The wrath of Farrakhan.

• Author: Hazlett, Thomas W.
• Position: Rev. Louis Farrakhan

The minister's faux pas

THE REV. LOUIS FARRAKHAN REcently moderated his rhetoric as he attempted to sneak into the mainstream. For a while it worked. Major civil-rights organizations included him in their meetings, and he attracted favorable coverage. But then--oops!

Time quoted Farrakhan explaining the political economy of Jewish merchants in the black community, 1920-1960, as follows: "What is a bloodsucker? When they land on your skin, they suck the life from you to sustain their life....So if they made profit from us, then from our life they drew life and came to strength. Then they turned it over to the Arabs, the Koreans, and others, who are there now...sucking the lifeblood out of our own community."

Farrakhan's public-relations rehab program hit a snag. He is being condemned again, and the scramble to disassociate is more frantic than when Rush Limbaugh pops up at a NOW cocktail party. But there are multiple ironies in the stampede to quarantine Farrakhan's racism.

Farrakhan's basic offense is that in each of his endeavors, including his impressive efforts to shape up troubled black youth, he operates as a "racialist" (Leon Wieseltier's term). Jews are an issue today because of what Jewish slave owners are reported to have done in the 1800s and what Jewish shopkeepers allegedly charged in the 1950s. Blacks are important today because their ancestors formed the first great civilization(s). Whites are contemptible as a class because their race has historically oppressed others of color. Even if Farrakhan's fantastic assertions were correct, his methodology would stink. Race is not an interesting rubric under which to lump individuals when crafting a political ethic, particularly for those of us who are less than 200 years old.

But Farrakhan's crude analytical model shares much with pontification across the dial. Take Bill Clinton's rationale for raising taxes in the 1993 budget deal: The government was simply going after those super-rich who made out like bandits in the '80s. While the increase was retroactive to January 1, 1993, Clinton's cover story was retroactive a decade. Those who scammed the system in the '80s probably will be hurt very little by the tax increase (and, at any rate, far less than by the special prosecutor looking into Whitewatergate).

Likewise, the right. What is so ugly about some Christian fundamentalists is not that they enjoy whooping it up in tongues or that they observe superstitions last respectable in...