by Adam Serwer
Here again, there is a consonance with the old anti-Semitism of Europe. As the historian David Brion Davis has written, “Jews had no important role in the British Royal African Company or in the British slave trade of the eighteenth century, which transported by far the largest share of Africans to the New World.” Similarly, the historian Seymour Drescher calculates that “it is unlikely that more than a fraction of 1 percent of the twelve million enslaved and relayed Africans were purchased or sold by Jewish merchants….At no point along the continuum of the slave trade were Jews numerous enough, rich enough, and powerful enough to affect significantly the structure and flow of the slave trade.”
The notion that Jews invented white supremacy is also risible, an inversion of the actual history. Modern race science was largely constructed around the idea that the Jews were not white but rather a “race” of “Asiatic” origin whose physical features and mental qualities separated them from true “whites.” Farrakhan’s insistence that Jews control black Americans is a nationalist transposition of long-standing white supremacist mythology. As Nell Irvin Painter writes in The History of White People, “Among white race chauvinists, the belief that Jews manipulate the ignorant working masses—whether Alpine, Under-Man, or colored—has proved extremely durable.” Delve into the online cesspools of the far right and you can find an endless series of images implying that black-rights movements, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Black Lives Matter, are covert Jewish plots.
When Burke determined the French Revolution was led by Jews, there were “at most forty thousand Jews” in the entire country. Farrakhan identifies Jews as the Southern planter elite, but according to Davis, “in the American South, in 1830, there were only 120 Jews among the 45,000 slaveholders owning twenty or more slaves and only twenty Jews among the 12,000 slaveholders owning fifty or more slaves.” Anti-communist propaganda all over Eastern Europe identified Jews as the masters of communism, even though, as Hanebrink writes, “The Communist Party would have flourished throughout the region without any Jews at all.”
Farrakhan’s case, like those of all anti-Semitic demagogues before him, relies on a kind of one-drop theory, where the involvement of any Jews at all signifies Jewish control. A kernel of truth—the existence of Jewish racists, Jewish movie producers, Jewish bankers, Jewish communists, or Jewish slaveowners—makes the entire system “Jewish,” much as one drop of “black” blood makes the lightest-skinned person black.
In asking why Farrakhanism retains some support within the black community, one might ask why similar ideas have held sway in the West for centuries and still do in Europe, where nationalist strongmen continue to use thinly veiled code words to attack “globalism” and “cosmopolitanism,” finding convenient bogeymen in targets like liberal financier George Soros. Or in the United States, where conspiratorial fantasies about men like Soros or theories like QAnon draw on implicit and explicit anti-Semitic themes. For centuries, anti-Jewish rhetoric has provided Western communities across the political spectrum with the comfort of believing external enemies hold the door to paradise closed, enemies whose destruction will allow those doors to swing open.
A key distinction, of course, is that white supremacy in America is a history of conspiracies. The Middle Passage was a conspiracy to use black people as forced labor; the Confederacy was a conspiracy to keep black people as chattel; the end of Reconstruction was a conspiracy to overturn black citizenship; Jim Crow was a conspiracy to maintain black people as a subservient labor caste; the Tuskegee medical experiment on black men was a conspiracy; redlining was a conspiracy; the exclusion of most black people from many of the benefits of the New Deal was the result of a conspiracy; the theft of Henrietta Lacks’s cells was a conspiracy; lending discrimination is a conspiracy; and so on and so forth. And for the most part, black Americans must go about their lives every day with knowledge of such conspiracies as most white Americans deny they exist, or that they have been of any significance in shaping modern life whatsoever. The remarkable thing is that Farrakhanism, for all its harms, remains as unpopular as it does.
That is not to say there is no danger in it. These beliefs have been used to justify hatred against Jews and in some cases outright violence and murder. They act as a solvent upon the natural bonds between religious and ethnic minorities with shared political interests. And they help keep alive the flame of one of history’s oldest and most destructive prejudices. In the Trump era, it has proven a useful bludgeon for attempting to break apart the coalition between black Americans and Jews, one of the most fruitful progressive alliances in American history, at a perilous moment for both communities.
