Five years ago, chants of “Black Lives Matter” rang out in the streets, and elite institutions underwent a racial reckoning. The unrest was centered on a distinctly American story, in which descendants of slaves played a central part. The New York Times had just published “The 1619 Project,” led by Nikole Hannah-Jones, which presented the legacy of slavery as the essential fact of American life. Ta-Nehisi Coates had done the same several years before in an Atlantic cover story making the case for reparations.
“Activist energy and elite attention have shifted to another group.”
Now, activist energy and elite attention have shifted to another group: Palestinians have displaced American descendants of slavery as the focus of progressive politics. This change cannot be explained by a decline in police killings, the issue that touched off Black Lives Matter, since those killings have only increased since 2020.
It instead reflects the fact that progressive politics is increasingly defined by the wave of immigration that ensued upon the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The left is increasingly populated by post-’65 Americans—figures like Zohran Mamdani, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. Their roots in America do not go back to 1619, and they cannot learn about their ancestors by reading James McPherson and Eugene Genovese. To the extent that progressive politics focuses on the history of slavery, it puts them on the sidelines.
If, however, progressive politics is best understood as a global anti-colonial struggle, then every descendant of non-white immigrants has a part in it. People who can trace their lineage back to the first slave ship have no special standing. There is no Mayflower Society of the oppressed. Special efforts to advocate for American descendants of slavery (ADOS) are xenophobic and nativist.
In 2013, the American Community Survey made headlines when it found that nearly one-quarter of children in America had at least one immigrant parent. Many of those children have since entered the electorate, and “Free Palestine” is the rallying cry of their progressive wing. Their movement is not just about the Levant. It is also about the United States. On the day after October 7, I attended the first pro-Palestine protest in New York City. One of the most prominent chants was, “From Palestine to Mexico, all the walls have got to go.”
Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign is the first expression of post-BLM progressive politics. Mamdani, who was born abroad to South Asian parents, enjoys high support from Asian Americans and weak support from blacks. Only 41 percent of black New Yorkers prefer Mamdani, compared to 49 percent of Hispanics and 69 percent of those who are neither black, Hispanic, nor white. As The New York Times noted, Mamdani’s ability to win the Democratic primary while losing blacks “marked a shift in the city’s political landscape.” One activist described this shift as a form of “erasure.”
Hoping to overcome this divide, Mamdani has hired Afua Atta-Mensah, a Ghanaian-American, to conduct outreach to black New Yorkers. He also spoke at Greater Allen AME Church, where he was received with “audible whispers and groans.” The unenthusiastic response reflects a cultural divide, as well as disagreements over policy.
In the intellectual sphere, the leading lights of BLM have sought to connect their concerns with the new focus of progressive politics. In his most recent book, The Message, Ta Nehisi-Coates admits the very American focus of his BLM-era writing: “My work was as local as it was lauded.” He also remarks that “the summer of 2020 now feels like distant history.” In accord with the migration of progressive attention, he travels to Palestine. When he returns to America, he enjoys some Middle Eastern food with members of an immigrant community. It gives him a reassuring “feeling of coming back to a home, even though it was not my own.”
The New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, who won a Pulitzer for her work on the 1619 Project, has navigated the same dynamic less successfully. Responding to calls for Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 campaign, Hannah-Jones warned that black Americans felt they were “being undermined by non-black people in the Democratic Party.” When she was accused of overlooking Biden’s complicity in genocide, she pointed out that she speaks of Gaza frequently. This is true. Nonetheless, the exchange showed that a person who once had been accorded unquestioned moral authority was suddenly at risk of being seen as a bad ally for a more central victim class.
There are longstanding ties between black American activists and Palestinians. But when these ties were formed, both groups were central to the perceived liberation struggles in their countries. Today, something different is occurring. Black Americans are being displaced as the protagonists of liberation in the United States. In an important review of Between the World and Me, R. R. Reno noted that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s work can be understood as an attempt to resist “absorption into a multicultural world where being black isn’t so special anymore.” Coates’s journey to Palestine is an admission that this effort has failed.
What has emerged in its place is a global campaign against colonialism. Normally, decolonization is understood as a struggle against more recent arrivals by those with longer local ancestry. In America, though, it has something like the opposite meaning. It is the project whereby recent immigrants and their children assert moral priority over those whose ancestors have been here for centuries. It is directed primarily against white Americans, but its effects will be felt by everyone with deeper roots in the country.