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The Harvard Salient |
October 21, 1996 |
One year ago, Harvard hosted a panel discussion on the Million Man March featuring Professor Cornel West and Nation of Islam Minister Conrad Muhammad of New York City. On October 10 of this year, Harvard hosted another Minister Muhammad from New York City &emdash; Minister David Muhammad. The similarity, however, ends with their names. David Muhammad is no Conrad Muhammad &emdash; and his speech to a 65-person (90% black) audience, entitled "The Million Man March: A Year Later," was not what the sponsoring Black Students Association must have hoped for from the first event of its 1996-1997 lecture series.
The idea itself was a sound one: one year after the Muhammad-West dialogue and the March, invite another NOI representative to update the black student community on the progress of black empowerment. Yet from the moment Muhammad &emdash; who has worked as an assistant to both City University of New York Professor Leonard Jeffries and NOI leader Louis Farrakhan &emdash; took the stage, it was obvious that something was amiss. Muhammad immediately attacked the media present as agents of an institution which along with the United States government was engaged in a grand conspiracy to "destroy black leadership." "The media doesn't want to let black leadership talk," continued Muhammad; "the media, the government, the CIA the FBI hate Farrakhan because he's a free black man."
Muhammad then proceeded with a two-hour sermon on the decadence of the American government and the nation as a whole, peppering his history of black oppression in the US &emdash; which, in his defense, was sound &emdash; with blatantly false and often offensive statements: "When they opened the pyramids, they found Egyptian air gliders ... they found computers." "Whites spend hundreds of millions of dollars on suntan lotion each year. The sun gives whites cancer ... but feeds on melanin ... it makes blacks psychic." "Mendel &emdash; who was a Caucasian &emdash; said himself, you can get the white recessive from the black dominant, but not the black dominant from the white recessive."
That Muhammad's speech was such a disaster is a shame, because it was obvious that the audience &emdash; BSA and non-BSA alike &emdash; was there to hear something else. The BSA wanted desperately to have Muhammad speak to the present and inform his listeners about the work the NOI has done on the nation's inner-city streets, work that no one can deny has been both impressive and genuinely beneficial to the black community. On more than one occasion, audience members attempted to steer Muhammad to more relevant subject matter.
Certainly the BSA cannot be blamed for Muhammad's speaking problems. If anything, the organization should be commended for attempting to keep the ideas that spawned the March alive. Most of the nation has largely ignored the March and the NOI during the past year despite Farrakhan's misadventures in Libya. Farrakhan's second edition of the "World Day of Atonement," which was held at the United Nations Plaza October 16, saw nothing of the publicity circus that surrounded last year's March. And the NOI's well-recorded intolerance of Jews and homosexuals (Muhammad's statement, that "you can't have gay rights ... and call yourself a leader of a democratic nation," is representative) has forced it into more and more of an isolationist position.
Unfortunately, Muhammad's speech reflected everything the NOI has been and nothing of what it could be. Although the Minister repeatedly claimed to speak a language of reconciliation, not retaliation, his speech revolved around the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, who taught that blacks had "the power to become world rulers again," and made reference to Farrakhan's statement that the next March would involve five million black men. "I don't know," smiled Muhammad, in what sounded like a veiled threat, "if Louis Farrakhan can control five million black men."
What the black community needs &emdash; in its own words, the words of the audience in asking questions of Muhammad and making comments on the speech after the event &emdash; is not the empty rhetoric of insurgency.
The BSA is on the right track in trying to engage the entire campus in a dialogue on the unacceptable Catch-22 in which the American black population finds itself. The BSA rightfully views the NOI as an organization that has, in the past, been one of a few that put aside their rhetoric to take useful and effective action in helping blacks throughout the country. It is high time, however, for the group &emdash; along with the nation as a whole &emdash; to realize that the NOI has not, and will not, change its perspective or its positions to a more moderate, pragmatic, and effective stance. As long as the black community looks to the Nation of Islam for leadership, it will find itself continually marching in place.
-Joshua Garoon