It also significantly shaped my childhood. I can remember sitting alone in my D.C. homeroom the day of the Million Man March and wondering if my classmates hated me. I can remember asking friends in the Nation if they could hear what Farrakhan said about Jews and reconcile it with what they knew of me. I remember feeling a tremendous loneliness in this separation from people I cared about and who I thought cared about me. I wanted to understand why.
I still regard Farrakhanism as noxious, but its resilience is no longer a mystery. I wrote this essay in early 2018 to explain to others why it persists, as someone who has been personally wounded by it. I hope it helps you understand and empathize with those who have found some comfort in the Nation of Islam, without excusing the anti-Semitism that remains central to its religious doctrine.
WHY TAMIKA MALLORY WON’T CONDEMN FARRAKHAN
MARCH 11, 2018
When I was seventeen, I was a scruffy-headed biracial black and Jewish teenager, and a furious Louis Farrakhan hater. In the mid-1990s, Farrakhan’s fame and influence was at its height; I had once been thrown out of a middle-school gym class for calling the Nation of Islam leader a racist. His Million Man March, a massive collective act of solidarity and perhaps the most important black event of the decade, had been one of the loneliest days of my young life. I sat in homeroom, one of just a few dozen kids in school, wondering why so many people hated people like me.
It was a story my high school English teacher Cullen Swinson told me, years later, that helped me understand why people might associate with the Nation. Scott Montgomery Elementary School was located in what The Washington Post called “the Wicked District” in a grim series on black youth in D.C. in the 1950s. Things were still bleak in the late ’60s when Swinson began attending Scott—one year, there was a crime scare that enveloped the whole neighborhood.
“Fear would soon become a daily companion in the short walk to and from school every day,” Swinson told me, until “a host of clean-cut, friendly, polite, and ramrod-straight, bow-tied young men from the Masjid took up daily residence on every street corner from 7th Street to 1st Street.” They were from the Fruit of Islam, the Nation’s paramilitary wing. “I will never forget how they calmed the fears of so many mothers and children, just by their mere presence,” Swinson said.
From the outside, seeing a liberal activist associating with an organization like the Nation of Islam can seem incomprehensible—particularly if you’re Jewish and you hear in Farrakhan’s speeches the venom that poisoned Europe for millennia and led to the annihilation of a third of the world’s Jews in the twentieth century. But I thought back to the story Swinson told me after Farrakhan made national news again in recent weeks in connection with the Women’s March, the organization that led a massive protest the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. It’s a reminder that the sources of the Nation of Islam’s ongoing appeal, and the reasons prominent black leaders often decline to condemn Farrakhan, may have little to do with the Nation’s prejudiced beliefs.
The national co-chair of the Women’s March, Tamika Mallory, was present at the Nation of Islam’s annual Saviours’ Day event in late February, where Farrakhan railed against Jews for being “the mother and father of apartheid,” declared that “the Jews have control over those agencies of government,” and s
urmised that Jews have chemically induced homosexuality in black men through marijuana. The Nation continues to produce volumes of propaganda blaming Jews for the world’s ills. After the Anti-Defamation League posted a write-up of the event, noting Mallory’s presence, Mallory and her colleagues were accused of dismissing the concerns of critics on social media who felt they were, if not endorsing anti-Semitism, homophobia, and sexism, failing to publicly rebuke it.
“There were people speaking to me as if I was anything other than my mother’s child—it was very vile, the language that was being used, the way I was called an anti-Semite,” Mallory told me. “I think that my value to the work I do is that I can go into many spaces as it relates to dealing with the complexity of the black experience in America. It takes a lot of different types of people to help us with our struggle.”
