To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian

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 t