Start here. Once you cross the threshold, you’re home. The door

is what brings you from out to in. The door:


the only unit of measurement, not how “poor,”

not four walls, not foundation or drywall or chimney or roof. A door


opens a place into home. Remember, on Gorée

Island, they walked us through that unknown mouth, the Door


made our own bodies a home, made doorways

out of our voices in the air, their undeniable treasure.

each other. How a nod can mean you’re home — home in feet planted, freely, on the floor.

My grandmothers made homes out of things that were not houses — the fervor

of their Blackmother spirits filling the Bessemer projects, the Greensboro trailer —

no fireplace but the warm TV set, no yard but the red clay. The splendor

of what lives beyond what you call welfare, inner city, blight. Don’t you know our

words are a way home? We even bend language into a liberating door.

I used to think my proper tongue meant I leaned toward

the thing that stole our culture. But we can’t outgrow our home. Or,

we have never left in the ways that matter — home in our flavors,

our dances, the languages we live. Home is in us, behind a locked door.

We bent the blue cries of this place into full-bodied song, bent frail walls into shelter.

We bent the cast-off portions into a meal, we bent two cents into a dollar.

We bent redlines and tenements into a sanctuary you can’t enter.

If you want to know how Black folks find our way back to heaven, start here. Open the door.

Courtesy of Carrie Mae Weems and Jack Shainman Gallery

Come In 

ow do we put back together a society that has broken apart? How do we build solidarity within a culture of individualism, punishment, and accumulation when we are constantly repairing ourselves in the face of various forms of daily heartbreak?

If we lend ourselves to the emergent struggles of our times — against Cop City; for Black history, abortion rights, trans liberation, widespread debt cancellation, climate justice, access to land, and alternative food systems; in solidarity with actors and writers on strike and so many others — drawing connections and showing up is where we should start and return to again and again. Now is a time for experimentation and discipline alike. We need to accept what an activist involved in the fight to Stop Cop City in Atlanta calls 

 rather than demand political, strategic, or tactical purism. We have to allow for different people to show up in various ways in terms of ideology and struggle; in our protests and movements, we need the widest participation possible to win.

The uprisings of 2020 showed serious cracks in the system’s legitimacy. By some estimates as much as 

 participated in the protests in some form, a figure without precedent in U.S. history. Around the world, people held protests in at least 

, embodying the globalized nature of our emerging struggles. Mass social upheavals unsettle the status quo; disruption proves to everyone that “normal” is a product of circumstance and not inevitability, that things might not have to stay the same after all. That revolt sent a flare into the sky: 

Don’t mistake the status quo for daily acquiescence. 

. We’re neither happy nor content with things as they are.

But we need more than protests and temporary uprisings. We must further develop our organizations into social institutions capable of creating new relations in every domain of our lives here and now. Previous generations of struggle led to the 

 to one of the worst epidemics in modern history. This fact is not lost on today’s ruling class, which is hard at work making sure today’s young students don’t know how or even whether these past victories happened — 

At work, let’s fight for strong workers’ movements — not only unions — that recognize and build upon the shared interests of a multiracial working class. At schools, let’s struggle against censorship like the opposition to 

 and Black history in the state of Florida while also fighting for 

 like Planting Justice’s in California, and for expanding access to and resources for public schools 

the way the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) of Brazil

 does. Let’s push for state accountability by planning and constructing the missing infrastructure of our neighborhoods like the socialist shack dwellers movement 

 in South Africa. Their struggle shows how the democratic input of everyday people shapes the built environment of their community, while also recalling the mutual-aid efforts of organizations like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords.

In Atlanta, several formations came together to build independent grassroots power to fight Cop City. They have targeted formal legal and political processes but also organized protests, occupied the forest where the city intends to build the police training facility, held a week of actions, and put on music festivals. In response, they have been targeted with sustained and virulent police violence and repression, tarred as terrorists by the state government.

These examples reveal the strategic importance of stable organizations pursuing long-term projects and programs. Uprisings are not enough — constructing an equal and democratic society requires the sustained participation of the people. They are the legitimate creators of the institutions and defenders of rights central to communal life. Beyond the 

 of direct democracy in protests, assemblies, and occupations, we need people power in practice and not just in slogans.

Illustration by Dakarai Akil. Photographs via Getty Images.

Uprisings Are Just the Beginning

ow do we begin to encapsulate the political chaos of the past few months? Joe Biden’s soporific and incoherent June debate performance was followed by an attempt on Donald Trump’s life by a 20-year-old registered Republican and then the most unhinged Republican National Convention yet. Now that Biden has announced that he will no longer seek re-election, some of the fog is beginning to clear. Like a growing number of party elites, Biden endorsed Kamala Harris, a former top cop in California who is now the presumptive Democratic nominee. Who knows what will happen next.

In recent weeks, Biden’s flailing ineptitude brought together an unlikely group of bedfellows (“bedwetters,” according to the president’s diehard supporters) who successfully demanded that he step down — a motley crew that included many left and progressive organizations, some big money donors, former Obama insiders-turned-podcasters, veteran consultants such as James Carville, Never Trump Republicans, a smattering of Democratic representatives, George Clooney, and a majority of Democratic voters. This strange alliance united people who insist that Biden has been one of the greatest American presidents — the problem was his age and rambling delivery — and those who object to his principles and policies, particularly his unwavering support for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

The left has long called attention to Biden’s weaknesses. But over the past 10 months, his administration has profoundly alienated core constituencies the Democrats need to win, young people foremost among them. Videos of unbearable suffering in Gaza — the leveled buildings, bloodied and traumatized children, and anguished parents — have sparked a moral revolt, prompting people to take the fight for Palestinian liberation to the streets, college campuses, the United Nations, and the ballot box. Organized student protesters and Democrats opposed to the unfolding genocide who voted uncommitted in the primaries were the first to show en masse that Biden was unelectable, well before the now infamous debate.

