A Man Of Our Times?

Messenger of the Million Man March

By Frank Sikernitsky

Editor-In-Chief

The Million Man march descended upon Washington, D.C., this week, demonstrating black solidarity and lending weight to the organizer's message. But Louis Farrakhan is either very stupid or very intelligent. His rhetoric, as disgusting as it may be, has a strategy behind it. The media has not yet picked up on it, because it is so different from conventional strategy that is not readily apparent.

Let me first say that Farrakhan is a man who believes that the ends justify the means. His remarks about Judaism as a "gutter religion" and Jews themselves as "bloodsuckers" generated an outrage. He further dared the Jewish community to prove they were not a "gutter religion". His is notoriously anti-white, anti-Asian and anti-everything else.

What we hate most about the man is that he angers us. But what effect does that have? Asking any race to justify their existence mobilizes that group. They protest. They speak out in public and on television. But they do speak out. His inflammatory rhetoric causes action in the communities without any planning on his part. Challenging Jews to prove their worth, as repugnant as that sounds, forces the Jewish voice to join the chorus. The same goes for Asians and whites and any other group he spews hate about. With as few words as possible, a monologue begins. It is a heated debate, but with angers come heightened senses.

What makes this strategy poor is the fact that this chorus of monologues is not a dialog. There is no structure in which to debate, and this will lead to two ends -- solidification of the walls between groups, and after that, the race and religion issues disappear again from active debate; O.J. will fade away, and a new issue will jump in. It will probably be the deficit or extrapolitico-marital affairs or something else. Hopefully, though, some issue could tie to the dialog. Affirmative Action is sure to be a buzzword in the upcoming election.

We live in a society still rife with racism. Whites believe that they are beyond it, but blacks still see it. Segregated lunch counters and drinking fountains still exist in living memory. The racism is a soft racism, without lynching and burning, but still evident in attitudes. Of all the black men that marched on Washington, not one was arrested. In fact, only three arrests happened. Two were unlicensed vendors who would have been selling their wares even if the Klan had been marching. The thirds was a bomb-threat, hardly considerable as a march supporter. What happened to the fear that Washington was going to burn?

If the chorus of monologues that Farrakhan's words -- and they were that, just words -- started can be turned into dialog, there may be some hope of getting at the soft racism that has become the issue of the times.