The Last Angry Man

Washington Monthly, Jan, 2001 by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Farrakhan has found a cause in black America's nostalgia. Indeed, his orchestration of a black mass wedding may have been more brilliant than he's been given credit for. Consider that in 1960, 79 percent of black men between the age of 30 and 34 were married. By 1994, the percentage had dropped to 33. Meanwhile, the number of black women between 15 and 44 who have never been married has skyrocketed to 56 percent from 28 percent over the same period. Those figures make the mass wedding an especially potent symbol.

There's nothing inherently wrong with preaching the value of marriage and family, except that it isn't especially unique. Black America doesn't really need Farrakhan to condemn it for moral failings; white America has been doing that quite well for years. More importantly, Farrakhan's conversion from black radical to social conservative has rendered him ordinary.

It's a sad turn of events, because there is still a need for someone like the old Farrakhan--an impolite African-American leader who makes white people uncomfortable, gets under their skin by telling unpleasant truths, and refuses to let them ignore the effects of their racism. In spite of all the gains African Americans have made in the past few decades, systemic racism is still waging war on the black community, even if black people choose not to see it. Nowhere is this more evident than in the criminal justice arena.

During George W. Bush's crusade to the White House, Bush was able to boast of his record of executing people in the state of Texas. Despite the fact that the death penalty's application is fraught with race, Bush's flippant remarks during the presidential debate went largely unchallenged by the country's black leadership. Farrakhan was silent on the issue--even as his own state, Illinois, was proving to be a breeding ground for errors in capital punishment cases, and it eventually rejected the whole procedure.

Ditto on the drug war. A recent study by Human Rights Watch found that blacks made up 62 percent of the nation's drug offenders. The study estimated that in the state of Illinois, for every white person that goes to prison on a drug conviction, 57 African Americans go first. In Alabama, because of the nexus between criminal justice and voting rights, nearly one-third of all black males can't vote.

Criminal justice is one the last vestiges of the sort of overt racism that Nation of Islam leaders have always railed against. But with Farrakhan busy kowtowing to Lieberman, there is no longer a national figure of any prominence who can confront those issues and give voice to the still simmering rage of black men.

Without someone like Farrakhan on the fringes willing to fight power with power, even moderate black leaders may find themselves handicapped. Like Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X before him, Farrakhan's mere presence on the political scene gave leaders like Jesse Jackson or Julian Bond a stronger bargaining position: Deal with us or you'll have Farrakhan to reckon with, was often their implicit message. Now, though, the threat of unleashing Farrakhan and his Moonie-esque minions isn't likely to leave many on Capitol Hill shaking in their boots.