Much to the annoyance of liberal pundits — including the newly Biden-skeptical Carville, who fumed, “Don’t talk about fucking Gaza and student loans!” — the rising generation understands that the occupation of and assault on Palestine is inseparable from other crises, including systemic racism and police violence, unchecked corporate power and public austerity, fascism and climate disaster. In response, new bonds of solidarity are being forged across racial, ethnic, religious, and generational divides to fight for Palestinian liberation — developments we tracked in our previous issue.

But far more than the 2020 protests for racial justice, this movement has sparked ferocious resistance. Nearly everywhere, transformative solidarity is not only spreading — it is also being undermined and criminalized. For exercising their First Amendment rights, students have been slandered, beaten, arrested, suspended, expelled, doxxed, and blacklisted, including some of those interviewed and photographed for this issue. Educators have been reprimanded or fired or had their hiring frozen. New York Democrats responded to the protests against genocide in Gaza by proposing legislation that would turn blocking public streets or bridges into acts of domestic terrorism. At the federal level, Republican lawmakers from other states have 

London, February 2024. Photograph by Crispin Hughes/Panos Pictures, via Redux.

This is a continuation of a longstanding trend that intensified after the Standing Rock protests and then again after the 2020 uprisings, when multiple states passed laws imposing harsh penalties on protesters who obstruct traffic on roads or even sidewalks. The state is setting dangerous new precedents, something Priscilla Grim chillingly illustrates in an essay in this issue; she was indicted on racketeering and domestic terrorism charges simply for joining a protest against Atlanta’s Cop City. (Let’s not forget that the Atlanta metro police routinely train and swap tactics with the Israel Defense Forces, providing further proof our issues really are connected.) In every case, the goal is the same: to splinter fragile coalitions, isolate the left, scare off potential allies, and foster reactionary solidarity to quell dissent.

Whenever ordinary people begin to come together across their myriad differences to challenge oppression, wherever fragile shoots of trust begin to grow, the powerful seek to mow them down and plant a more mean-spirited and lethal crop in their place. Last fall, influential Democratic Party adviser Ruy Teixeira published a piece connecting the progressive response to Gaza to the George Floyd uprisings. In it, he encouraged his fellow Democrats to “throw the intersectional left under the bus.” Over the past 10 months, many elected officials have done just that, further emboldening a fascist right that has beaten nonviolent protesters while funneling mountains of cash into MAGA candidates’ coffers and pretending to denounce a make-believe scourge of antisemitism on the left. A disturbing number of Democrats have provided cover for their opportunistic Republican colleagues, including New York Representative Mondaire Jones, who sided with AIPAC to oust his cease-fire-supporting colleague Jamaal Bowman. For members of both parties, Palestine is not a real place full of real people but a wedge issue to exploit in order to marginalize the left — to sabotage inclusive, transformative solidarity while fostering its reactionary counterpart.

Across the world, far-right governments, which have been gaining ground by forging reactionary solidarity among their base, have faced encouraging electoral setbacks in the face of solidifying opposition in France, India, and the United Kingdom, while the threat of renewed austerity in Kenya has brought together coordinated mass protests of such intensity that President William Ruto dismissed almost his entire cabinet. It remains to be seen how a new Democratic ticket will respond to this fraught moment and whether organizers can continue to build on the momentum that forced Biden to step down to help ensure his successors stop funding the slaughter of Palestinians.

A majority of Americans believe a cease-fire is urgently needed. But we need more than positive survey results — we need to do the hard work of cultivating solidarity and building collective power. The question is what kind of solidarity we, the people, will choose to grow: A flourishing, inclusive, and transformative solidarity that fights to universalize access to affordable housing, transportation, dignified working conditions, and peace? Or a poisonous, exclusionary, and reactionary variant that aims to incarcerate, deport, and deprive people of rights, protections, and even life itself?

Milan, Italy, November 2023. Photograph by Giovanni Pulice/contrasto, via Redux.

he distinction between transformative and reactionary solidarity reminds us that solidarity is not always a good thing, as Hammer & Hope editorial board member Astra Taylor and the activist Leah Hunt-Hendrix argue in 

Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea

. Picture the odious insularity of white supremacists, ethno-nationalists, and religious fundamentalists or of otherwise hypercompetitive billionaires who lock arms to defend their class interests, the provincialism of police unions, or the resentful bonds men’s-rights influencers forge with their followers. These people are united, but toward what end?

This form of reactionary politics exceeds U.S. borders. Narendra Modi’s Hindutva dogma promotes Hindu Brahminical domination through violence against Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Adivasis, and Dalits throughout India; Viktor Orbán’s fascist traditionalism encourages religious and racial intolerance in Hungary; Benjamin Netanyahu’s Zionism colonizes and kills Palestinians while also smearing anti-Zionist Jews in Israel; Javier Milei’s anti-migrants and anti-Indigenous austerity plan led to the closing of the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism (Inadi) in Argentina; Jair Bolsonaro’s racist legacy includes the subordination of minority groups to the Christian majority and the rise of a militarized Christian state in Brazil. These leaders have one another’s backs, as documented ties between Netanyahu and Orbán reveal, as well as the growing popularity of the Israeli government among European far-right parties. Reactionary solidarity locks its adherents in a toxic embrace that essentializes its enemies — “human animals,” as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians last fall.

This chauvinism serves a purpose. To paraphrase legal scholar Ian Haney López and author Heather McGhee, reactionary solidarity functions as a “plutocrat’s scythe”: a way economic and political elites weaponize a wide range of resentments and fears to harvest obscene wealth and power. And harvest they have. Fascist formations and parties around the world continue to make inroads, gaining converts and seats in legislative bodies. Meanwhile, the number of billionaires has climbed to a record high. Some of the most notorious members of this class are now proud promoters of a racist, conspiratorial right wing. Trump endorsers Elon Musk and Bill Ackman are bound by reactionary solidarity, having conscripted themselves and their vast fortunes into the “war on woke” — a battle absurdly out of proportion to any racial justice reforms or concessions. It’s a reminder of just how threatening some found 2020 and the specter of multiracial solidarity.

