7 ms·

I think Farrakhan is a really tough case. First, he's cartoonishly anti-semitic and has been for years. He's as much of a hate monger as any of the other peopl

I think Farrakhan is a really tough case. First, he's cartoonishly anti-semitic and has been for years. He's as much of a hate monger as any of the other people who were banned and that's enough reason to ban him. That given, he has also materially supported vulnerable populations in a way that few organizations have. He has pushed very hard for black people to be proud of their blackness and to create narratives in which blackness is not looked down upon. This is good, needed work. Members of the black community have spoken about and wrestled with this difficulty. [1][2] I don't think I can add anything other than to agree his situation is more complicated, though I also agree that he should be excluded from the public square as long as he continues to promote hatred. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/nation-of-islam/555332/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/nation-... [2] https://www.theroot.com/a-word-about-louis-farrakhan-and-tamika-mallory-1823607435 https://www.theroot.com/a-word-about-louis-farrakhan-and-tam...

cat199 8y ago
> to create narratives in which blackness is not looked down upon. This is good, needed work. so like: In the Nation of Islam, both God and the devil are human beings. Elijah Muhammad identified the devil as the white man, the Caucasian race. According to Elijah, though the black race is many trillions of years old, the white race began a mere six thousand years ago with Yakub, one of the Black Gods of this time cycle.[15] Elijah explained, "The white race is not equal with darker people because the white race was not created by the God of Righteousness. . . . They were made by Yakub, an original Black Man—who is from the Creator. Yakub, the father of the devil, made the white race, a race of devils—enemies of the darker people of the earth. The white race is not made by nature to accept righteousness."[16] is 'good, needed work'?? https://www.answering-islam.org/NoI/noi2.html https://www.answering-islam.org/NoI/noi2.html
- aeturnum 8y ago
  Hah, no, I would not say that's the "good" part of the the Nation of Islam. However, just like Christianity has been able to do some amount of "good work" while insisting that "Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says"[1], the Nation is not "all bad." I personally would judge its good works to be more crippled by its doctrine than most faiths. If you want to read a good thinking wrestling with the Nation of Islam I recommend The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. I think he does a good job of capturing the contradictions and attractions of Elijah Muhammad (another undeniably hateful man) in the flesh. [1] 1 Corinthians 14:34, NIV
  - TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
    That was PART of the apostle Paul's admonition about keeping order in a gathering of the saints, from a wide variety of angles. I think the context is explained by the next verse: If they have questions, let them ask their husbands at home. Ergo: don't disrupt the proceedings with distractions. (And even if you accept this interpretation, you may now commence criticizing Paul for inferring that only women needed to be told this.) People who look down on Christianity love to bring up this scripture, but do you actually know any significant branches of Christianity that enforce this? I'm a fan of one of the most stringent denominations around, and even we have A LOT of women speakers and ministers in our organization. I honestly don't know any which abides by a literal application of this scripure. I've only ever seen it used as a wedge issue against strict biblical interpretation.
    - cat199 8y ago
      nevermind the glorification of mary, spreading the practice practicing of monogamy instead of male:multi-female polygamy, being anti-prostitution, etc.. oh right, but those things are really 'supressing women'.
    - aeturnum 8y ago
      > do you actually know any significant branches of Christianity that enforce this? Not universally. I think there are denominations that use that passage as justification to keep women from being Deacons but I couldn't cite one off the top of my head. That said, I used it as an example and I'm sure if you're that knowledgeable about scripture you're familiar with the other parts of scripture that are (or have been) used with questionable intent. If I wanted to be less fair I could have cited the passages that slave owners used to argue that slavery was "christian." I could also have talked about the anti-homosexual (or perhaps anti-decadence) passages in romans. I also could have cited the Mormon church's doctrine around skin color, but that's a bit of a horse of a different color. My point, which I think is preserved, is that scripture and practice are two different things. Scripture colors practice - but the Nation of Islam is not (as far as I know) going around hurting white people because they're demons any more than Christian denominations go around forcing women to be silent because there's a passage from Paul.
- colordrops 8y ago
  As if other religions had a sane non violent healthy mythology. Please.
  - DtnB 8y ago
    Other religions that have kept their popularity and adherents over the centuries(and much in the past century) have, part, reformed and toned down the significance of these violent mythologies especially in their relevance to doctrine. To assert otherwise seems like arguing in bad faith.
    - colordrops 8y ago
      Yes, you are arguing in very bad faith to ignore the millions dead in the middle east in the last 20 years due to sectarian fighting between abrahamic faiths.
      - Fellshard 8y ago
        Just one.
        colordrops 8y ago
        The level of discussion in this thread is unfortunate.
        Fellshard 8y ago
        I get pretty irritated with intentional imprecision, as usually it's attempting to obfuscate what's actually happening. Unidirectional violence from exactly one religion should not be then generalized to a family of religions.
      - pmarreck 8y ago
