But beneath the bitterness lies a new and helpful clarity. It may now be easier to confront both Farrakhan and the larger issue of offensive speech, particularly on campus. The potential of this story to end well depends on whether you trust people-all people-to make better decisions when they have additional information. In the months ahead, college students will learn more about the 10,000-member Nation of Islam, and they will hear more hate speech. But they will also hear more from people like Rep. Major Owens, who along with a few other black members of Congress found the courage to denounce Farrakhan’s bigotry. Jesse Jackson says he favors a White House conference on intolerance. That sounds like a circus. But a series of campus teach-ins might help turn this whole painful episode into something productive.
The first thing made clear last week is that the “New Farrakhan” is a hoax. In 1993 we read (in sources including NEWSWEEK) that Farrakhan was moving away from anti-Semitism. As a conciliatory gesture, he played music by the Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn on the violin. Last September the Congressional Black Caucus, headed by Rep. Kweisi Mfume, established a formal relationship with the Nation of Islam. The caucus even managed to obtain federal funding for a Nation of Islam AIDS-education program.
But even as he fired Muhammad and called his words “meanspirited,” there was Farrakhan on CNN last week saying that 75 percent of slaves in the American South were owned by Jews. This is a lie. (The truth is more like 2 percent.) He apparently misread his own Nation of Islam book, “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,” a pseudoscholarly anti-Semitic tract that claims 75 percent of urban Southern Jews owned slaves, which-even if true -is quite a different point.
So why did Jackson, Mfume and the NAACP all ignore Farrakhan’s latest slurs against Jews? They’re angry at the ADL and Jewish columnists for picking at this scab when the black community is in crisis. After repudiating Muhammad, they’re understandably tired of the pressure to repudiate all the time. (Were blacks always pressuring the head of the ADL to repudiate the late Jewish racist Meir Kahane?) And they desperately want to change the subject. But it’s truly shortsighted for black leaders to argue that Farrakhan’s often-hyped success at instilling discipline in young black males somehow outweighs the poison of his message. This argument undermines their moral authority in fighting racism. And it’s not as if they privately approve of Farrakhan. After all, it was members of the Nation of Islam who killed Malcolm X.
This fact is still almost unknown among younger African-Americans (Spike Lee’s gloss didn’t help). Perhaps the publicity about Farrakhan will help black students see the absurdity of, say, listening to Muhammad participate in “Salute to Malcolm X” ceremonies. At two recent rallies, Farrakhan brought Muhammad Abdul Aziz to the stage. Aziz spent 20 years in jail for his part in killing Malcolm X; several black eyewitnesses that day in 1965 in the Audubon Ballroom identified him as one of the gunmen. But Farrakhan claimed Aziz was innocent, and the crowd roared its approval. Malcolm X’s family is appalled at Farrakhan’s popularity. With any luck, all the current attention may help finally drive home the truth.
It may also yield a better understanding of how to handle hatemongers like Muhammad on campus. The old, mindless approach is typified by a dean at the University of Florida who invoked the First Amendment and said he didn’t want to “prejudge” Muhammad’s speech. The new approach is reflected by Trenton State College, which is allowing Muhammad to appear but also criticizing his earlier remarks and inviting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. to speak a couple of days later. At Wellesley College, a tenured professor of “Africana Studies,” Anthony Martin, recently published a book called “The Jewish Onslaught,” a vitriolic attack on all those Jews and “Judeophiles” who had criticized him for teaching “The Secret Relationship” in class. Diana Chapman Walsh, the incoming president of Wellesley, makes a useful distinction between a decision to censor Martin (prevent him from speaking), which she rejects, and a decision to censure (strongly criticize) him, which she undertook in an open letter to the entire Wellesley campus and alumnae.
This distinction, if applied throughout academia, could resolve many disputes over political correctness. Fight speech with more speech. It’s often that simple. As the Farrakhan affair ripples through the culture, it may also spur debate on academic standards and tenure, the true history of black-Jewish relations and the origins of bigotry. Not bad for a miserable racial mud fight.