But the problem isn’t just the right. Embedded in every conservative backlash is the failure of the liberal establishment to improve people’s lives. Liberals’ unwillingness to blame the capitalist system for hurling us toward mass immiseration and planetary destruction leaves people grasping for explanations, and the far right is happy to fill the gap. Millions can barely make ends meet, yet corporate Democrats claimed for months that the issue was bad vibes and the public’s ignorance about how inflation works, opening space for fascist faux populists to position themselves as champions of the working class.

This reminds us that the term “backlash” has always been a misnomer. It misleadingly implies that conservative counter-reactions to social movements are natural and inevitable as opposed to ongoing and engineered. But division is not our default state; authoritarians spend money, time, energy, coordination, power, and opportunism to foment it. The right’s forging of reactionary solidarity is a long-running and expertly executed project — one that takes advantage of not only liberal failures but also the shortcomings of the left.

Berlin, Germany, July 4, 2020. Photograph by Stefan Boness/VISUM, via Redux.

olidarity among human beings can happen spontaneously, as in a flood or fire, or by design, through organizing,” writes the renowned and much missed labor strategist Jane McAlevey in 

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age

. Whether reactionary or transformative, building solidarity requires resources, vision, and a willingness to dig in for the long haul. The kind of solidarity we need has to be consciously cultivated, meeting by meeting, day after day. Many of the pieces in this issue document efforts to do precisely that, whether in Sudan or Haiti or during past iterations of struggles that we continue to fight.

As leftists, we know we’d all be more secure if we funded social services instead of jails; more stable if our neighbors could stay safely housed and well fed; better paid if immigrants weren’t exploited for poverty wages; healthier if we protected the air and water in poor communities and distant countries. If being right were enough, the left would have won long ago. The same goes for having public opinion on our side. Survey after survey shows Americans want many progressive things, from environmental protections and universal health care to free college and union representation to a cease-fire in Gaza. But polling results aren’t power.

Power is created by building transformative solidarity and engaging as many people as possible — like the unlikely coalition that came together to push President Biden to pass the torch, based on little more than a shared desire to have marginally better odds of staving off Trumpism. To pose the kind of challenge that can restructure society on a more profound level, we will need to build movements that are both disciplined and diverse. In the United States, few if any social groups have the numbers to single-handedly overcome the forces invested in our oppression, which means we need one another to win. The multiracial working class toils day after day, but to exercise collective power over the economy, it has to be brought into consciousness, each individual transformed when they come to the realization that they are valued and needed and can be part of something bigger than themselves. That’s what organizing is all about.

We organize by meeting people where they are, even when they are somewhere that initially disappoints or even offends us. In a 2020 interview, 

, recounts a trip to Palestine he took as part of a delegation for the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. He recalls his dismay upon returning home when some people he met expressed reservations about being in solidarity with Palestinians on the grounds that some harbored anti-Black sentiments. He responded that the Black community was hardly free of Islamophobia — should Palestinians withhold solidarity from them? In Kelley’s words, “solidarity is not a market exchange.” It’s not transactional, a kind of down payment on future reciprocity or a campaign donation that can buy Mondaire Jones’s vote. It’s transformational.

Of course, making space for difference and disagreement is easier said than done, especially at high-tension moments like the present, when we’re encouraged to denounce people who fall short and to see all conflicts as zero-sum. This patient ethos can be tough on those of us who prioritize conceptual clarity and consistency. “We think that the world will collapse as the result of a logical contradiction: this is the illusion of the intellectual — that ideology must be coherent, every bit of it fitting together, like a philosophical investigation,” observed the late great sociologist Stuart Hall. “When, in fact, the whole purpose of what Gramsci called an organic  (i.e. historically effective) ideology is that it articulates into a configuration different subjects, different identities, different projects, different aspirations. It does not reflect, it constructs a ‘unity’ out of difference.”

As philosopher and poet Audre Lorde recognized, we need to find ways to find common cause in our complexity and heterogeneity:

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identi­ties. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our dif­ferences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.

Gaza, the Democrats, and How to Fix Our Wretched Politics

t’s perpetually election season in the United States, but this one has been especially bizarre and intense. Donald Trump was shot in the ear. Joe Biden mumbled his way through a debate that was his downfall. Kamala Harris fell from a coconut tree and became the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. But Harris’s campaign quickly squandered the initial burst of enthusiasm and momentum as it pivoted to courting centrists and trying to outflank the opposition on the military and border security. The first Black and South Asian woman to have a chance at the Oval Office, Harris has tried to position herself as a transformative candidate in the mold of Barack Obama while actually running more like Hillary Clinton, pandering to Wall Street and vowing to include Republicans in her cabinet. This rearranging of the deck chairs on the sinking Democratic ship has unfolded against the backdrop of racist anti-immigrant fearmongering, conspiracy theories and threats of post-election violence, catastrophic heat waves and hurricanes, and the unceasing, enraging, heart-rending genocide in Gaza and devastating strikes across the region.

We don’t know what will happen on Nov. 5, but we do know we can’t afford to ignore elections. Political power matters, and it’s important to understand how it operates — and how we might influence it. That’s why the writers in this issue have taken the time to examine the electoral dilemma from multiple angles. They 

 why this presidential race is so close, 

 Harris’s reactionary appeals to Black men, and 

 the strategy that drove the Uncommitted movement. We 

 to two former Biden officials who resigned in protest over the administration’s policy toward Israel and Palestine and also 

 at more participatory alternatives to elections that allow people to vote for policies instead of voting for personalities.

In the end, we know our collective liberation won’t come from the ballot box. There are many other forms of power we need to build and wield if we want to transform society: power in unions, power in the streets, power in deeply rooted community organizing and coalition building. This is the power displayed by the 

 aiding their western North Carolina neighbors in Hurricane Helene’s aftermath and by the patient organizers who have built a 

 that has helped make Minnesota a progressive stronghold. It’s the power 

 and faculty are forging on campuses as they begin to repair movement infrastructure destroyed by the far right and band together to fight administrators hellbent on squeezing workers.

