It didn`t surprise me to hear that conservative Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas once professed great admiration for Black Muslim Minister Louis Farrakhan. In many ways, Farrakhan is the quintessential conservative. Just watch out for his snake oil.
Like Thomas, he stresses self-help as the proper road to black progress. He urges poor blacks to reject government welfare, promote the family, dress conservatively and abstain from drugs, alcohol and pork.
He encourages men to form neighborhood patrols to fight crime and encourages women to be fruitful, multiply and devote themselves to maintaining strong family life at home.
Like Thomas, Farrakhan doesn`t like affirmative action. In fact, he goes even further, denouncing racial integration altogether as a liberal pipe dream.
This, too, is not all that far removed from Thomas` views. He was a black nationalist in college, a devoted fan of Malcolm X and, as he said in an insightful 1987 Atlantic magazine profile by Juan Williams: ”I don`t see how the civil-rights people today can claim Malcolm X as one of their own. Where does he say black people should go begging the Labor Department for jobs? He was hell on integrationists. Where does he say you should sacrifice your institutions to be next to white people?”
So far, so good. But, while much of what Farrakhan, with his uniquely soothing yet provocative oratory, says about self-improvement also has been said by other more conventional black leaders, Farrakhan`s message is poisoned by troubling demagoguery, some of which comes straight out of the Twilight Zone.
Like his mentor, the late Elijah Muhammad, Farrakhan has professed the belief that the white race was created out of a ”germ” by an evil wizard as punishment for the sins of the black race and that racial justice finally will come at Armageddon.
Few Farrakhan admirers I know will admit openly to believing any of that poppycock, but, like alcoholics who insist they are only ”social drinkers,” they find it easy to ignore the parts of Farrakhan`s message that they don`t like while they soak up the parts they do, even when the entire barrel is tainted with drops of poison.
That may be what happened to Clarence Thomas. In two 1983 speeches still on file at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, then-chairman Thomas praised Farrakhan as ”a man I have admired for more than a decade.”
An aide at the time has confirmed to reporters that Thomas delivered the Farrakhan tribute to Atlanta`s Association of Black MBAs. The other, prepared for delivery at the Capital Press Club a few weeks earlier, reportedly was not delivered after Thomas decided to ad lib.
It is worth noting that this happened a year before Farrakhan`s connections to Jesse Jackson`s presidential campaign, his description of Adolf Hitler as ”great . . . wickedly great” and his referring to Zionism as a
”dirty religion” brought him to the attention of mainstream media in 1984.
Nevertheless, among blacks Farrakhan`s more controversial views were widely known, if not always acknowledged. In the late `60s, when Clarence Thomas was a self-professed black nationalist and Malcolm X fan in college, Farrakhan, a former calypso singer then called Louis X, already was moving rapidly into the prominence Malcolm X enjoyed as Elijah Muhammad`s chief spokesman.
As early as 1972, Farrakhan was making anti-Semitic references to Jews`
controlling the media, and the spurious forgery known as ”The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was always available in the bookstore at his Harlem temple.
Perhaps, like many others, Thomas chose to borrow a bit from Farrakhan`s appeal as a way of showing his black credentials to a black audience, rather than do the right thing, which would be to expose Farrakhan`s snake oil.
Now it`s time to play catch-up. In a prepared statement responding to the flap, Thomas said: ”I repudiate the anti-Semitism of Louis Farrakhan or anyone else. While I support the concept of economic self-help, I have never tolerated bigotry of any kind.”
Like Jesse Jackson, Thomas repudiated only some of the man`s ideas, not the man. That did not sit well with some Jewish leaders. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said attempts to distinguish the messenger from the message ”only legitimized Farrakhan`s overall message of hate.”
As Kingfish used to say on ”Amos `n` Andy,” brother Clarence got a heap of `splainin` to do. Unlike Kingfish, Thomas should get a chance to do his explaining in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
That`s progress.
