ANOTHER FROM MY FILES

 I thought you might find this one of historical interest.

The Farrakhan Fiasco:

The UMass Amherst Reaction to Louis Farrakhan’s Visit

Seven months ago, on March 9th, Minister Louis Farrakhan came to speak at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. An audience of roughly two thousand listened to a three hour speech that was, according to most reports, lively, informative, inspiring, and forceful.

The university administration's reaction to Farrakhan's visit can charitably be described as hysterical. A month before Minister Farrakhan was scheduled to speak, the Chancellor, David Scott, assembled most of his senior administrators and a good many faculty and staff at his home for a lengthy strategy session, after which he issued a two-page statement in which he delicately balanced his commitment to the Constitution and the ideals of free debate against what he described as the ugliness of Farrakhan's message and the pain it could confidently be expected to cause among what he tastefully referred to as certain "communities."

In the face of Farrakhan's visit, which it clearly viewed in roughly the way medieval Europe viewed the approach of the armies of Ghengis Khan, the administration mobilized the entire university. The March 4 issue of the Campus Chronicle, under the headline "Programs, Workshops Pose Counterpoint to Speech," described some of the defensive measures prompted by the impending threat to the university community: A two-week video series on the Housing Services Cable Network "spotlighting the Jewish and African-American cultures"; a workshop for faculty, teaching assistants, residence directors, and student leaders on "Leading Difficult Discussions" guided by three representatives of the Social Justice Education Program; two meetings at the offices of the university Ombud at which trained student mediators from the Multicultural Student Conflict Resolution Team would provide "an opportunity to listen to concerns, issues and feelings related to the Farrakhan speech [before the evening of the speech, note]; an afternoon lecture entitled "Talking About Race, Learning About Racism,"; a session that same afternoon on "Beyond Blacks and Jews: How Students Can Be Allies for Each Other"; another session, the next afternoon, entitled "Anti-Semitism: What's It All About"; and finally, on the night of Farrakhan's visit, a protest co-sponsored by the Newman Center, United Christian Foundation, Episcopal Chaplaincy, Hillel, and other groups.

Grant Ingle, director of the campus's Office of Human Relations, described clearly and rather revealingly the purpose of this extraordinary flurry of activity. "This isn't simply a controversial speaker coming that we have to suffer through," he said. "It's also an educational opportunity." The question explored at meetings he attended was, he said, "how can we come together as a campus in responding to a controversial speaker like Louis Farrakhan?" [Daily Hampshire Gazette, February 11,1994, p.9]

This image of the members of a university community facing a controversial speaker shoulder to shoulder, rather like wildebeest turning to confront a marauding lion, is rather startling, to say the least, as is the notion that controversy on a university campus is a trial to be "suffered through." But that is not the focus of my observations today. Nor shall I address the substance of Farrakhan's remarks, inasmuch as I did not attend his lecture, and know about it only through a partial transcript, the accounts of several of my students, and fragmentary newspaper reports.

My interest in the Farrakhan affair can be summed up in two words: Why Farrakhan? Why was the university thrown into panic by the prospect of a Farrakhan visit? Why did the entire administration, from the Chancellor on down, treat an announced lecture as a threat to the safety, the sanity, the integrity, the very life of the university community? What does this reaction tell us, not about Farrakhan, but about those who run the university? And, inasmuch as the university's reaction to Farrakhan, however bizarre, was of a piece with the reaction of many other American institutions, officials, and individuals to Minister Farrakhan, what does this affair tell us about significant segments of American society?

The administration's answer to these questions can be inferred easily enough from the opening lines of the statement issued by Chancellor Scott a month before the lecture:

The messages from Mr. Farrakhan's organization are prompting intense discussions and deep soul-searching not only among the communities which feel directly the pain of the hate and stereotypes from those messages but also among various quarters of the African American community.

It is to be expected that the same discourse and emotions would take place on our campus at the news of the impending visit of Mr. Farrakhan at the invitation of students.

