Adam Serwer has a nice—nice but incomplete—post up at the Atlantic, “Why Tamika Mallory Won’t Condemn Farrakhan”, explaining why Tamika Mallory, national co-chair for the Women’s March, refuses to “apologize” for attending the Nation of Islam’s annual Saviour’s Day event last month, at which time Farrakhan engaged in his now standard apocalyptic anti-Semitic rhetoric, seasoned with predictably hysterical assaults on homosexuals, women, and other troublemakers.
Serwer, “biracial black and Jewish”, tries to fill the Atlantic’s readers—the 99.7% of them who are white, anyway—on the Nation of Islam’s unique position in black culture.
‘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.’
Serwer includes a number of such comments in his article, but I wonder, when if ever, has the Nation of Islam created a permanent change in a single neighborhood, much less a city? Malcolm X was urging blacks to drive the drug dealers out of their neighborhoods back in the fifties and sixties, but when has this ever happened? The stories about the Nation of Islam as a meaningful force for reducing street violence remain stories. The one “success story” that Serwer cites by name, the Mayfair housing projects in Washington, DC, dates from 1989 and only describes incidents occurring over a span of several days (including the beating of a TV newsman who tried to film the a group of Black Muslims who were beating a man who was holding a shotgun).
Serwer quotes several blacks as saying that most blacks regard Farrakhan’s perennial anti-Semitic outbursts as an attention-getting device that are irrelevant to the larger role of the Nation of Islam in the black community, but he doesn’t attempt to explain—in fact, avoids mentioning—why Mallory posed for a picture with Farrakhan at the recent Saviour’s Day event and two years ago posted an Instagram of a picture of the two of them with the caption “Thank God this man is still alive and doing well. He is definitely the GOAT [Greatest of all time]. Happy Birthday” Apparently, not that irrelevant!
The “symbolic” role of the Nation of Islam, which in fact has far fewer members than admirers, in the black community is to keep alive the fantasy of an independent all-black “nation” that supervises itself and is self-sufficient and separate from the larger white community. The fact that the Nation of Islam has made no progress in achieving this goal during Farrakhan’s long lifetime is irrelevant, because American blacks clearly have no interest in actually living in such a nation, for Africa offers dozens yet receives few immigrants. America is home to American blacks, but they can’t entirely accept it. Farrakhan is a symbol of uncompromising blackness and uncompromising rejection of the white world, which has nothing to do with the actual lives of black Americans, but they are not ready to give up that illusion, the satisfaction, the thrill of complete defiance.
