When I first learned that a girls’ elementary school in Iran was bombed on the first day of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, the grief was heavy and familiar. It’s the same grief that comes with living in a context of state violence as a Black person in the United States. It shows up in police brutality, in disproportionately poor health outcomes, and in economic instability. Initially, I questioned whether drawing a connection from my life in the United States to the life of a schoolgirl killed by a bomb in Iran was sensible. Still, I know that the struggle for liberation exists outside of U.S. borders. As a Black American woman, I care about the conflict in Iran because liberation exists in a global context. This war doesn’t just take resources directly from our pockets. It also threatens the lives of Black and Brown people across the globe, and we can’t afford to separate domestic and international issues.
Since February, the United States and Israel have carried out sustained airstrikes on Iran, prompting retaliation across the region. By the time the U.S. and Iran struck a two-week ceasefire deal, the Human Rights Activist News Agency had counted at least 1,700 civilian deaths, with at least 200 of them being children. The true number of civilian deaths may be higher. The war has also disrupted global oil supply, increased energy costs, and those ripple effects have seeped into American households.
Even as these consequences show up at our front doors, foreign policy seems distant from our daily lives. A 2023 survey from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace shows that foreign policy is not a top concern for Black Americans when it’s time to vote in national elections. Instead, we care more about domestic issues, like the economy, jobs, racial discrimination and healthcare. In other words, “Black people have our own issues at home.”
Jalessah Jackson, the founder of the Decolonial Feminist Collective, said separating domestic and foreign affairs is a privilege that comes with living in a global superpower like the U.S., but it’s a false separation. “It’s important to think about [the] US empire and imperialism abroad as being inseparable from anti-Blackness at home,” Jackson said. “When we think about the US expanding its war making power, it is strengthening the very institutions that manage and repress Black life here … what’s real is that war drains resources from care, and Black communities pay the cost for that.”
The conditions Iranians live under at the hands of U.S. military action should hit home for Black Americans, since our conditions are also those of an oppressed class. Like Black Americans, Afro-Iranians often live at the economic and social margins of society. When I asked Priscillia Kounkou-Hoveyda, the founder of the Collective for Black Iranians, about the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school on the first day of the war, she told me the island where it sits, Minab, holds a high population of Afro-Iranians. While there is no official data on the number of Black people who live in Iran, it’s clear that Black people in the country may be disproportionately impacted by the bombs sent by Israel and the United States. Yet, Iran is talked about like a monolith, Hoveyda said, with Black Iranians hardly spotlighted.
“I think that expression of solidarity should not be towards the Islamic Republic, but towards the Iranian people,” Hoveyda said. “More specifically, when it comes to Black folks from the Black diasporas of the world, expression of solidarity with Black Iranian people. That’s definitely not with the ruling elites, not with … the government of Iran.”
One of the most eye-opening parts of my conversation with Hoveyda was when she described navigating life as a Black Iranian. She didn’t learn that the country’s Black population stems from the centuries-long Indian Ocean slave trade in school. It was hard for her to even learn that she is of African descent because of Iran’s culture of refusing to discuss race. In fact, she’s been advised not to go back to Iran because of her work for the Collective, which empowers Afro-Iranians to share stories and embrace their Blackness — it’s deemed as separationist.
The erasure of Afro-Iranians feels similar to the discussions of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, that have mounted in the United States. Anti-DEI sentiments in the United States have played a role in an unemployment crisis among Black people that threatens our economic mobility. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the Black unemployment rate skyrocketed to 7.4% in the first quarter of the year, well above the national average of 4.4%. The economic consequences of war further compound the existing conditions that arise with job loss and rising costs.
When the war started in February, one of Iran’s first responses to U.S. and Israeli airstrikes was to close the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway for global oil shipments. Consumers felt the domino effect on the global oil supply immediately when the national gas price hit $4 per gallon. That impact, predictably so, is not evenly distributed.
The National Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a think tank that analyzes tax policies, found the South has been hit the hardest by rising gas prices, where a little more than half of the country’s Black population lives. It also found that Alabama and Mississippi, home to some of the highest concentrations of Black people in the nation, are among the most impacted states.
And that’s just personal economics.
In early April, President Donald Trump said the United States can’t afford to pay for “small things” like daycare, Medicaid and Medicare since we’re “fighting wars.” He’s right that war spending has been extremely high, but I reject the notion that our country can’t pay for basic necessities. They just aren’t prioritized by our government. The U.S. Department of Defense last month reportedly told Congress that it had spent $11.6 billion in the first six days of the war. If spending patterns continue in this direction, the nation will have spent $476.6 billion on this war by the end of this year. In comparison, Penn University experts estimated in 2022 that it would take $351 billion over the span of a decade to build a universal pre-kindergarten program for three and four-year-olds.
When it comes to military budgets, the United States spends more money on its military than other developed nations like the United Kingdom, Canada, or China combined. Dr. John Thabiti Willis, who heads Grinnell University’s African American Studies, posed an important question.
“What happens if all that money is used to make sure we have free education, free health care, and gainfully employed?” he asked. “We’d be living like the Scandinavian countries … well taken care of by the state.
“But that’s not it [because] I think at the end of the day, the state treats us like we are still just labor there to be deployed as the state … deems appropriate,” he continued.
With all of this in mind, I call on Black Americans to develop a politic of global solidarity that takes into account the important political education we weren’t taught in our own education. It’s imperative that we push past our urge to focus on four-year election cycles, which keep us focused on our own living conditions in the United States.
We have to keep our eyes on the long-term prize: freedom for Black people across the globe.