But this cannot possibly be an adequate explanation of the university's reaction. It is a principle of reason widely understood and well established that what counts as a good reason in one case must count as a good reason in all relevantly similar cases. Now, there are many, many speakers whose messages cause pain to members of the university community and prompt intense discussions in various quarters - speakers who defend the theses of Sociobiology, for example; speakers who celebrate the fall of communism, or the virtues of the free market, or the Christian promise of salvation; speakers who call for "the end of welfare as we know it," or advocate the death penalty; and speakers who insult the intelligence and mock the sufferings of the poor by claiming that in a capitalist economy workers are paid a wage equal to their marginal product.

All of these speakers, and many more, prompt intense discussions and deep soul-searching among the communities which feel directly the pain of the hate and stereotypes from those messages, and yet the Chancellor is not moved by the prospect of their appearance on campus to pull up the drawbridge, lay in provisions for a siege, call emergency strategy sessions at his home, and issue statements to the university community.

My colleague, Michael Thelwell, put his finger on the essential point in a follow-up article printed by the Valley Advocate a week after Farrakhan's visit. Thelwell was asked by the Advocate reporter, "The basic question is, What is your response to the Farrakhan lecture?", and his reply was, "What is your interest in writing about this? Why are you writing about it?"

Michael was not merely being puckish, though he is perfectly capable of that. His point was that the reaction of the entire university and newspaper community to Farrakhan's visit was so disproportionate to the event as to call for an explanation. Clearly, there are certain as yet unidentified differentia that distinguish Farrakhan's visit from all others. What might they be?

The answer appears quite simple: Farrakhan had in the past made statements attacking Jews, among others, statements which others considered ugly and exaggerated. But that cannot possibly be the end of it, because countless speakers make statements that others find ugly and exaggerated.

There are in fact two reasons for the special response to Farrakhan. One of them was perfectly well understood by everyone involved in the affair, though it was not considered acceptable to mention it. The other is equally obvious, though perhaps not so readily available to the self-consciousness of most members of the UMass Amherst community.

The first reason, of course, is that there are well-organized groups of American Jews who have succeeded in getting institutions such as UMass to treat their personal concerns as politically important, regardless of any actual threat to their legally protectable interests. Neither the Nation of Islam nor any other African-American organization or grouping poses any real threat to the interests of American Jews, regardless of what their representatives may say in public speeches. The members of the UMass Amherst Jewish community who protested Farrakhan's visit have no grounds to fear that his language will be transformed into actions inimical to their interests. But they have succeeded in getting others to treat their personal distress or outrage as a fact of such public significance that an entire university campus must be mobilized to provide a context for their distaste for Farrakhan's

Contrast this situation with the reaction of those on welfare for "the end of welfare as we know it." Those statements, uttered in quite socially acceptable language by everyone from the Governor on up and down the political hierarchy constitute an immediate threat to the well-being of welfare recipients. Mothers already struggling simply to feed and clothe themselves and their children must daily face the real and imminent threat of cuts in their support payments, or even a termination of support all together. Since I am not myself a mother on welfare, I cannot pretend to speak for those who are, but an abstract consideration of the matter suggests to me that at least some mothers on welfare find such statements ugly and offensive. Would the Chancellor mobilize a month of defensive seminars and training sessions in preparation for a campaign visit from Mitt Romney or William Weld? I imagine not.

Lest it strike you as too outré to take notice of the sensibilities of welfare mothers, consider an example closer in substance to the Farrakhan affair - the sociobiological attempt to justify the discriminatory treatment of African-Americans. The "pain and the hatred from the messages" of the late Richard Herrnstein, of E. 0. Wilson, of William Shockley, and of countless other socially respectable academics, is felt quite as keenly in the part of the university community I inhabit as any caused by Farrakhan's speeches, yet no strategy sessions have been called at the Chancellor's house to counteract those effects.

The political power of the official Jewish community in America is, of course, not unique. It is a general fact about American public life that there is a sharp distinction between those groups whose interests possess political weight, and hence are accorded respect by governments, by universities, by media commentators, and even by the courts, and those other groups whose interests, however intensely felt, fall outside the realm of public acknowledgement.

