CAPÍTULO 4 EVALUACIÓN GENERAL DE LA PRÁCTICA
4.3 Conclusiones y recomendaciones generales de la práctica
I
never thought I’d be thankful for Louis Farrakhan’s abominable anti-Semitism, but right now that’s all that’s slowing down his coronation as the new Booker T. Washington. My fears are that he and Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League will strike some kind of accord, or that the corporate elite will just decide that this is too good to let pass and tell the Jewish interest groups to shut up, or that the Commentary crowd will figure out that Farrakhan is the best way to get rid o f their Negro Problem— and the best way to pry liberal Jews away from a progressive social agenda.A week or so before the Million Man March, mainstream media fastened onto it, and coverage was— Farrakhan’s complaints not withstanding— decidedly positive, virtually part o f the promotional campaign. W hy? Because, as a friend quipped, this was the first protest in history in which people gathered to protest themselves. Farrakhan’s conventionally black nationalist “ do-for-self, can’t- look-to-government, develop-our-own-communities” line meshes perfectly with the bipartisan right-wing consensus about social policy and civil rights enforcement—just as Booker T .’s version of the same line legitimized the bipartisan consensus to restore white supremacy in the South. And Farrakhan’s victim-blaming rhetoric echoes Washington’s in a more vicious tone.
T h e viciousness is not happenstance. Farrakhan is a fascist, and he would be if there were no white people on the planet. His vision for black Americans is authoritarian, theocratic, homophobic, and like nationalisms everywhere, saturated in patriarchal ideology. Like his antecedents Washington and Marcus Garvey, Farrakhan is militantly procapitalist (he reportedly indicated that black trade union leaders were not welcome on the dais) and antidemocratic.
Washington wanted to control all race-uplift activity and enforce the gospel o f submissiveness— while patrolling black politics to root our radicals. Farrakhan also wants to establish a regime o f ruth less moral regeneration according to his standards. That’s why the sycophantic performances o f academic wannabe racemen Michael Dyson and Cornel West are so contemptible. West has gone to the
limit o f his capacity for double-talk to rationalize association with Farrakhan’s agenda; Dyson played Goebbels on “ Nightline,” de claring the march to be against sexism and homophobia. They have nice, secure jobs and lives outside the Bantustan; they’ll never have to worry about the Fruit o f Islam kicking down their door to beat them for stopping at the liquor store after work or for eating a pig foot or because their wives wore short skirts. Think that vision is paranoid? Consider three things: (l) Farrakhan already has a para military apparatus in the Fruit o f Islam and the Unity Nation, his skinhead Jungvolk; (2) the Nation’s contract “ security” forces have a history o f beating and brutalizing supposed criminals— a record, N BC news noted almost gleefully, that would prompt legal action if it belonged to the police; (3) Malcolm X.
Because I spent most o f the week before the march fending off media requests, I saw clearly how journalists wanted to frame it. Only conservative black opposition was newsworthy; it shared the m arch’ s prem ises w hile objecting only to Farrakhan’ s anti- Semitism and racism. T h e “ woman question” was reduced to a simple inclusion-exclusion debate that accepted the patriarchal as sumptions fundamental to the event. T he condescending spectacle of black men sharing their pain in public and stepping up to take their rightful place was ju st— as befits Ben Chavis and the reborn Marion Barry— the Hugh Hefner-Robert Bly-Steven Seagal sensi tive man in blackface. T he focus on “ responsibility” provided a backhanded assertion o f male priority in families and communities. Beneath the patronizing acknowledgment that black women have played important roles in community life lay the punch line— that the brothers are here to take care o f business now, so you honeys can go cook something and watch the kids.
T h e idea of gathering to accept responsibility also rests on two intertwined but quite different objectives. One is for the marchers to counter the stereotyping and stigmatizing o f black men. (But for whom anyway?) T h e second, which overlaps “ atonement,” is to exhort miscreant brothers to mend their ways. These objectives are contradictory; one admits what the other challenges. What appears to resolve the contradiction is the slippage between “ I” and “we” that is greased by nationalist notions o f a uniform black
Triumph of the Tuskegee Wi l l—63
male collectivity. A bunch of “ I” s gathered to pat themselves on the back for being “ responsible” and to provide a model for those benighted bloods— the “w e” who are really “ they” — who need moral tutelage.
The call to atone presumes— as Farrakhan and his ilk always have— Daniel Moynihan’s and Dinesh D ’Souza’s views o f black American life. The god-drenched rally was to that extent a sort of baptism, cleansing the congregants o f the racial original sin identi fied in the 1965 Book o f Daniel, Moynihan’s scurrilously racist and misogynist Report on the Negro Family. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the responsibility-atonement paradigm also shifts discussion o f in equality away from public policy to victim-blaming underclass ide ology. This is the wet dream of all those who would like to be rid of the “ race problem” ; liberals would be off the hook for those messy civil liberties and civil rights issues, because black people would administer themselves in line with “ their” special needs, etc. No need to link black dispossession to capitalists’ global restructuring and corporate downsizing. Nor to the reactionary assaults on public responsibility for civic welfare and on mechanisms for countering discrimination. Let them eat bean pies!
In the political desperation of the moment, and given the bank ruptcy of the manifest options in black politics, many decent, hon est progressives attended the march, trying to distance themselves from its official message of black male atonement, trying to shout their own agendas over the din o f the dominant chorus whose “ (those other) niggers ain’t shit” melody was softened by the psy chobabble o f pop spiritualism and religiosity. T he ploy won’t work now, just as it didn’t work in the ’70s when black progressives tried to ride on the coattails o f the rising stratum o f black public officials or in the ’80s when they tried it with Jesse Jackson. T he weakness that makes us seek to join also means that we can have no influence on the motion. T h e stakes are greater now than before; remember what happened to the German left.