What do you call someone who you invite to your house as a guest only to see him trash the carpet and wet all over your walls?
There are words for such a guest, words that aptly describe Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan’s recent appearance in a Nashville church at the invitation of the nation’s largest annual gathering of black journalists.
Speaking at the National Association of Black Journalists convention , Farrakhan thrashed journalists of African descent who work in mainstream newspapers and other media, calling us “slaves” to white media owners.
“White folks did not hire you to really represent what black people are really thinking, and you don’t really tell them what you think because you are too afraid,” Farrakhan said. “A scared-to-death Negro is a slave, you slave writers, slave media people.”
Nobody ever went broke bashing the media and Farrakhan is no exception. After that sound thrashing, at least a few black journalists felt sufficiently intimidated or enthralled to leap to their feet in a standing ovation. If this was an audience of slaves, some of my colleagues appeared to be remarkably eager to leap from the white man’s plantation to Farrakhan’s.
But not everyone was impressed. Most of my friends, an admittedly older and less easily impressed crew of professionals, sat on their hands. Many of us were annoyed that Farrakhan would stand there and stereotype black journalists as broadly, ignorantly and destructively as any white editor ever has.
Nowhere in the Farrakhan journalism lecture was there a word said about the possibility that one could maybe sometimes disagree with Louis Farrakhan and still be black.
Nowhere was much said about black journalists who have refused to be go-along “slaves” to paychecks or narrow-minded bosses. Nor was any tribute paid to the experiences many outspoken black journalists bring to the news mix, even on those frustrating days when they feel like they are only shouting in a wilderness.
One good example came up the next day after Farrakhan’s speech when a black United Church of Christ minister praised Gary Fields, a black USA Today reporter, for his perseverance earlier this year in reporting on the burning of black churches, keeping the story alive for months before other major media began to pick it up.
Farrakhan’s standards for fairness are about as suspect as the white editors who, before assigning black reporters to cover Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns, asked if the reporters could be “objective” or “unbiased” about covering a black candidate. Funny but I have yet to hear of an editor who has asked a white reporter if he or she can be objective covering Pat Buchanan.
Farrakhan, quite the opposite, beats up the journalists who are most likely to give a black leader a fair shake, if not a free ride.
Perhaps he was still chafing from the last bold challenge he gave to black journalists. It came last May when he was asked at the National Press Club about charges that he was aiding and abetting his friends in the Islamic government of the Sudan in covering up the enslavement and selling of non-Muslim blacks, including children, in the nation’s war-torn southern region.
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Suddenly the minister’s glow-in-the-dark smile vanished. “Where is the proof?” he exploded. “If slavery exists, why don’t you go as a member of the press, and . . . tell the American people what you have found.”
Two reporters, one white, one black, for the Baltimore Sun accepted the challenge and found the purchase of two black boys to be astonishingly easy in the war-torn land. They reported their experience, with photos, in a three-part series in June. Farrakhan dismissed the report and the Nation of Islam newspaper, The Final Call, called the Sun a “Zionist Jewish daily.”
Now the plot thickens. The same week Farrakhan was attacking black journalists, it turns out, he was applying to the Treasury Department for permission to receive a $1 billion gift from Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya, a nation that at least one State Department report says has received slaves from the Sudan.
Farrakhan’s announced goal was to fund self-help, black-owned farms, supermarkets and other enterprises. In his quest to win black hearts here at home, he apparently doesn’t care how many blacks it hurts overseas. One can only wonder how he feels about the few, but significant, African blacks who profited from America’s slave trade. Maybe this is Farrakhan’s version of payback.
Before Farrakhan loosely throws around the word “slave” to describe black journalists, he should look up the term “blood money.” It refers to money earned with the blood of others.
Then he should ask himself, “Who’s enslaving whom?”