The distinction is dynamic and fluid, changing over time in response to political struggle. The greatest victory any group can win in American politics is the fight to become one of the officially recognized interest groups, whose private sensibilities and substantive interests are accorded political significance. One of the striking changes of the past fifteen years or so has been the dramatic decline in the ability of the African-American community to win or preserve political weight for its interests.

I said that there were two reasons for the special response to Farrakhan's visit. The second is that for a very long time in America, white society has found it necessary, at any given moment, to demonize one or two Black leaders, as the price for allowing the rest to enter the circle of social and political acceptability. Having enslaved, oppressed, and exploited people of African descent, whites in America quite reasonably fear an angry response. So they encourage docility, submission to their laws, a willingness to talk, and most of all a commitment to non-violence in those who emerge as leaders in the Black community. Above all else, they cherish and celebrate those leaders whose behavior, speech, and demeanor demonstrate that they look to the white community for validation or approval. Nothing is more threatening than Black leaders who seem more concerned with the approval of their own followers than with admission into the clubs, restaurants, study groups, commissions, universities, or symposia of whites.

In each age since before the Civil War, we can find one or a few Black men and women - more often men than women, interestingly enough - who are seen as outrageous, unacceptable, evil. One of the odder aspects of this familiar phenomenon is that a previous generation's demon may, by a curious metamorphosis, join this generation's pantheon of honored Black leaders. W. E. B. Du Bois was demonized in this fashion during the time when Booker T. Washington was the white man's favorite Negro. Malcolm X stood in as demon during Martin Luther King, Jr.'s apotheosis. We remember faintly, with some bemusement, that King was attacked both for his opposition to the Viet Nam War and for his unconscionable attempt to transform a safely Southern voting rights struggle into a fight for economic justice in the slums of Chicago. And in one of those extraordinary miracles of self-conscious self-delusion, by which history is stood on its head, we now make movies and television specials about Malcolm in which, through the very act of reminding ourselves how thoroughly he was once vilified, we somehow tell ourselves that he was, all along, a tame, proper, acceptable Negro, fit for inclusion in syllabi of even the most inoffensive college curriculum.  

In the end, the Farrakhan fiasco at UMass Amherst is a lesson not in language, but in power. It is a lesson in the power of the Jewish community to win protected status for its sentiments and sensibilities, and in the inability of the Nation of Islam to win the same status for its concerns. It is, of course, also a lesson in the ability of excluded groups to play on the phobias of those within the circle of acceptability, so as to win a degree of attention they would otherwise be unable to command.

In addition, the Farrakhan affair reminds those of us who need reminding of the effort by the white community to deny to the African-American community autonomy in the choice of its leaders. Even such moral monsters as William Bennett, John Silber, George Will, Pat Buchanan, Phil Gramm, Newt Gingrich, and Pat Robertson, who, given their way, would inflict unimaginable suffering on tens of millions of Americans, are treated with respect and forbearance by the arbiters of American social acceptability. One cannot imagine the University of Massachusetts mobilizing itself to "suffer through" a visit from any of these gentlemen.

As always, speech is the garb in which power conceals itself. And the charge of uttering offensive speech is a disguised call for the repression of a group whose interests are a threat to those with power.

Since the Farrakhan affair was about power, not language, and since all politics, as the late Tip O'Neill reminded us, is local, let me conclude with a wonderfully clear and self-aware statement by one of the students who invited Farrakhan to the campus. In the Advocate interview quoted earlier, Mike Thelwell concluded with these remarks:

[T]he students have a legitimate - and this is the most saddening part - need. Those who invited him do in fact feel marginalized on this large white campus. At a public discussion before he came, I asked, "why do you do it?" One student said, "there is this facade and rhetoric of cultural diversity, but there is no real discussion of conditions in our communities, and we thought Farrakhan would do that. When we bring other speakers no one pays attention, it's business as usual. We invited Farrakhan and now the President returns our phone calls and there is discussion in every area of the campus.