There is also power in alternatives, in beginning to build the world we want out of the rubble, planting seeds for future harvests by constructing cooperative enterprises, reconnecting with the land, and trying to create a future free of incarceration. We see this kind of visionary power in the 

, where people are creating new systems of agriculture and exchange in order to resist colonization and exploitation. This is the power sought by 

 who are working to dismantle the prison industrial complex, one of the pillars of the fascist threat now threatening to engulf us.

As essays in this issue reveal, building small-d democratic power — power rooted in solidarity — is never easy. Our organizing efforts have to contend with racism, sexism, mistrust, external attacks, internal conflict, and the common but misguided view that outcomes are always zero-sum. But as an account of the deep connections between Palestinian and Black liberation argues, this kind of solidarity isn’t just a moral imperative; it’s a strategic one. We can save ourselves only if we do the work to save one another.

As academic and activist Donna Murch writes, “Winning is hard, but it is absolutely necessary.” Even if the worst outcome of an all-out takeover by the far right is avoided in the weeks and months ahead, the left can hardly begin to claim victory. To have any hope of actually creating change on a scale that meets the crises that define our time, we need to organize everywhere, building power person by person, day after day in our workplaces, schools, faith centers, neighborhoods, rural communities, local governments, and more. We need a plan that extends far beyond one election cycle, and we need to be realistic and relentless about the monumental effort, insight, compassion, and courage this task requires. Let’s get to work.

Illustration by Golnar Adili. Photographs by Abbas Momani/AFP and Erin Lefevre/NurPhoto, via Getty Images.

Elections Matter, but We Need More Than the Ballot Box to Achieve Collective Liberation

he state of Israel has unleashed the most brutal military bombardment since World War II on the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. This siege came in response to Hamas’s breach of the wall that delineates the Israeli occupation and the group’s subsequent attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians.

 the nearly 15,000 air strikes the U.S. carried out on Iraq in its campaign against the Islamic State from 2014 to 2017. In December, U.S. intelligence sources divulged to CNN that 40 to 45 percent of the 

 against Gaza were “dumb bombs,” or unguided missiles, which can be more dangerous to civilians in densely populated areas.

“When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target,” an Israeli military source told reporters as part of a bombshell 

 attributing the virulence of Israel’s assault in part to an increased reliance on artificial intelligence to generate targets. “Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

Intense anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia, and what the Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said described as “Orientalism” have underwritten the West’s perpetual wars, sieges, and onslaughts against the Middle East, wars that America’s client state, Israel, has helped manage for multiple generations. This racism has normalized America’s and Israel’s war crimes in the Middle East.

But this is far more than a simple ideological project. As the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the region, to the tune of more than $3 billion each year, Israel has long been of use to the West as the Zionist project of building a state on the dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian population. The U.S. disguises its geopolitical designs to control access to the region’s oil supply under the guise of rooting out terrorism. Though America’s “war on terror” failed, its afterlife of security theater, surveillance, and abject racist demonization of a perpetual Arab or Muslim “other” lives on.

Soon after Israel began its siege, Joe Biden made a mockery of Palestinian grief and death. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” he said, echoing the Israeli government. His 

 recognizing 100 days of the war on Gaza made no mention of the thousands of Palestinians whom Israel had killed. More recently, Biden enjoyed an ice cream cone with a late-night talk show host while blithely suggesting the possibility of a cease-fire. A week later, The Washington Post revealed that the United States has quietly delivered 100 weapons packages to Israel over the course of its assault, including thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, and bunker busters.

Of course, the U.S. has long licensed Arab death. Consider the Clinton era. In 1996, when Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes” asked UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright about the deaths of half a million Iraqi children caused by U.S.-backed sanctions on Iraq, Albright infamously said, “The price is worth it.” Activists confronted her the next year, and she responded, “I am as concerned about the children in Iraq as any person in this room.” But, she added, “Saddam Hussein is the one who has the fate of his country in his hands. … He is the one responsible for starving children, not the United States of America.”

George W. Bush claimed after the attacks on Sept. 11 that “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” and “Islam is peace.” But the indiscriminate targeting of Arabs and Muslims abroad through various war efforts and domestically by federal and local police during the Bush presidency contradicted such overtures. The federal government’s gearing up for war reverberated across the country and fomented an atmosphere of fear, anxiety, and extraordinary racism. 

 taken soon after Sept. 11 found 58 percent of Americans supported “intensive security checks” for Arabs, 49 percent favored special identification cards for them, and 32 percent approved of “special surveillance” of Arabs.

The media played a significant role in providing bigoted justifications for racial profiling. Richard Cohen, then a columnist for The Washington Post, 

: “We have become driveling idiots on matters of race and ethnicity. One hundred percent of the terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 mass murder were Arabs. Their accomplices, if any, were probably Arabs, too — at least Muslims. Ethnicity and religion are the very basis of their movement. It hardly makes sense, therefore, to ignore that fact and, say, give Swedish au pair girls heading to the United States the same scrutiny as Arab men coming from the Middle East.”

Indeed, less than a month after the attacks, Bush sang a different tune from his earlier overture:

They hate us because we love the idea that people can worship an Almighty God any way he or she sees fit. They hate us because we love political discourse and a free society. They hate us because of our free press. They hate everything about us, because of our freedom. And there’s another — there are a lot of distinguishing features, but one of the most clear ones to me is this: We value life in America. We say everybody is precious, everybody counts, every life has worth, every life has dignity. They don’t value life.

An emboldened American security state was activated. In the weeks after Sept. 11, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies rounded up and detained more than 1,200 people, mostly Arabs and Muslims. The Department of Justice initiated a program of “voluntary interviews” with 5,000 “non-immigrant” men who claimed citizenship from countries the U.S. insisted harbored Al Qaeda. Two years later, in preparation for war with Iraq, a new Iraqi Task Force, created by the FBI, interviewed 11,000 people of Iraqi origin living in the United States, many of them citizens.

