"Sadly, it isn't only conservative and right-wing white folks who have chosen to make Farrakhan something of a racial Rorschach test for black leaders. To wit, the recent ventilations of self-proclaimed spiritual guru, Michael Lerner, who claimed in an April 29, 2008 e-blast from his "Network of Spiritual Progressives," that lasting damage had likely been done by Rev. Wright's praise for Farrakhan. According to Lerner, failure to clearly condemn the Nation of Islam leader is a "danger to any hopes of reconciliation between blacks and whites in this country."
But such a statement--in effect, placing the burden for racial reconciliation on black people, who must condemn Farrakhan in order for whites to be willing to dialogue--is a grotesque inversion of historic responsibility for the problem of racism in the United States."
America's Racial Litmus Test
Farrakhan is not the Problem
By TIM WISE
May 27, 2008
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Thirteen years ago, when I first started out on the lecture circuit, speaking about the issue of racism, it seemed as though everywhere I went, someone wanted to know my opinion of Louis Farrakhan.
To some extent, this was to be expected, I suppose. It was 1995, after all, and Farrakhan had just put together the Million Man March in DC. So when race came up, that, and sadly, the OJ Simpson trial and verdict seemed to be the two templates onto which white folks in particular would graft their racial anxieties.
Though OJ has long since faded as a matter of conversation among most, discussion of Farrakhan never seems to end. As controversy has erupted regarding comments made by Barack Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Wright's occasional words of praise for Farrakhan have caused many to suggest that he, and by extension, Obama, are somehow tainted. Wright, we are to believe, is forever compromised as a legitimate commentator on issues of race and even as a man of God. And why? In large part because he has noted two basic truths that are pretty hard to dispute: first, that Farrakhan is an important voice in black America--important in the sense that millions of black folks are interested in what he has to say--and second, that he is someone whose community work with young black men has been constructive where many other efforts to reach them have failed. Although Wright has never indicated that he agrees with the more extreme comments made by the Minister over the past two-and-a-half decades (and indeed, much of Wright's own ministry and approach to issues of race, gender and sexuality suggests profound disagreements with Farrakhan on these matters), his unwillingness to condemn the Nation of Islam leader is used to write him off as an extremist and a bigot.
As someone who is Jewish, I am expected to join in this chorus, apparently. Thus, the repeated and regular queries dating back at least fifteen years from other Jewish folks or from whites generally, asking why it is that I have never, in all of my years as an antiracist activist, turned my pen (or at least my computer keyboard) on Farrakhan.
But the simple truth is, Louis Farrakhan is not the problem when it comes to racism, sexism or heterosexism in this country; nor is he any real threat to Jews as Jews, or whites as whites, contrary to popular mythology.
(full text..)
Perhaps when white folks begin to show as much concern for the bigoted statements and, more to the point, murderous actions of white political leaders as we show over the statements of Louis Farrakhan, then we'll deserve to be taken seriously in this thing we call the "national dialogue on race." Until then, however, folks of color will continue--and rightly, understandably so--to view us as trying to dodge our personal responsibility for our share of the problem. They will view us, and with good reason, as merely using Farrakhan so that we can divert attention from institutional discrimination, institutionalized white privilege and power, and the way in which white denial maintains a lid on social change, by creating the impression that everything is fine, and whatever isn't fine is the fault of "crazy," militant black people, who follow so-called crazy and hateful religious leaders. In this way, white Americans can continue to pretend that the nation's racial problem isn't about us; that we are but passive observers of a drama concocted by others, over which only they have any control. And in this way, we guarantee the perpetuation of the very enmity we claim not to understand, the very tension we cannot comprehend, and the chasm-like divide that was created in our name and for our historic benefit, no matter how much we try and shift the blame now, heads rooted firmly in the proverbial sand.
http://www.counterpunch.org/wise05272008.html
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