Stanford University Press Blog

Andrew Young, Marc Lamont Hill, and Palestine

How the resignation of a Carter era ambassador still echoes today.

By Michael R. Fischbach, Ph.D.

Atlanta 1979, Martin Luther King Sr., Rosalynn Carter, Andrew Young, Coretta Scott King, Jimmy Carter, and 2 unidentified men holding hands at a service at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

When noted black intellectual Marc Lamont Hill spoke at the UN last month about justice for the Palestinian people, critics were quick to condemn him. They said his call for justice “from the river to the sea” implied support for the so-called one state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which his detractors claimed was an anti-Semitic and even genocidal notion that really meant the destruction of Israel. Just one day after Hill made his comments, CNN fired him from his post as a commentator on the network. Hill quickly tweeted, “My reference to ‘river to the sea’ was not a call to destroy anything or anyone. It was a call for justice, both in Israel and in the West Bank/Gaza.” Yet both the president and chair of the board of trustees of Temple University, where Hill teaches, nonetheless denounced him and his “hate speech.” In what may have been a racial Freudian slip, board chair Patrick O’Connor even said that Hill had “blackened” Temple’s reputation. Civil libertarians were quick to defend Hill’s right to free speech, and supporters of the Palestinians groused about yet another public figure silenced for evidencing sympathy with the Palestinians. Yet some of the most insightful criticisms of the way Hill was treated pointed out the controversy’s racial context: Hill’s was just the most recent case in a long history of blacks being publicly excoriated for “daring” to speak out on the great issues of the day in ways that defy white conventions. This was particularly true when discussing the Arab-Israeli conflict in a manner that evidences criticism of Israel. This has happened before. Indeed, next year, 2019, marks the fortieth anniversary of a similar brouhaha that erupted when another black man very much in the public eye did so: the Andrew Young Affair.

How to Get Away with Murder

David Kishik, author of The Book of Shem, on Cain, Abel, and the origin of violence.

DAVID KISHIK 

Cain and Abel as depicted in the Speculum Humanae Salvationis, Northwest Germany, c. 1360 by Anonymous. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

The story of Cain and Abel is a rusty old needle that can still burst our cozy bubble. To stand “east of Eden” is to sense that the good is only a temporary deferral of evil and that fleeing happiness is so much more entrenched than its pursuit.

Contrary to what is commonly believed, Cain is not the first human to cut a life short. It is his younger brother, Abel the shepherd, who initiates the cycle of violence by slaughtering the best of his flock as an offering to a bloodthirsty God. The average reader of Genesis prefers to gloss over the fact that sacrificing nonhuman animals is an act of killing. After the Flood, Genesis will even present a convenient justification for eating their flesh.