The Blatant Hypocrisy of the Congressional Black Caucus’s Out of Bounds Boycott

The new initiative enlists Black college students and athletes to face down Jim Crow rule in the South, while the group remains silent on boycotts targeting Israel’s apartheid rule.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries and members of the Congressional Black Caucus at a May press conference denouncing the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais .

(J. Scott Applewhite / AP Photo)

During a May press conference on Capitol Hill, members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) stood in solidarity with NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson to launch the Out of Bounds campaign . The initiative is a boycott targeting state-funded universities in eight Southern states that seek to dilute Black political representation through racial gerrymandering.

The boycott call followed the Supreme Court’s ruling in Callais v. Louisiana , which gave conservative state legislators legal cover to redraw congressional maps that eliminate Black-majority districts. “I want to thank all of the members of the CBC for standing on integrity,” Johnson said . “In this moment, when Black representation is under attack, it is important for the CBC to keep in their tradition of being the moral conscience of Congress and the moral conscience of this country.”

“No one Black should be on a playing field of institutions that’s living off of our labor and yet in states that are seeking to reinstitute a sharecropping reality,” Johnson continued. “We will not tolerate a Confederate mentality on our labor, on our ability to contribute, and our ability to have representation.”

The campaign urges Black athletes, families, alumni, and fans to withhold athletic and financial support from universities in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas—all states that have already redrawn majority-Black districts in the wake of Callais . Organizers of the boycott say it will continue until states adopt a Voting Rights Act, repeal maps that dilute Black voting power, and restore congressional or judicial districts that reflect their Black population and its voting strength.

But the campaign draws renewed attention to a glaring contradiction that continues to damage the moral standing of the CBC in challenging the renewed rule of apartheid in American politics: its passive support for the apartheid state of Israel. Israel’s US lobbying arm, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has helped finance Republican lawmakers hostile to Black voting power even as it has contributed to the campaign coffers of CBC leaders. Since January 2024, AIPAC has contributed at least $5,788,171 to 75 of the 80 Republican House representatives across the eight states the Out of Bounds campaign targets. Within that same timeframe, AIPAC also dispersed at least $265,355 to 13 of the 18 CBC House members representing those same Southern states. AIPAC’s expenditures are bipartisan, conditioned on the recipient’s proven fealty to AIPAC’s Israel-first agenda.

The Out of Bounds campaign is properly targeting the baleful impact of the Callais ruling on racial representation in the South—but the CBC is conspicuously silent on the long-standing boycott, divest, and sanctions (BDS) campaign that targets the displacement and disfranchisement of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. While the organization has not issued any formal statement addressing the BDS movement, its high-ranking members have left a compendium of words denouncing the BDS movement as an illegitimate form of political opposition.

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“What is beyond the pale is BDS—is the attempt to delegitimize Israel. That’s extremism. That’s hate. And we as a Democratic Party should be against hatred and extremism,” said Democratic Representative Richie Torres (NY-15), in a 2020 interview. In 2024, Torres expressed his devotion to Israel’s imperial enterprise, telling an audience, “I am a Zionist. Always have been and always will be.”

Torres’s CBC colleague, Representative Hakeem Jeffries (NY-05), the first Black leader of either major political party in Congress, cosponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, a 2017 bill that would criminalize support for, or furnishing information about, boycotts that target Israel. Jeffries has abided by AIPAC’s agenda, refusing to condition aid to Israel’s military—even as the apartheid state wages genocidal war on Palestinians. After AIPAC spent millions to defeat Jeffries’s CBC contemporaries during the 2024 election cycle, Jeffries offered an impassive response: “The voters have spoken.” In 2025, Jeffries refused to join the Reject AIPAC Coalition, an alliance of Democrats and grassroots organizations aiming to protect Democrats targeted by AIPAC. “I’m going to continue to raise money in the way I’ve been raising money since my arrival in the United States Congress,” Jeffries said .

Swearing off AIPAC support within the caucus would be a critical first step toward addressing this moral imbalance. If Out of Boun…