The swell of anti-Arab suspicion and racism shaped the lead-up to America’s baseless war of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq. Politicians’ xenophobia obscured the brutality of a war that killed between 150,000 and perhaps as many as 600,000 Iraqis. The widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure, already weakened by a decade of brutal U.S.-backed sanctions, resulted in even more deaths of Iraqis. It also helped to foment the conditions that allowed for the creation of the U.S. gulag in Guantánamo Bay — a military space controlled by the U.S. absent any rights or freedom. The climate of war allowed for torture and abuse of detainees at 

, too. Tens of thousands more were killed in Afghanistan — the longest war in U.S. history, ending only in 2021.

According to a 2023 report from Brown University, researchers estimated that more than four million people were either killed or eventually died in the War on Terror. From Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen, millions have died from what The Washington Post 

 as “waves of violence, hunger, the devastation of public services, and the spread of disease.” In fact, it was anti-Palestinian bigotry that drove the creation of and shaped the development of anti-terrorism laws, according to a new 

 by Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights. In 1969, the first-ever mention of terrorism in a federal law “dealt specifically with restricting humanitarian aid to Palestinians and inaugurated a pattern of rendering Palestinians synonymous with terrorism.”

The characterization of Arabs and Muslims as forever enemies was built into politics and disseminated through popular culture, which endlessly portrayed brown-skinned men as terrorists.

Republicans have long worn their derision of Arabs and Muslims openly. The far right concocted a mass hysteria over the conspiracy theory that Muslims sought to implement Shariah law in the U.S. Since 2010, state legislatures have introduced at least 201 anti-Shariah bills. Breaking with longstanding international consensus, Trump moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to the contested land of Jerusalem. And he implemented a ban on entry into the United States from a handful of majority Muslim countries after he was inaugurated as president, a ban the Supreme Court upheld. More recently, in the weeks after Hamas’s attacks, Montana Representative Ryan Zinke introduced legislation (with 10 cosponsors) that would 

 from entering the United States. “I don’t even want to call it the Palestinian flag because they’re not a state,” Republican Representative Max Miller of Ohio 

 after Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib pinned a Palestinian flag to her office door. “They’re a territory that’s about to probably get eviscerated and go away here shortly, as we’re going to turn that into a parking lot.”

We have come to expect such racist dreck from the Republican Party. But this is the Democratic Party’s war. Democrats have mastered the art of performing grief even while Biden’s intersectional and multiracial cohort of UN ambassadors and functionaries oppose cease-fire resolutions that could immediately end the war. When Tlaib spoke out early in favor of a cease-fire and for an end to Israeli atrocities in Gaza, Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, a queer Haitian American, described as “repugnant” and “disgraceful” statements from Tlaib and others in the Squad calling for a cease-fire or criticizing Israel.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi told Palestine solidarity protesters to “go back to China” and 

 that calls for a cease-fire are “Mr. Putin’s message.” As if time-traveling back to the Cold War, she pressed on without evidence. “This is directly connected to what he would like to see,” she said. “Some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere,” but others “are connected to Russia.” Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor of New York, 

 that if Canada attacked Buffalo, N.Y., in the way that Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, “there would be no Canada” — an apparent endorsement of collective punishment and the right of Israel to annihilate Gaza.

Beyond such crass rhetoric, in early February, 

 voted for a $17.6 billion aid package put forth by Republicans to finance Israel’s siege of Gaza; it failed to pass. Instead of pressuring Israel to allow more aid trucks into Gaza, which is on the brink of famine, the Biden administration has dropped parachutes of food aid, some of which failed to open midair, killing people upon landing, and rushed to create a temporary port off Gaza’s coast for humanitarian aid shipments, a theatrical, cumbersome workaround.

But we are in a new moment. For the short life of this war, millions across the globe have roared in opposition, demanding a cease-fire, along with medical aid and food for Palestinians. The protests spurred a campaign spearheaded by South Africa at the International Court of Justice to make a surprising intervention, holding that Israel’s actions may constitute genocide. Opposition to Israel’s siege has activated a Palestine solidarity movement in the U.S. led largely by Palestinian Americans and young Jews. U.S. financing and arming of this war has made Biden politically vulnerable even as he continues to stand by it.

Biden’s polling among Arab Americans voters has plummeted from 59 percent to 17 percent, while progressives have threatened to withhold their votes in the fall’s presidential contest. His political future is further imperiled by 

 to Israel’s actions in Gaza among Democratic voters, especially the young. Most recently, tens of thousands of Democratic Party primary voters in Michigan, Minnesota, and elsewhere voted “uncommitted” as a protest vote against Biden’s Gaza policy. The Democratic establishment downplayed the Michigan vote in public, but when Vice President Kamala Harris was dispatched to commemorate the 59th anniversary of the Selma civil rights march, she called for an “immediate cease-fire,” then paused for applause, “for at least the next six weeks.” Of course, the movement demands an immediate and permanent cease-fire and an end to the occupation. Harris’s use of “cease-fire” instead of Biden’s “pause” is the administration’s effort to co-opt an antiwar movement that has spiraled beyond their control or their imaginations. But that rhetorical shift is also evidence that the “uncommitted” movement is unsettling the party’s consensus, as was Senator Chuck Schumer’s surprising excoriation of Benjamin Netanyahu in a speech.

Palestinians have challenged the U.S.-Israeli war machine. The U.S. war in Vietnam was the first to be broadcast widely in the homes of Americans, and the Israeli onslaught in Gaza is the first genocide to be watched live on people’s smartphones across the globe. The sheer determination of the Palestinian people to document their own suffering has transformed our understanding of this lopsided war, slicing through state-generated propaganda that has, since Vietnam, sought to shield the public from the death and destruction that is the reality of all war.

As the West has moved toward remote war conducted by drones, the human costs have become more abstract. Mainstream media outlets reinforce that remove, refusing to show the extent of the carnage, obliquely sanctioning the dubious claims of “smart bombs” and other euphemisms meant to assuage the public’s concern about the deaths of innocents. Because Israel has locked Gaza’s doors, courageous Palestinian journalists have risked their lives to broadcast Israel’s atrocities, and dozens have died doing so. It is because of Palestinians that we know of the hunger they are experiencing, visible in the gaunt bodies of their children. We know of the sniper attacks outside hospitals, the bombings of residential housing, mosques, and universities. Palestinians have learned how to circumvent the mainstream media’s equivocation about the value of their lives. They have seized the technology to show the world the consequences of Israel’s actions. Activists around the world emulated those techniques to document global movements like Occupy, the Arab Spring, Fees Must Fall, and the Black Lives Matter movement during the Ferguson uprising in 2014.