Then there’s the timing—at a moment of rising anti-Semitism in the United States and abroad, resurgent white nationalism, and anxiety among many liberal Jews about their place in the progressive movement, Mallory’s presence at the NOI event shocked many who identified with the Women’s March.
The incident is the latest episode in a pattern that has repeated itself ever since Farrakhan’s entry onto the national stage. The Nation of Islam leader first rose to national prominence defending Jesse Jackson from accusations of anti-Semitism, after Jackson referred to New York as “Hymietown” during the 1984 Democratic presidential primary. Farrakhan called Judaism a “dirty religion” and warned Jews against attacking Jackson: “If you harm this brother, it will be the last one you harm.” Farrakhan’s defense of Jackson, which many black voters felt was unfairly maligned and taken out of context, helped establish his reputation as someone who, right or wrong, would not cave to the white establishment.
Since then, the cycle has repeated for one black leader after another. Farrakhan says something anti-Semitic, which draws press attention; he is roundly condemned, which draws more press attention but also causes some black people to feel he is being disproportionately attacked; and the controversy further burnishes his credibility within the black community as someone who is unacceptable to the white establishment and is therefore uncompromised. It is a cycle he has fueled, and benefited from, for decades. After the Saviours’ Day story blew up on social media, Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam began promoting clips of the most inflammatory sections of the speech on Twitter, including a clip in which he says that Jews control the FBI. Currently, his pinned tweet asks, “What have I done to make Jewish people hate me?”
Yet because of the NOI’s ongoing presence in many poor and working-class black communities, time and again Farrakhan is able to threaten the mainstream political ambitions of black public figures who, for good reasons and bad, choose to deal with him. There was Jackson, who ultimately condemned Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism as “reprehensible.” The Democratic National Committee’s deputy chair, Representative Keith Ellison, disavowed his earlier membership in the Nation of Islam, saying that they “organize by sowing hatred and division, including anti-Semitism, homophobia, and a chauvinistic model of manhood.” According to The Washington Post, Ellison also met privately with Farrakhan in 2016 (Ellison put out a statement on March 13 denying he has met with Farrakhan since a chance meeting in 2013). There’s even Barack Obama, whose presidential ambitions might have been curtailed had a black photographer not buried a photo of the Illinois senator meeting Farrakhan in 2005, conscious of how the image might be exploited. Obama formally “rejected and denounced” Farrakhan during the 2008 campaign.
“Farrakhan knows who his constituents are. If he can cause some controversy and grab some headlines, he’s gonna do it. I think it’s kind of a hustle. He’s been doing it for years, it’s not going to change,” said Amy Alexander, a journalist who edited an anthology of black writers on Farrakhan called The Farrakhan Factor. “It’s almost like he’s that kid on the schoolyard who in front of the teacher will drop the f-word just to get the teacher riled up. And if the teacher falls for it every time, what’s that kid’s incentive to stop doing it?”
Most people outside the black community come into contact with the Nation of Islam this way—Farrakhan makes anti-Semitic remarks, which generate press coverage and then demands for condemnation. But many black people come into contact with the Nation of Islam as a force in impoverished black communities—not simply as a champion of the black poor or working class but of the black underclass: black people, especially men, who have been written off or abandoned by white society. They’ve seen the Fruit of Islam patrol rough neighborhoods and run off drug dealers, or they have a family member who went to prison and came out reformed, preaching a kind of pride, self-sufficiency, and entrepreneurship that, with a few adjustments, wouldn’t sound out of place coming from a conservative Republican. The self-respect, inner strength, and self-reliance reflected in the polished image of the men in suits and bow ties can be a powerful sight.
“Even before Farrakhan, the Nation was the first group to really go into the prisons to rehabilitate, or to call incarcerated men and women towards a kind of rehabilitative lifestyle,” said Zain Abdullah, a professor at Temple University who used to teach Islam to people in prison. “They command some respect because of their visibility and presence in lower-class communities. People don’t see them selling out to corporate America, selling out to government. I think people see them as a grassroots organization. They still speak to the poor, to racial injustices, and that’s where their power lies.”
