Afriphobia in a Zionist and Antisemitic Feminist Context

Abstract

My response to the important intervention made by Nira Yuval-Davis (1984) in her 1984 Spare Rib article ‘Zionism, antisemitism and the struggle against racism: some reflections on a current painful debate among feminists’ is to work with a similar framework, notwithstanding a different lens, primarily grounded in a concern coined in recent years as ‘Afriphobia’ (The Ligali Organisation, 2016). Afriphobia has been recognised since the UN World Conference Against Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in South Africa in 2001, and, in its simplest form, could—not unlike antisemitism in relation to European Jews—be described as ‘the fear of People and things Afrikan’ (Sampong, 2015).2 It has affected and continues to affect the lives of Black, Caribbean and Mixed-race people, People of Colour and/or Jews of Colour in the UK.