But today it is not only Palestinians who document their genocide in real time. For months, Israeli soldiers have 

 their atrocities. There are the group selfies of soldiers huddling, smiling in the foreground of the smoldering remains of apartment buildings and neighborhoods. Male Israeli soldiers fondling the underwear and nightwear of Palestinian women. A soldier in a tank 

 about running over a Palestinian man. Israeli soldiers beating, degrading, belittling Palestinians on camera, as if to showcase their hatred as well as their imperviousness to human rights, international law, or the rules of warfare. Israel has made a mockery of all of it, as settlers build illegal housing units 

 at record pace, murdering Palestinians in the process and arresting thousands to be held in indefinite detention. In doing so, it has betrayed the fake piety of U.S. officials who defend Israel’s every action while deflecting queries about a cease-fire or humanitarian aid for Palestinians. That these bureaucrats feel obliged to explain this particular foreign policy is because of the mass movement and Palestinians who, from a tiny strip, occupy the center of its moral universe.

The longevity of the Palestinian movement in Gaza and beyond allowed a core of activists to immediately jolt into action after Israel began to strike Gaza. Student activism organized around the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign has been a staple of the Palestinian solidarity movement for years. Now there are almost 100 new 

 chapters. The political atmosphere is still charged by a decade of Black Lives Matter activism and just three years removed from the paroxysmal marches in the summer of 2020. Solidarity activism replaced the political ennui brought about by an adrift Biden administration.

Even as young Jews and many of their parents have rejected Israel’s war, Israel’s propaganda machine has denounced the movement as antisemitic. Those accusations have created an academic year like no other, with student activists taking courageous action week to week, while being 

 by paranoid college administrators. The punishment of Palestinian solidarity and activism can’t be attributed only to “Islamophobia.” In the U.S., Zionists and conservatives attack the language of decolonization along with Palestinian demands for self-determination, as captured in the old slogan “From the river to the sea,” as antisemitism. (The far-right Likud party used a version of that slogan in its original platform.) They seek to marginalize and ban Palestinian solidarity on college campuses. Here, the work of the right, liberal college administrators, and the donor class converge. There is little doubt that antisemitism is on the rise. But its ascendance must be understood alongside the simultaneous growth of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia that Israel’s ruthless assault on Gaza has encouraged, and fear of the loss of a significant portion of young Jews for the Zionist project.

Today, the reputation of the United Nations is in tatters because of both Israel’s relentless criticism of the organization and America’s ability to unilaterally undo the sentiment of a body that claims to represent the international community. Of course, the U.S. has always used or ignored the UN for its own purposes, but never under a spotlight this searing. Consider how the U.S. relied upon the UN to launch its illegal war in Iraq after the specious claim that the country harbored weapons of mass destruction. As the world longs for a cease-fire, we all watch in astonishment as U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield erases the will of the world with a mere wave of her hand.

What will become of international law as Israel continues to flout every postwar convention intended to constitute a new global order based on human rights in the aftermath of the Holocaust? All were intended to prevent exactly the kinds of atrocities that Israel is carrying out in Gaza. Of course, we have never enjoyed such a global peace. The global north instrumentalized these legal frameworks to police and control the global south. But now the emperor has no clothes — the hypocrisy of Israel’s barbarism, bankrolled by the United States, has been exposed before a global audience not just on the internet but in the Hague itself, the embodiment of the supposed sacrosanctity of international law.

Israel is a state forged in the aftermath of the traumatic experience of the Holocaust. But it has long weaponized this trauma and displaced it from Europe onto Arabs. In this siege, Israel is not satisfied with only territorial conquest and the defeat of its enemies; its military and state leaders also seek to torture, humiliate, and revel in the murder of Palestinians and the ruin of Palestinian society. Despite the gruesome suffering of Gazans, in a 

 of Israeli Jews that asked “to what extent should Israel take into consideration the suffering of the civilian population of Gaza when planning the continuation of the fighting there,” over 80 percent said a very small or fairly small extent. Nearly 75 percent of Israeli Jews supported the invasion of Rafah in a 

. Israel projects its own violence and hatred onto Palestinians in an orgy of racism, mass murder, and wanton destruction, while Western states, led by the United States, claim to be powerless to stop this madness.

But even amid a powerful backlash that conflates demands for a cease-fire and support of Hamas’s attacks, the power of Palestinians has propelled a global antiwar movement and in turn made the Western world finally see them and their righteous demands for freedom as legitimate — even urgent. No one in any country that has been colonized or invaded or occupied by Western imperialism needs to be told about either the atrocities or the hypocrisies of the world’s greatest democracies. Vietnam, India, Congo, Namibia, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Belfast, and beyond do not need to be reminded of the compromised freedom of imperial democracy. Their own colonial and imperial histories, and their legacies of resistance, are being remembered by and for a new generation.

In the United States, disapproval of Biden’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to rise — now among 79 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of Democrats. 

, a stunning 67 percent of Americans support “calling for a permanent cease-fire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza,” including 56 percent of Republicans. This may not translate into immediate support for Palestinian freedom, but Palestinian liberation is being seen in the new light of day.

This is the challenge for the left now, the one we are all focused on and the one we must think most sharply about. We are living through a revival of internationalism and another extended moment of mass protest. Even as we tire in the face of exhausting odds, a hulking imperial ship that refuses to acknowledge our power as it trembles, we must persist. A victory against the systems that oppress Palestinians is a victory against the systems that oppress us all. We hope this special edition of Hammer & Hope on Palestine provides some measure of the history, politics, and solidarity needed to support any liberation movement in its quest for freedom.

