DIARY
DAVID ENGLISH SNew York egregation or integration? For the first half of this century, America went with seg- regation, de facto in the North and de jure in the South. Then Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of an Alabama bus and the drive to integration began. This month, after 40 years, that drive is coming to a full stop. Louis Farrakhan, whose bril- liant tactic of the Million Man March on Washington has made him America's sec- ond-most-talked-about black, is the leading exponent of the separate but equal cause. His organisation, the Nation of Islam, is the most disciplined and militant of the black groups in the country. Their idea of equali- ty is that no taxes should be levied on any black family in America and billions of dol- lars must be given to the black community (i.e., the Nation of Islam) in the form of reparation for centuries of white injustice. As we know, Farrakhan hates all whites but reserves special venom for Jews, homosexu- als and feminists. He has a particular theo- ry, which he articulates with frightening conviction, that rich Jews were in league with Hitler and actually financed the Holo- caust to get rid of millions of poor Jews. There is meaning in this madness. It is a coded message to rich and successful blacks who have joined the white American estab- lishment. Farrakhan believes that this establishment is committed to an organised mass-destruction of the blacks by means of drugs and welfare. And middle-class blacks are increasingly buying this argument.
DeLores Tucker, once the highest ranking black woman civil servant in Amer- ica, claims that white record companies flooding the market with black `gangsta rap' records are doing so to set up black people as 'trash' fit only for extermination. Picking up Farrakhan's theme, she pro- claims that 'all the negative images of Jews fostered by the Nazis were so powerful that when Hitler moved to eliminate the Jewish masses, many middle-class Jews said, "They're not fit to live with us," and nobody cared. That's what they're doing today, here in America.' My black and wealthy next door neighbour, when I lived in Scarsdale, an expensive New York sub- urb, has fled back to the ghetto, though he lives in the 'perfumed' part of it. 'It just feels more comfortable with the brothers,' he said. I noticed that he has taken his accent down and was using black slang. `Most of those Westchester "Mo Fos" never accepted me anyway,' he explained, though I saw no evidence of this at the time. But I understand his change of life. He did not want to be classed as a race traitor, as many middle- class blacks have been. Michael Williams, a black academic who argues for race-neutral education, is denounced by the black film director, Spike Lee, as a Sambo Tom' who should be `dragged into an alley and beaten with a baseball bat'. Thomas Sowell, the right- wing philosopher, is accused of being a black Vidkun Quisling. Middle-class lifestyle is seen as collaborationist, while black underclass behaviour is 'authentically black'. So this is now becoming the cloth- ing, language and culture of blacks who only recently were behaving like the Huxtable family in the Bill Cosby television show. It is very hard for the white liberals to take. An editor of a newspaper here told me he will never recover from the exultant shout of 'Yes' and the air-punching that went on from his black reporters gathered round the newsroom television as the O.J. Simpson 'not guilty' verdict came in. He had spent years encouraging those blacks, promoting them in his newspaper, in order to foster racial harmony.
But since the O.J. Simpson verdict there is an icy divide between the editor's black and white staff. It was really the white backlash which caused him great sadness, he said. He could not grasp that the Simp- son case has released into the open the resentment that had been harboured in the whites by years of 'affirmative action'. But in any case no editor should have been sur- prised at the Simpson verdict. For some time, black juries in New York have been acquitting black defendants accused of assaulting, raping or even murdering whites. In the Bronx, for example, the acquittal rate of black defendants on felony charges is almost 50 per cent. As one black lawyer said to me 'Under Jim Crow, good ol' boy juries always acquitted any white accused of raping a black woman or killing a black man. Now we have black juries tacquitting the bros when they're accused of attacks on -.whitey. What goes around, conies around, and it's our turn now.' Meanwhile Mr. Farrakhan is also calling for one-day strikes by black athletes. At first glance, this seems unlikely, given the huge sums of money that these athletes are paid. But it's the whites who would feel the pain. An English friend just back from a business trip to Omaha watched the local state university team playing Washington. Very few black people live in Omaha, yet the team was composed almost entirely of blacks. And when he looked around the 70,000-seat stadium, he saw only white faces. 'There were these thousands of white Nebraskans cheering madly for a team composed of blacks, none of whom came from Nebraska,' he said. 'It really seemed rather bizarre.' It is not bizarre at all. It is the norm. The athletic stars of America's two biggest sports — football and basket- ball — are overwhelmingly black but they are invariably watched by totally white crowds. Blacks may follow the sport on television but they rarely go to the games. It's one of the big mysteries of American life. But it has led to the Reverend Jesse Jackson's demand that television and news- papers appoint more black sports reporters. When asked why, he replied, 'Because sport in America is completely racist. It's the exploitation of the black athlete for the entertainment of white audiences.'
Farrakhan's organisation may be small. But it is stunningly effective. In the housing projects of Chicago, controlled by the paramilitary 'Fruits of Islam' security force, he has stamped out drugs and crime using methods of which the IRA would thor- oughly approve. Many whites, though fear- ing Farrakhan, admire his puritanical morality. It echoes a deep American tradi- tion. Farrakhan is going to be very big on the political scene for the foreseeable future. A bigot, a racist, surrounded by his loony FOS leibstandarte in uniforms which are a cross between the SS and an old-style Pullman-car porter's outfit, he is clearly a suitable case for treatment. But he does have one saving grace. The contempt in which he holds the white liberal establish- ment and the discomfort he is causing this unctuous section of American society, the most patronising of all the politically cor- rect classes, is a joy to behold. On that point alone, it makes you want to shout out `Hallelujah — and praise the Lord!'
Sir David English is Chairman of Associated Newspapers.
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