To Exist as a Problem

In the first pages of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois meditates on the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?”

In this profound response to that question, Zahi Zalloua endeavours to think through the shared Black and Palestinian experience of being racialized as a problem. Zalloua argues that today’s anti-Blackness is not a lingering feature of a regrettable past that only occasionally manifests its ugly face. Rather, anti-Blackness permeates white civil society. Black being stands for the anti-human, its being is barred and degraded. And while Black being denotes criminality, Palestinian being denotes terrorism – a problematic being produced by Orientalism and used to legitimize oppression. Both the Black and Palestinian are framed as existential threats that undermine the very structures of white and Zionist dominance.

To Exist as a Problem provides a searing critique of such assumptions, arguing that Blacks and Palestinians do exist as a problem, but a different problem than the one dictated by the petrifying white and settler gaze. They exist as a threat because the mechanisms of structural racism make them so. In order for racism to thrive, they must be othered in the profoundest sense. In asking how a politics can be constructed in the face of this hegemony, Zalloua constructs a model of solidarity that places Black lives and Palestinian liberation at the forefront of the anti-racist struggle.