ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 10, 1996 TAG: 9603080025
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: William Raspberry
SOURCE: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
"MY WORRY [is] that Farrakhan will do something to make some of those who endorsed his march wish they hadn't ... that he will say something anti-Semitic or anti-white, that he will blast one or another member of the political coalitions that most blacks find useful, that he once again will confuse standing up for black people with standing against white people."
Those words, which I wrote on the eve of the Million Man March, are recalled here to note with sadness that Louis Farrakhan, the bold and clever minister of the Nation of Islam, has succeeded again in living down to our worst fears.
Some of us had hoped that the success of the October 1995 march, which catapulted Farrakhan into the forefront of black leadership, might give him the confidence and sense of acceptance to take that leadership seriously. Farrakhan might change.
He hasn't changed, of course, and maybe he can't. The thing that put him back in the news now - his America-bashing tour of Africa and the Middle East - is a perfect illustration of the difficulties he makes for more traditional leaders.
It's a free country, as they say, and if the Muslim minister wants to cozy up to the despotic leaders of Libya, Iraq and Iran (all accused by the United States of sponsoring international terrorism) - if he wants to compare international sanctions against Iraq with the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps - if he wants to defend Nigeria's execution of author-activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, which virtually all of America's black leadership, save CORE, has condemned - it's his business. Even if he really has cut a legally questionable deal to receive $1 billion from Libya's Gadhafi to finance political activities in the United States, that's an issue between Farrakhan and the Justice Department.
But here's the thing: Farrakhan's international standing as an African American leader has been enormously increased by the success of the Million Man March. The fact that so much of the black leadership (and so much of black America generally) responded to his call for the march expanded his leadership charter beyond his religion.
Then, without any consultation with the rest of America's black leadership, he peddles the credentials they helped to confer on him to do and say things that cause them needless political embarrassment. They are put in the position of having to denounce the behavior of the man with whom they so recently made common cause (or, politically worse, seem to give it their tacit endorsement).
Farrakhan pretends not to notice the quandary. Why can't these other leaders just stand up like men? Why must they bow down to white folk, or explain to them, or mollify them?
The answer is both philosophical and pragmatic. Philosophically, many of these other leaders really do believe in the importance of building bridges across racial and religious divides. Pragmatically, they are coalition-dependent for their success. The Congressional Black Caucus, even if it survives the present Supreme Court determination to decimate its ranks, can't pass legislation by itself; it needs the support of like-minded (or at least sympathetic) legislators who are not black. The civil rights organizations depend on the support - moral, political and financial - of whites who care about racial justice.
Farrakhan, of course, needs no white supporters. He is strongest when he is most racially divisive. His willingness to stand up to ``the white man'' or ``the Jew'' can make him seem, to the despairing black masses, a man among boys.
That's why whenever he reaches out to take the hand of his black brothers and sisters, some of them start counting their political fingers. The black-black coalition he urges is mostly a one-way street. They give support and credence to his cause, but he ignores their need to maintain their racially inclusive coalitions.
Indeed, if I saw him as more thoughtfully Machiavellian, I might even imagine that a major item on his agenda is to dissolve those coalitions in order to force blacks into a separatist tent.
Guess whose leadership would survive that catastrophe.
Washington Post Writers Group
LENGTH: Medium: 79 linesby CNB