        Hate to break the news to you, but... https://qr.ae/TWIst4 https://qr.ae/TWIst4 "...Anti-religion has caused more deaths than religion" I'm no fan of abrahamic faiths nor religion in general, though. I just try to separate fact from fiction. I'm kept very busy. ;)
vibrato 8y ago
So you've established that it's desirable for black people to be proud of their blackness. Is it desirable for white people to be proud of their whiteness? If you allow for one of these and not the other, you'd be a racist.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  “Black” and “White” as identities are both products of White racism (outside of White racism, individual ethnic identities have historically been prominent, but not a racial identity.) Positive Black racial identity is a reaction against White racism, whereas White racial identity is it's continuation. And it remains the case that the effort to advance a broad crosd-ethnic White racial identity is intimately connected with White supremacy. Mirror tests work when the things being swapped are actually, in relevant context, similarly situated, but that is simply not the case in Black vs. White identity. Abstractly, there's nothing wrong with positive White racial identity, but in the real world, that doesn't exist as free-floating thing detached from White supremacist ideology.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - vibrato 8y ago
    And black identity is detached from black supremacist ideology? In fact, logic is useful in evaluating the world. All of it.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > And black identity is detached from black supremacist ideology? Yes, it is. Both exist (well, at least black identity and black nationalism do, and that's close enough that I'm not going to quibble about it), but while black nationalism depends on black identity black identity exists and thrives outside of it (and historically does so as a reaction against White anti-Black racist actions and ideology), while White racial identity as opposed to ethnic identities largely does not exist outside of White racism (of which it is also a product, though not, obviously, a reaction against.) > In fact, logic is useful in evaluating the world. Logic is useful for evaluating the relationship between abstract concepts, but is only useful for evaluating the world when you join it with all the relevant facts about the world. When you reason about abstractions without facts, or in ways which implicitly make counterfactual assumptions, you reach conclusions that are either without material relevance or incorrect.
reissbaker 8y ago
Farrakhan is, to be frank, not a tough case. There are plenty of people who have incited mass hatred who also were, not coincidentally, very much promoters of their own ethnic identity and superiority. Yes, black people have faced and continue to face unjust oppression. But that doesn't give carte blanche for anti-Semitism, with quotes like: “The Jews, a small handful, control the movement of this great nation, like a radar controls the movement of a great ship in the waters. … The Jews got a stranglehold on the Congress." Or implying that Jews are subhuman insects: “I’m not an anti-Semite. I’m anti-Termite.” Or veiled calls to violence: “And you do with me as is written, but remember that I have warned you that Allah will punish you. You are wicked deceivers of the American people. You have sucked their blood. You are not real Jews, those of you that are not real Jews. You are the synagogue of Satan, and you have wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell. But I warn you in the name of Allah, you would be wise to leave me alone. But if you choose to crucify me, know that Allah will crucify you.” Or explicit calls to violence: "Can that be the holy land, and you have gay parades, and want to permit to have a gay parade in Jerusalem when no prophet ever sanctioned that behavior. How can that be the Israel, how can that be Jerusalem with secular people running the holy land when it should be the holy people running the holy land. That land is gonna be cleansed with blood!" Seriously, this is cut and dry. There are plenty of other people to lionize for e.g. promoting black bodies. And if wanting to kill all the Jews and loudly, repeatedly proclaiming his belief that they're evil and worthy of death to his religious followers on social media isn't a big enough deal to make it non-complicated, we're talking about the guy who called for the death of Malcolm X and whose religious followers carried out his assassination within months. He is violent and deranged and his followers have acted violently at his behest before. (Also, respectfully, I don't think Farrakhan's anti-Semitic proclamations feel particularly "cartoonish" to the Jews he's targeting.)
- rayiner 8y ago
  The point is not whether there are people to “lionize” that are better. The point is whether an organization like Facebook (which didn’t have a single black board member until last year) has standing to police such opinions. I vociferously oppose him, and think liberals have made a huge mistake being soft on anti-semitism lately. But leave that aside. Would just the stuff he has said about white people justify Facebook banning him? If so, that’s a pretty breathtaking assertion of power to police a very complex range of narratives.
serf 8y ago
>He has pushed very hard for black people to be proud of their blackness and to create narratives in which blackness is not looked down upon. This is good, needed work. (disclaimer : i'm about as anti FB and anti-censorship as one can be.) Well, he (Farrakhan) mostly just taught blacks to hate whites -- which I guess achieves more 'black pride', but not in any manner that I think is sustainable or responsible. Rather than raising one group up, he just taught that the other group was worse than perceived. "White people are potential humans – they haven’t evolved yet." “You are not now, nor have you ever been a citizen of America. You are a slave to white America.” and my personal favorite, although unrelated to whites in America : “Qadaffi’s a revolutionary, he’s my friend, he’s my brother. And I would never deny him because you don’t like him… I love him.”

