LOOKING FOR FARRAKHAN
By Florence Hamlish Levinsohn
Ivan R. Dee, 305 pages, $25
In “Looking for Farrakhan,” Evanston journalist Florence Hamlish Levinsohn misses a sublime opportunity to inject much-needed humor into the grim discussions of race relations in America. Her book, a strange amalgamation of personal reflections, dubious investigative reporting and scathing commentary, might have taken stock of its own thwarted ambitions and emerged as an absurdist look at Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan, the condition of black-Jewish relations and the rocky state of race relations in late-20th Century America. Instead, Levinsohn takes herself–and the complex enigma that is Louis Farrakhan–much too seriously.
Oh, I know that plenty of people will say race relations in America are no laughing matter. I also know that Farrakhan, the 65-year-old self-appointed leader of the Nation of Islam, is certainly not a figure to be taken lightly. In general, I agree with those assessments. Yet, in “Looking for Farrakhan,” Levinsohn wanders so far afield of her stated goal–to write a biography of Farrakhan–and is so obviously embittered and confused by the stonewall reception she received from the minister and his minions that the overall result is unseemly, at best. And where she might have leavened the confounding nature of her subject (and of his equally confounding context, American race relations) with wit and satire, Levinsohn boxes herself into a poisonous corner of dangerous speculations and irresponsible assumptions.
Rather than turning the minister’s silence to her advantage, Levinsohn produces a work that in most ways justifies Farrakhan’s unwillingness to cooperate with her. Her repeated use of terms like “virulent anti-Semitism,” her comparisons of Farrakhan to Adolf Hitler and numerous snide observations about the intermediaries she hoped would lead her to the minister are all indications that Levinsohn’s intentions were questionable from the start.
Because Levinsohn never talked with Farrakhan, her inside-the-minister’s-brain comments ring false. She attempts to fill the void by visiting some of Farrakhan’s current and former stomping grounds, and then conducting internal monologues about what the minister might have been thinking at different times in his life. The embarrassing results read like the mean-spirited imaginings of a writer whose subject refused to go along with her preconceived ideas.
Further, Levinsohn makes the same mistake other white observers routinely make when considering Farrakhan: She seems to think he is the No. 1 choice of African-Americans desperate for an effective leader. By 1994, after 20 years of jockeying for power within the Nation following the mid-1970s death of Elijah Muhammad, Farrakhan had become the “foremost leader in the black fold,” Levinsohn tells us. Like the mainstream journalists and pundits whose hysterical denunciations of Farrakhan helped elevate him into the national spotlight beginning in the mid-1980s, Levinsohn seems to confuse black Americans’ respect for the minister with a blind willingness to follow him. In fact, most black Americans respect Farrakhan for his outspokenness, but few are willing to get on board with his separatist dogma, his bizarre philosophies of UFOs, his rants of an impending apocalypse, his unreliable versions of the history of slave trading or his even more unreliable scriptural interpretations. Levinsohn consults with several black nationalists, then dismisses them when they refuse to rise to the bait of her using Farrakhan as a litmus test. She also lobs broadsides at several African-American scholars, including Henry Louis Gates Jr. and C. Eric Lincoln. Levinsohn declares these two intellectual titans too sympathetic to Farrakhan, and therefore unworthy of serious consideration when it comes to their research on him.
Ultimately, Levinsohn emerges as a relic of the civil rights movement, a living example of a mindset described by writer Jim Sleeper in his current book “Liberal Racism.” She would have served us all better by simply coming clean and directly questioning why blacks don’t seem appreciative of some liberals’ efforts, and specifically but not exclusively, of Jewish efforts on their behalf.
Levinsohn reminds us repeatedly that she has fought the good, liberal fight on race and social issues since the 1960s. But her words come off as harping and self-serving, a postmodern case of protesting too much. Like this reader, Farrakhan’s aides probably were unimpressed with Levinsohn’s claims of liberal righteousness. When she informs us that she “went to Selma, Alabama, in 1965, to march with Martin Luther King,” my response was to roll my eyes heavenward. I would have been more engaged–and sympathetic–if Levinsohn had turned the tables on her subject. She might have turned up at some of Farrakhan’s personal appearances and implored his aides to give her access. She might have stationed herself outside the minister’s Hyde Park home and come away with a hilarious look at how Farrakhan and the Nation responded to being hounded by a female, middle-age Jewish journalist. To be sure, it would have marked the first time in the long, twisted relationship between Farrakhan and his Jewish critics that someone displayed the good sense to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
