All good men despise him, but the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, peerless master of demagoguery’s magic arts, has already defeated them. And they do not know it. A week ago Sunda ABC’s Sam Donaldson asked the cleric about President Clinton’s reluctance to endorse the Nation of Islam-sponsored “Million Man March.” But the purpose of his march is to “organize black men” for self-improvement, community development, job creation, and crime reduction, Farrakhan responded, all crinkly smile and soft voice of wounded innocence. “What intelligent person wouldn’t want to embrace that kind of idea?”
He has a point. It’s hard to find such an intelligent person just now. Thank you, Minister Farrakhan. Roll credits.
The rhetoric of embarrassment that governs American race relations has already made its half-hearted, half-witted accommodation to Farrakhan’s latest, and so far greatest, provocation. The dupes and fanatics who yoke themselves in his Nation’s bow-tie uniform will be a small fraction of the massed crowd on the Mall. For almost all the rest of us, left and right, black and white, the consensus judgment on the march is this: message good, messenger — in varying degrees — bad. All we are allowed to disagree about is whether and how thoroughly the latter damages the former. Farrakhan is, after all, the nation’s leading anti-Semite. Does it matter?
Sure, it matters. Opponents of the march have the better of this oddly muted debate. There would be no “million men” without Farrakhan, and there would be no Farrakhan without anti-Semitism. At his first Lincoln Memorial appearance, during the August 1983 March on Washington II, Farrakhan departed from his long-established, sordid script to offer unmodulated praise of Martin Luther King, Jr. and to decry “these artificial barriers that divide us as a people” into opposed creeds and races. He was warmly received by the audience. But he was completely ignored by the media.
It was not until the following year that Farrakhan became famous, as an unignorable surrogate speaker in Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign. You remember: He called Judaism a “gutter religion” and issued death threats against Washington Post reporter Milton Coleman, who had dared to report Rev. Jackson’s “Hymietown” remark, and New York City Clerk David Dinkins, who had dared to criticize him. We would never have heard of Farrakhan otherwise. And deprived of that negative celebrity, won by violating basic cultural taboos on a national stage, he would, by his own standards, hardly exist at all. That’s what it means to be a demagogue.
The Anti-Defamation League expresses its understandable, necessary concern about “the most mainstream event led by an anti-Semite in recent American history.” The ADL also proclaims its confidence that the “vast majority” of march participants will not “subscribe” to Farrakhan’s bigotry. That last part is too generous. How many marchers will there be this week who do not know that Farrakhan is a Jew-hater? By responding to his call, by listening to his appeal, by joining him, they will be accepting a tacit, charter subscription to anti-Semitism. All of them.
But what if, just for the sake of argument, Farrakhan weren’t an anti- Semite? ADL spokesmen say they “understand and support” the black-directed goals of the Million Man March. The American Jewish Congress says it supports those goals “enthusiastically.” The White House, three days before the March, amended its position to “let’s see if we can’t build on the positive.” Allowing for differences of tone and vigor, that’s what everybody says. Unmistakably implying in the process that but for the Jew stuff, Farrakhanism is basically harmless.
Shame. America has a nasty, patronizing habit of easily excusing behavior in blacks that would be correctly and stiffly sanctioned in anyone else. Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism wounds and infuriates. But it is not by any means the worst thing about him. He poses no serious threat to Jews, or to white Americans generally. Louis Farrakhan does pose a threat, however, a direct and grave one, entirely removed from the question of anti-Semitism, to black Americans. Doesn’t that matter? Or hasn’t anyone noticed?
To begin with, the man is a charlatan of classical proportion. For decades now he has preached a gospel of black economic self-determination, urging his followers to withdraw their commerce from the larger society, to spend and sell only among their own. Forget the stupid theory involved, and consider Farrakhan’s practices. With a $ 5 million interest-free loan from Moammar Gadhaft in 1985, Farrakhan launched something called POWER, Inc., which he promised to turn into a “billion-dollar corporate entity” by 1990.
Its retail enterprises would create jobs and investment capital benefiting millions of blacks — if, that is, they each scraped together $ 20 a month to purchase POWER’s first product line, soaps and shampoos.
A comprehensive investigative series earlier this year by William Gaines and David Jackson of the Chicago Tribune proves, predictably, that POWER is a fraud. And that Farrakhan, who claims that he “owns nothing,” is a thief. Nation of Islam-affiliated companies are saddled with debt, unpaid bills, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax delinquencies. Their assets are personally and directly controlled — in clear violation of federal law — by Nation officials, most of whom are members of Farrakhan’s immediate family. POWER pays their heating bills.
And unsuspecting black people, most of them poor, pay for all the rest. Donors to the Nation’s “No. 2 Poor Treasury” get a T-shirt. Farrakhan gets the money. His name is on the bank account, which has bought him a 77-acre rural retreat and a Land Rover. He also owns two stately homes in Chicago, a Mercedes, a Lexus, innumerable imported shoes and suits, and God knows what else.
This is not “harmless.” And neither is the truest, deepest goal of Farrakhan’s march. He — the presumption! — asks black men to “atone” for their crimes to self and family, and to give up their dependence on a corrupt greater America, an ostensibly unobjectionable, even conservative, summons that has muzzled the march’s would-be critics. But he is asking these black men to atone as Black Men, not as individuals, for sins he has elsewhere and exhaustively ascribed solely to the conspiracies of White Men. And it is not the subordinate material connection that blacks now have to whites that Farrakhan seeks to erase, as his march manifesto makes clear in its complaints against pending federal budget cuts. It is their psychological connection with America he wants to sever. He wants black men to withdraw into hatred. And dehumanize themselves.
Louis Farrakhan, the messenger, is appalling. But even had he never once in his life uttered the word Jew, his message — and this march — would be worse still.
Last year at Howard University, Colin Powell told an assembly of students that “African Americans have come too far, and have too far yet to go, to take a detour into the swamp of hatred.” There is “danger in the message of hatred,” he warned, “however cleverly the message is packaged, or entertainingly it is presented.” This year, this month, by contrast, Mr. Powell says through his spokeswoman that while he can’t attend the Million Man March (scheduling conflict, you understand), he “supports its purpose.”
Its “purpose” is to identify and legitimize a “swamp of hatred” as the proper home for 12 percent of our citizens. Americans — black Americans especially-deserve better than the puling response Farrakhan’s march has earned so far.
David Tell, for the Editors