cat199 8y ago

> to create narratives in which blackness is not looked down upon. This is good, needed work. so like: In the Nation of Islam, both God and the devil are human beings. Elijah Muhammad identified the devil as the white man, the Caucasian race. According to Elijah, though the black race is many trillions of years old, the white race began a mere six thousand years ago with Yakub, one of the Black Gods of this time cycle.[15] Elijah explained, "The white race is not equal with darker people because the white race was not created by the God of Righteousness. . . . They were made by Yakub, an original Black Man—who is from the Creator. Yakub, the father of the devil, made the white race, a race of devils—enemies of the darker people of the earth. The white race is not made by nature to accept righteousness."[16] is 'good, needed work'?? https://www.answering-islam.org/NoI/noi2.html https://www.answering-islam.org/NoI/noi2.html

aeturnum 8y ago
Hah, no, I would not say that's the "good" part of the the Nation of Islam. However, just like Christianity has been able to do some amount of "good work" while insisting that "Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says"[1], the Nation is not "all bad." I personally would judge its good works to be more crippled by its doctrine than most faiths. If you want to read a good thinking wrestling with the Nation of Islam I recommend The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. I think he does a good job of capturing the contradictions and attractions of Elijah Muhammad (another undeniably hateful man) in the flesh. [1] 1 Corinthians 14:34, NIV
- TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
  That was PART of the apostle Paul's admonition about keeping order in a gathering of the saints, from a wide variety of angles. I think the context is explained by the next verse: If they have questions, let them ask their husbands at home. Ergo: don't disrupt the proceedings with distractions. (And even if you accept this interpretation, you may now commence criticizing Paul for inferring that only women needed to be told this.) People who look down on Christianity love to bring up this scripture, but do you actually know any significant branches of Christianity that enforce this? I'm a fan of one of the most stringent denominations around, and even we have A LOT of women speakers and ministers in our organization. I honestly don't know any which abides by a literal application of this scripure. I've only ever seen it used as a wedge issue against strict biblical interpretation.
  - cat199 8y ago
    nevermind the glorification of mary, spreading the practice practicing of monogamy instead of male:multi-female polygamy, being anti-prostitution, etc.. oh right, but those things are really 'supressing women'.
  - aeturnum 8y ago
    > do you actually know any significant branches of Christianity that enforce this? Not universally. I think there are denominations that use that passage as justification to keep women from being Deacons but I couldn't cite one off the top of my head. That said, I used it as an example and I'm sure if you're that knowledgeable about scripture you're familiar with the other parts of scripture that are (or have been) used with questionable intent. If I wanted to be less fair I could have cited the passages that slave owners used to argue that slavery was "christian." I could also have talked about the anti-homosexual (or perhaps anti-decadence) passages in romans. I also could have cited the Mormon church's doctrine around skin color, but that's a bit of a horse of a different color. My point, which I think is preserved, is that scripture and practice are two different things. Scripture colors practice - but the Nation of Islam is not (as far as I know) going around hurting white people because they're demons any more than Christian denominations go around forcing women to be silent because there's a passage from Paul.
colordrops 8y ago
As if other religions had a sane non violent healthy mythology. Please.
- DtnB 8y ago
  Other religions that have kept their popularity and adherents over the centuries(and much in the past century) have, part, reformed and toned down the significance of these violent mythologies especially in their relevance to doctrine. To assert otherwise seems like arguing in bad faith.
  - colordrops 8y ago
    Yes, you are arguing in very bad faith to ignore the millions dead in the middle east in the last 20 years due to sectarian fighting between abrahamic faiths.
    - Fellshard 8y ago
      Just one.
      - colordrops 8y ago
        The level of discussion in this thread is unfortunate.
        Fellshard 8y ago
        I get pretty irritated with intentional imprecision, as usually it's attempting to obfuscate what's actually happening. Unidirectional violence from exactly one religion should not be then generalized to a family of religions.
    - pmarreck 8y ago
      Hate to break the news to you, but... https://qr.ae/TWIst4 https://qr.ae/TWIst4 "...Anti-religion has caused more deaths than religion" I'm no fan of abrahamic faiths nor religion in general, though. I just try to separate fact from fiction. I'm kept very busy. ;)

vibrato 8y ago

So you've established that it's desirable for black people to be proud of their blackness. Is it desirable for white people to be proud of their whiteness? If you allow for one of these and not the other, you'd be a racist.