Anti-Arab Racism and the U.S. and Israeli War Machines

his summer, the earth raged. Fires in Maui and Canada, floods in Delhi and Beijing, heat everywhere — this is the beginning of the climate impacts scientists have long predicted, and the U.S. is unprepared in terms of everything from 

 to public health. And if I’m honest, I raged, too. Never in my life have I wished more to be a cyclone, blowing away everything in my path, or an earthquake, shaking everyone to their core until they take seriously the concerns of Black and Indigenous frontline communities.

August marked a year since the Inflation Reduction Act passed, arguably the most significant climate legislation in U.S. history. But the racist compromises and the marginalization of Black people and their demands that facilitated the bill’s passage have seeped into the climate movement, sowing division and narrowing discourse in ways that not only threaten to keep Black people at the bottom of a new green economy but also undermine efforts to address thornier issues, such as who owns energy resources or how to navigate conflicts about resource distribution and land use, questions that money alone cannot answer.

t’s true that the IRA has sparked the largest investments in clean energy and manufacturing that the U.S. has ever seen. In fact, along with investments from the CHIPS Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, two climate-adjacent bills passed around the same time, the federal government is funneling so much money into the development of clean and renewable energy — at least $515 billion in public investment from the IRA alone — that 

 is expected to come from renewable sources by 2024 (

up more than 10 percent from a decade ago

), and over half of all electricity could come from solar and wind by 2030. More than 170,000 green jobs have also been created in the wake of the IRA, a majority of them in red states, some of which, like Texas and Georgia, have the largest and 

 to be happy about that. By “derisking” clean technology through public subsidies and other forms of industrial policy, the IRA is succeeding, at least in its mission to spur private investment in clean energy and low-carbon goods. And after 40 years of exclusively neoliberal economic policy, that is something to celebrate. But the transition to clean energy, like every other economic transition, is inherently distributive and redistributive — especially in a capitalist society — and this time, we need Black people to significantly benefit. Yet, with the exception of a few targeted policies, the IRA and the debates that have emerged since its passage suggest that the U.S. is again (at this big age!) relying on white supremacy to decide how to allocate the power and resources that come from going green.

Since last August, commitments to climate and racial justice — legion in the wake of the 2020 uprisings — have disintegrated rapidly, leaving Black people at risk of being left behind and locked out of the clean energy economies spurred by the IRA. The shift arguably began with the deal Senate Democrats brokered among themselves to pass the law, which included several concessions that deeply and directly harm frontline communities. For instance, the IRA required the federal government to reopen public waters in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas lease sales, although the Biden administration had previously canceled the sales after court challenges from environmental and community groups. So far developers have bought only a fraction (3.3 million acres) of the reopened sites, but their successful development will almost certainly increase pollution in neighboring Black communities, which house the oil refineries and gas and petrochemical facilities that will process the oil and gas fossil fuels extracted from these sites. Worse still, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the federal agency responsible for carrying out offshore lease sales, 

, both in its analysis preceding the sale, arguing that “these low-income and minority communities are located onshore and distant from … oil- and gas-related activities” and thus did not merit consideration in the agency’s decisions about the sale.

The Senate deal also led to federal approval of the 

, which, like the lease sales in the Gulf, had been blocked after environmental groups presented evidence of the negative effects the pipeline’s construction and operation would have on water quality and local air pollution and argued that the project bypassed environmental protection regulations. Like most fossil fuel infrastructure, the pipeline and related facilities would run through poor Black, white, and Indigenous communities in West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina, some of which already have 

because of existing fossil fuel facilities. Furthermore, while the owners of the pipeline are 

 their property, those who live in poor communities 

 the pipeline and its stations will not be compensated for decreased property values or anticipated health risks that may result from the pipeline’s operation.

Many white climate experts and advocates argued that while these concessions were unfortunate — unjust, even — they were costs worth paying to pass the nation’s first major climate bill. Others argued that the compromises reflected nothing more than the outsize influence of Senator Joe Manchin and his fossil fuel allies, which would lessen once the IRA made clean energy industries bigger and more politically powerful. But even some of the IRA’s flagship policies seemed to be designed almost exclusively to serve the needs and interests of middle-class white people and also to pave the way for clean energy systems that continue to deeply marginalize Black people.

The IRA includes a slate of tax credits for individual consumers to install heat pumps, buy electric vehicles, switch from a gas stove to an electric stove — basically to electrify their homes and vehicles in order to reduce emissions. But the IRA’s tax credits are nonrefundable, making them nearly useless for the 

 that do not earn enough to have tax liability, many of which are Black. IRA tax credits also require users not only to have the money to cover upfront costs but also the ability to wait months for reimbursement, as with all previous energy tax credits — which have been overwhelmingly used by white people even compared with people of color at the same income levels.

The IRA tax credits also prioritize homeowners, a class that is 

, who are much more likely to be young, Black or Latino, or poor. The credits don’t attempt to address the split incentives that exist between renters and landlords: While renters are more likely to want to switch to renewable energy because they usually pay the utility bills, landlords bear the costs of electrification without benefiting from the savings that result, making them far less likely to invest in the relevant upgrades. Nor does the IRA address the fact that climate investment increases home values and thus property taxes for low-income homeowners, which risks unintentionally pricing them out of their homes, 

t is easy to understand why the IRA and the negotiations surrounding it were shot through with racism. White supremacy is incentivized at every level of our policy-making processes — from deciding whom a policy should target and shaping how it is designed to deciding how (and to whom) to market the policy. If I step back and squint (and try to forget that I’m Black), even I can understand how racism can seem — emphasis on 

 — reasonable in light of the conditions we face. But just because something is logical doesn’t mean it’s free — or smart.