The Nation of Islam had an estimated fifty thousand members as of 2007, far from its heyday in the 1960s. Farrakhan’s inability to grow the Nation’s ranks indicates that sympathy with his critiques of white racism does not necessarily translate into broad affection for the man himself.
“What’s interesting is, why is Farrakhan still relevant to these communities, and why is he still as visible as he is? He still commands twenty, thirty thousand people,” Abdullah said. “I think people see the Nation as a voice of dissent. A viable voice of dissent. Leadership in these communities—few are as visible as Farrakhan.”
I spoke with several civil-rights leaders who reject Farrakhan’s views but didn’t want to go on record criticizing Farrakhan—in part out of respect for the constituency he represents, but also because they are aware of precisely how he exploits such condemnations to strengthen his own credibility. One prominent civil-rights activist cautioned against reading some black Americans’ sympathy with Farrakhan’s critique of white racism as a wholesale embrace of his message. “The message and appeal of Barack Obama is the polar opposite of Louis Farrakhan. That is more emblematic of the black community’s sentiments than Louis Farrakhan,” said the activist. “In this era of mass incarceration, the Nation still maintains a presence in the prisons, where we have too many people of color locked up, too many men, they are in many of our communities. So the unsparing critique of racism that he provides has a certain appeal.”
For all its attempts at curbing urban violence, the Nation itself has a bloody history. Malcolm X was assassinated by members of the Nation in 1965 after his break with Elijah Muhammad and turn toward orthodox Sunni Islam; in 1973, former members of the Nation were convicted of murdering seven members of the Hanafi Muslim sect in Washington, D.C., five of them children. In 2000, Farrakhan apologized to Malcolm’s surviving family, saying that he felt “regret that any word that I have said caused the loss of life of a human being.” While Malcolm was still alive, Farrakhan said he was “worthy of death.”
Nevertheless, the Nation retains credibility in many black communities as a force for reducing street violence.
It was in that context that Mallory came into contact with the Nation of Islam. Mallory turned to anti-violence activism after her son’s father was murdered, eventually becoming the national director of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. “In that most difficult period of my life, it was the women of the Nation of Islam w
ho supported me, and I have always held them close to my heart for that reason,” Mallory wrote in a statement published in NewsOne on Wednesday.
She soon realized that all the women she knew who had lost loved ones to gun violence had also lived in poor, segregated neighborhoods, and she concluded that the circumstances that led to these deaths were systemic and not just individual. And in those neighborhoods, the Nation was present when others were not.
“The Nation of Islam was the place where most of the black men and women that I knew had been there and really had been reformed. Men particularly in my family, people who had been arrested, and people who had been through really troubled situations, I saw them cleaning themselves up and were successful,” Mallory told me. “I found that the Nation had been influential in helping them to turn their lives around.”
Mallory was surprised by the backlash to her presence at the Saviours’ Day event, in part because she’s been going to the annual Nation of Islam function since she was a child—her parents were activists. Although she is a Christian, she says it was common for her to work with the Nation of Islam on anti-violence initiatives, such as the NOI’s “Occupy the Corner” program, which involves members of the Fruit of Islam patrolling dangerous areas to prevent violence. In 1989, after the Fruit of Islam’s “Dopebuster” patrols proved successful in the Mayfair housing projects, The Washington Post reported that other neighborhoods were clamoring for their help.
That reputation has endured; in 2012, Chicago’s first Jewish mayor, Rahm Emanuel, said that the Nation of Islam had a role to play in reducing violence in the city. “They have decided, the Nation of Islam, to help protect the community. And that’s an important ingredient, like all the other aspects of protecting a neighborhood.” Emanuel echoed what many black communities had long since concluded—the Nation can be the least bad of the available options, especially in a city like Chicago, where the police retain a reputation for lawlessness and brutality in minority neighborhoods.