dragonwriter 8y ago
“Black” and “White” as identities are both products of White racism (outside of White racism, individual ethnic identities have historically been prominent, but not a racial identity.) Positive Black racial identity is a reaction against White racism, whereas White racial identity is it's continuation. And it remains the case that the effort to advance a broad crosd-ethnic White racial identity is intimately connected with White supremacy. Mirror tests work when the things being swapped are actually, in relevant context, similarly situated, but that is simply not the case in Black vs. White identity. Abstractly, there's nothing wrong with positive White racial identity, but in the real world, that doesn't exist as free-floating thing detached from White supremacist ideology.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- vibrato 8y ago
  And black identity is detached from black supremacist ideology? In fact, logic is useful in evaluating the world. All of it.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > And black identity is detached from black supremacist ideology? Yes, it is. Both exist (well, at least black identity and black nationalism do, and that's close enough that I'm not going to quibble about it), but while black nationalism depends on black identity black identity exists and thrives outside of it (and historically does so as a reaction against White anti-Black racist actions and ideology), while White racial identity as opposed to ethnic identities largely does not exist outside of White racism (of which it is also a product, though not, obviously, a reaction against.) > In fact, logic is useful in evaluating the world. Logic is useful for evaluating the relationship between abstract concepts, but is only useful for evaluating the world when you join it with all the relevant facts about the world. When you reason about abstractions without facts, or in ways which implicitly make counterfactual assumptions, you reach conclusions that are either without material relevance or incorrect.

reissbaker 8y ago

Farrakhan is, to be frank, not a tough case. There are plenty of people who have incited mass hatred who also were, not coincidentally, very much promoters of their own ethnic identity and superiority. Yes, black people have faced and continue to face unjust oppression. But that doesn't give carte blanche for anti-Semitism, with quotes like: “The Jews, a small handful, control the movement of this great nation, like a radar controls the movement of a great ship in the waters. … The Jews got a stranglehold on the Congress." Or implying that Jews are subhuman insects: “I’m not an anti-Semite. I’m anti-Termite.” Or veiled calls to violence: “And you do with me as is written, but remember that I have warned you that Allah will punish you. You are wicked deceivers of the American people. You have sucked their blood. You are not real Jews, those of you that are not real Jews. You are the synagogue of Satan, and you have wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell. But I warn you in the name of Allah, you would be wise to leave me alone. But if you choose to crucify me, know that Allah will crucify you.” Or explicit calls to violence: "Can that be the holy land, and you have gay parades, and want to permit to have a gay parade in Jerusalem when no prophet ever sanctioned that behavior. How can that be the Israel, how can that be Jerusalem with secular people running the holy land when it should be the holy people running the holy land. That land is gonna be cleansed with blood!" Seriously, this is cut and dry. There are plenty of other people to lionize for e.g. promoting black bodies. And if wanting to kill all the Jews and loudly, repeatedly proclaiming his belief that they're evil and worthy of death to his religious followers on social media isn't a big enough deal to make it non-complicated, we're talking about the guy who called for the death of Malcolm X and whose religious followers carried out his assassination within months. He is violent and deranged and his followers have acted violently at his behest before. (Also, respectfully, I don't think Farrakhan's anti-Semitic proclamations feel particularly "cartoonish" to the Jews he's targeting.)

rayiner 8y ago
The point is not whether there are people to “lionize” that are better. The point is whether an organization like Facebook (which didn’t have a single black board member until last year) has standing to police such opinions. I vociferously oppose him, and think liberals have made a huge mistake being soft on anti-semitism lately. But leave that aside. Would just the stuff he has said about white people justify Facebook banning him? If so, that’s a pretty breathtaking assertion of power to police a very complex range of narratives.

serf 8y ago

>He has pushed very hard for black people to be proud of their blackness and to create narratives in which blackness is not looked down upon. This is good, needed work. (disclaimer : i'm about as anti FB and anti-censorship as one can be.) Well, he (Farrakhan) mostly just taught blacks to hate whites -- which I guess achieves more 'black pride', but not in any manner that I think is sustainable or responsible. Rather than raising one group up, he just taught that the other group was worse than perceived. "White people are potential humans – they haven’t evolved yet." “You are not now, nor have you ever been a citizen of America. You are a slave to white America.” and my personal favorite, although unrelated to whites in America : “Qadaffi’s a revolutionary, he’s my friend, he’s my brother. And I would never deny him because you don’t like him… I love him.”