The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations has refused to ask for a ceasefire in Gaza to save lives, after more than 12,000 civilians have died, and half are children.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has refused to ask for a ceasefire in Gaza to save lives, after more than 12,000 civilians have died, and half are children. Thomas-Greenfield’s policy statements suggest Israelis are deserving of human rights, while Palestinians are not.
In 2015, Thomas-Greenfield received the Bishop John T. Walker Distinguished Humanitarian Service Award, and yet her current presence at the UN has not exhibited any humanitarian urgency for Gaza, which her own colleagues at the UN are calling a humanitarian disaster, and genocide.
She forgets that her own ancestry mirrors the Palestinians, not the Israelis. She is representing the interests of the masters, while denying the oppressed people’s rights.
Thomas-Greenfield is the great granddaughter of Mary Francoise, who was born in 1865 in Louisiana. Mary was born after the civil war ended, but she was not born into freedom; her mother had been a slave, and even though the war ended, it would be decades before any African Americans were given their rights.
Mary Francoise might as well have been born in the Occupied West Bank, or Gaza. Her life and the lives of Palestinians today have a great deal in common. She lived in a land where the colonial government in Washington, DC. had two separate codes of justice and human rights. The White European settlers came to Virginia in 1607 and shortly were bringing thousands of enslaved Africans. The Native Americans were deprived of all human rights, and many were kept as slaves.
Mary’s son, Oliver Thomas, and his son, Oliver Thomas, Jr. were born ‘free’ in America, but had no right to vote, to live where they chose, to sit anywhere on the bus, except in the back, to eat in a restaurant with White people, to use a public bathroom used by White people, and no right to a decent education alongside White classmates. Thomas-Greenfield’s parents were illiterate, and she was the first in her family to graduate from high school.
Palestinians are not allowed to own land in Israel, and much of the land they live on in the West Bank has been bulldozed to make way of illegal Jewish settlements for decades. Building permits in East Jerusalem are denied to Palestinians. The people who live in Gaza today are the original inhabitants of other areas, and were forced to be segregated into a ghetto called Gaza.
Thomas-Greenfield attended an all-Black high school in Baker, East Baton Rouge County, Louisiana. In 1960, the total population of Baker was 4,823 persons, and by 2020 the population is 82% African American, the descendants of slaves, with 12% living at or below the poverty line.
She grew up in segregated Louisiana, where by law and tradition White students and Black students never sat together. When desegregation finally came to Louisiana in 1960, only four Black girls attempted to go to a White school and violence ensued by White parents.
In 2021, Tammy C. Barnett wrote that Louisiana’s history of racism is historical, and present. Barnett cites the definition: “Racism is the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another.” By this definition, we can see that the Israeli policy toward all Palestinians is racist.
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