Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, gave a lecture on Monday night at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. The term ‘lecture’ aptly describes Farrakhan’s remarks, in that his message of inspiration, hope and self-reliance was buried deep within a predictable mire of scolding rhetoric.
This is unfortunate as the substance of his remarks (some of them anyway) held the seeds of constructive admonishment. Even so, the messenger often gets out in front of his message. Given Farrakhan’s well-established public persona, this is to be expected. Just as the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of the world make a living spewing reactionary discontent on the fringes of the American right, Farrakhan has made a career of radical, even revolutionary ultra-left politics.
Of course, one could reasonably argue that Farrakhan’s politics are not so much right or left as they are dominated by adversarial positions, angry rhetoric, blame assignment and an unproductive tether to historical injustices — all of which serve to retard rather than propel the kinds of progress he clearly desires for African-Americans. Stepping back from the venom of Farrakhan’s tone, one sees important and noteworthy themes.
Chief among these are a clarion for equality, self-reliance, self-esteem and pride in one’s heritage. Collateral to this, his instruction to not be defined by other people’s standards is very important. So too was his emphasis on the role of the family. Despite these laudable ideals, Farrakhan’s reasoning leaves the tracks at many points. He highlights the need for a sense of self-worth… to not be defined by other people’s sense of beauty. But in so doing, Farrakhan makes an overly narrow generalization that errantly faults members of another culture, “You’re so ashamed of the darkness of your skin, the broadness of your nose, the kinkiness of your hair. That’s why the Koreans built Korea towns just selling us hair products.”
This might be significant save for the fact that the nation’s leading manufacturer of hair care and cosmetics targeted toward people of color was founded (and run for decades) by Edward Gardner, an African-American. On his company’s community role Gardner told the Chicago Defender newspaper, “We were not only a hair care company — we were also concerned with the needs of the Afro American community, as far as producing jobs. Our plant on 87th Street (in Chicago) hired many people. We’ve had some of the finest people you could find and they are out to build the company.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
As such, Farrakhan’s attempt to indict Koreans for profiting from an aesthetic they neither invented nor necessarily ascribe is to miss the point. Moreover, if one were looking for a balanced, yet complex deconstruction of prevalent hair style trends among African-American women, comedian Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair is far more revelatory than Farrakhan’s blanket castigations.
Sadly, “be true to yourself” is a message people of all colors too easily forget. The same could be said of forgetting collective history. Here too, Farrakhan takes a simple instructive and turns it into destructive invective. As he told the assembled crowd, “White people, we know you better than you know yourselves. We know who we are dealing with. We know your origins and we know when your end will be…”
Instead of focusing on common origins, acknowledging past injustices and moving forward, Farrakhan chooses to foment inter-racial discord and foster a mindset of perpetual victimhood through a language of pseudo-empowerment. It is in this last failing that Farrakhan does the most damage.
His rhetorical excesses are all the more egregious because many uninformed Christians will conflate his speech with all of Islam, thereby doing a double disservice.
Just as all Christians are not like Rev. Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church zealots, most Muslims do not embrace Farrakhan’s fiery polemics. If anything is to be learned here, that would be a good start.