this subset of people.