For a policy to be effective in the long run, it must be about people. Imagine the impact of a clean energy development whose tax benefits went back into the community to help fund schools or build libraries, or a solar panel factory that’s required to provide child care and elder care for workers and their families. We need to give people concrete experiences of climate policy materially benefiting their lives: better-paying jobs, lower energy bills, new business opportunities, fewer utility shutdowns, and 

. Lower greenhouse gas emissions will mean fewer extreme weather events, fewer boiling summers, and less illness, but that will take time. And even then, most people will not experience the benefits of lower greenhouse gas emissions as viscerally as a transition that helps them to feed their families or take care of themselves. Blame it on capitalism or individualism or consumerism — it doesn’t really matter; we need those sorts of direct experiences for people to care about climate policy when 

. Most days, for most people (including me), life is just too hard to worry about what’s not feeding, fucking, or relying on you.

But for climate policy to be successful long-term, it has to serve Black people too, perhaps most of all. Especially in this fragile moment, right at the start of the domestic energy transition, the experience of having a 

 pipeline built through your community without consultation, or a 

 cratering sacred tribal land without consent, or new petrochemical facilities being allowed in 

 because they have carbon capture and storage with the emissions, or a 

 being rammed through a rural community that feels like it had no say, or a 

 to build a transmission line without any effort to find a different path, or a new incinerator being greenlit in an already polluted neighborhood without any consultation because it has solar panels — experiences of being silenced and dispossessed — could quickly halt the progress of a green transition, especially with the right wing hungry for followers and fossil fuels waiting in the wings.

These are real possibilities — in some cases, real stories. But they come with mounting, potentially unsurvivable costs, even if we rarely discuss them that way.

onsider the discussion that surrounds “permitting reform,” a 

 for efforts to streamline siting and permitting processes to help speed the development of renewable energy projects and modernize the electric grid. Permitting reform has emerged as a focus of Washington policy makers, many of whom worry that the U.S. lacks the regulatory regime and administrative capacity to support the rapid buildout of clean energy funded by the IRA. But the discussion has been dominated by the purported evils of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), one of the 

 Black communities can use to oppose toxic polluting infrastructure; almost all proposals to weaken it would remove or constrain the avenues the law provides for democratic participation in building infrastructure. Gutting NEPA has 

 for fossil fuel lobbyists, but since the passage of the IRA, it has also been 

 by “supply-side liberals” and members of the climate movement’s 

Thankfully, only the most toothless of the proposed NEPA reforms made it into the debt ceiling deal passed in June. But the fight over permitting reform reflects a trend of pushing aside what Black communities have said they want out of IRA implementation and the energy transition, often in favor of advancing clean energy technologies preferred by fossil fuel industries. Many frontline communities have expressed a fervent desire to prioritize renewable energy when it comes to clean energy development in their neighborhoods — especially community solar, microgrids, and distributed energy resources (like rooftop solar). But while several programs in the IRA do provide funding to support these types of projects, recent federal decisions have also begun to push projects into frontline communities that employ technologies such as 

 that could be used to prop up fossil fuels.

For example, the Biden administration has 

 to funding two hubs for direct air capture — a form of carbon removal — in or near frontline communities in Kleberg County, Tex., and Calcasieu Parish, La. This is in spite of vocal 

 from residents who worry that the technology could be used to justify the continued operation of at least 12 existing petrochemical facilities. Residents’ concerns are justified: The CEO of Occidental Petroleum, the company building the Texas hub, has already 

 that she sees direct air capture technology as a lifeline to “preserve our industry over time.” Nor would the technology remove any of the particulate matter or other pollutants that harm residents most.

The debates about climate policy since the passage of the IRA have been marked by dynamics that make these occurrences more likely — particularly an effort to once again define the climate crisis as a matter of energy policy, separate from concerns about the environment and unconnected to efforts to build a more just society. In fact, many of the loudest advocates for “cutting red tape,” who are almost exclusively white men, argue that demands for a just transition are incompatible with the demands of decarbonization or simply that they do not understand how to “

” address environmental justice concerns.

As a result, policy proposals that aim to balance efforts to decarbonize with the needs of Black communities are increasingly dismissed as ancillary, 

, or, worse, “unserious.” More dangerously, after it seemed like people started to understand how white supremacy, the fossil fuel industry, and the climate crisis are linked, environmental and racial justice are being sidelined as separate, secondary issues instead of principles that should guide decisions about how to structure the green transition. But there are simply not enough 

 in the world to prevent Black people from being left behind in an energy and economic transition that does not intentionally consider justice at every turn — not in this country, not with our history, and not with these systems.

I will never agree that white supremacy is a legitimate response to the demands of the climate crisis. Not just because I refuse to assent to my own oppression but because I do not believe that finding ways to legally 

 as many Black people as possible between us and a boiling planet is, or will ever be, a viable climate solution. But I understand the temptation. Truly.

he climate crisis is one of the biggest and most complex problems that the world has ever faced. If you slice open even one of the issues, 10 more problems fall out. Permitting reform alone touches issues with the transmission of electric power and, by extension, the design of our electric grids and energy markets; interconnection queues; cumulative impacts and fossil fuel development; environmental review; permitting and siting for energy projects at the local, state, and federal levels; labor; democratic participation; coalition building; disinformation and growing opposition to renewables among both elected officials and everyday people; utilities and their frequent opposition to clean energy development — and that’s just a start.

Addressing the climate crisis requires us to build out unprecedented levels of clean and renewable energy, much of it within the next decade; stop using fossil fuels, even though our societies and economies remain painfully dependent on them; broker new diplomatic relationships and operate with untold levels of global cooperation; and, at least in the U.S., do all of this while developing and defending a new regime of industrial policy — all while fending off climate disasters, a rabid GOP, rising white nationalism, and a democracy that seems to become more dysfunctional by the minute. It’s an absolute shitshow, through and through.

But as the U.S. begins to implement the country’s first real climate law, we are also creating the frameworks we will use to address the climate crisis for the foreseeable future. Baking white supremacy into these new frameworks, even if just to make designing and passing climate policy easier, will undermine the long-term success of the energy transition.

Hammer&Hope

No. 5

Fall 2024

No. 4

Summer 2024

No. 3

Spring 2024

No. 2

Summer 2023

No. 1

Winter 2023

SUPPORT
OUR WORK

PLEASE
DONATE

FREE
TO READ

SIGN UP
TODAY