Louis Farrakhan

Steve Sailer identified the problem with such a scheme in his book America’s Half-Blood Prince:

The basic social problem that both Farrakhan and Obama want to alleviate is that, on average, blacks have less money than whites. Farrakhan’s plan to create a separate black-only capitalist economy in which blacks could not be cheated by whites out of the hard-earned wealth they would create is doubtful on various grounds. And even if it were plausible, it would require generations of hard work in dreary fields such as toothpaste-manufacturing.

In contrast, Obama’s plan to get more money for blacks from whites by further enlarging the already enormous welfare / social work / leftist charity / government / industrial complex is both more feasible in the short run, and, personally, more fun for someone of Obama’s tastes than making toothpaste.

Even Farrakhan’s calls for separatism include a demand that white people give stuff to blacks: “You have to provide us with a good send-off. And if you don’t provide us with what is required to let us go, then God will fight you now and is fighting for our deliverance.” NOI is, when all is said and done, just another cargo cult.

Farrakhan considers American blacks to be in bondage still. The logic, if I have grasped it correctly, goes like this: The 13th Amendment abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime,” so the crafty white devils snuck slavery back in by, in Farrakhan’s words, “making nearly everything we do or think of doing a crime.”

I can’t say I really mind Farrakhan. He is obnoxious in a lot of ways: the white-hating and Jew-baiting, the kissing up to Gaddafi, Mugabe, Castro, & Co. This kind of thing is so widespread among American blacks, though, it seems unfair to single out Farrakhan. It is similarly pointless to object that NOI encourages antipathy between blacks and whites, when everything else in our culture, from Affirmative Action to the endless picking at historical wounds in schools and movies and “diversity” seminars, does the same thing.

Sure, NOI is a crazy cult; but the USA is full of crazy cults and always has been. Most of them are harmless”€”as, so far as I know, NOI is nowadays. You could make a case, I think, that it is less dangerous than actual Islam. (Toward which Farrakhan expresses some disdain: “Most of you Muslims that come to America, you don’t come around us. You go out in Elk Grove and all with Caucasian people because you want to impress them….” Perhaps it’s those half-hour expositions of the Sermon on the Mount that put them off, Louis.)

And the cult’s stern Puritanism”€”Farrakhan railed angrily at immodest female dress, loose morals, drug-taking, and pornography”€”surely does some good, adding structure and discipline to thousands of lives. That’s not nothing.

I won’t be listening to any more of Louis Farrakhan’s speeches. For all his spirited delivery, this one got wearisome after an hour or so. Harmless crazy cults have their place in the great scheme of things, I am sure; but they are all much of a muchness when seen up close, and are not meant for the well-educated and intellectually curious.

The dull stupidity of it wears you down at last”€”the pseudoscience and preposterous historical claims, the leaky logic and ill-concealed crude emotions. I still can’t find it in myself to mind “Minister Farrakhan,” though, and I wish him many more years of doing what he does so well.