Express Yourself In Black Ink
Black Ink invites all students to
showcase their talents in a special literary
edition of Black Ink. We will be
accepttng poems, fiction, graphic art and other
innovative artistic forms.
Black Ink will accept entries until
Monday, February 4, 1991
j/KS Look for drop boxes in the Black Cultural Center, Black Student ^
Movement Office, Lenoir, Chase, Morrison, Hinton Janies, Craige,
Ehringhaus, Avery, Teague, Carmichael, Campus Y and
the Black Ink Office (Suite 108-Union)
Farrakhan
continued from p. 10
He urged women not to hurt the poten
tial lives inside their bodies, to choose
life because abortion before birth is the
same as murder after birth.
Yes, abortion may very well be
murder. But is it a case of murder, or is
it a case of humanely preventing a
slower death at the hands of the perni
cious society known as the United States
of America? Until our society cleans itself
of the multiple scourges of drugs, dis
ease, 40-oz. botdes of liquor, Jeri curl
juice, and other life-threatening elements,
thereby bringing about an environment
that is conducive for the growth and
maturity of our youth, I cannot agree
with the minister that abortion for Afri
can-Americans (at least) is murder.
For our children in general and our
males in particular, the chance of murder
inside or outside the womb is almost
equal. Abortion is not the issue. The
issue at hand is the environment which
threatens to kill us all and not the hu
mane prevention of exposure to an en
vironment that is, at best, a slow death.
Only when the extreme dangers which
threaten our lives are seriously reduced,
creating a better environment, can abor
tion become the vice the minister de
scribed.
And furthermore, he didn’t make the
issue clear as he could have. His best
defense against abortion was that it pre
vented great men like himself from being
born. For all the moral tones of his
speech, he did not make a clear-cut case
against abortion on a moral basis. Over
the years, controversial issues have been
discussed in a moral, religious and mili
tary fashion before being resolved. An
example of this is the method of Martin
Luther King Jr. in arguing that segrega
tion and discrimination was morally
wrong, and brotherhood and equality
were morally right. With that argument,
Dr. King was able to bring it into a forum
where Blacks could make their greatest
gains for civil rights.
But this is not the case with Minister
Farrakhan and the discussion of abor
tion. He further clouded an issue already
muddy with opinion and moral cases on
both sides. Maybe the minister is trying
this argument out and he may evolve
with time, but he needs to evolve faster
than this. Abortion is a problem, but it is
not the problem for African-Americans
in 1990.
Strange Bedfellows
Ultimately, the moral overtures of
his speech, especially concerning re
marks he made at the end, when he
predicted what would happen if he
would be in power, placed him in what
plenty of African-Americans must con
sider strange company: fundamentalists
like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell,
and—^worst of all—that revered cham
pion of “North Carolina values,” Sen.
Jesse Helms. Farrakhan’s call for a fun
damental society in which the death
penalty would be given to convicted
murderers, rapists and drug dealers
sounds the same in the throats of those
three men—no more, no less.
Farrakhan’s espousal of the death
penalty won thunderous applause from
the crowd. But it operates on the fear
that African-Americans would be vic
tims at the hands of Whites. What about
the rates at which we kill ourselves—
one of the few points of the night that
I agreed with (but one that has been
hammered by the media to the point of
saturation and beyond)?
If 96 percent of all African-Ameri-
cans are killed by other African-Ameri
cans, instituting the death penalty for
murder, dealing drugs (because there
are more African-Americans at the lower
levels of the drug trade than at higher
levels) and rape would not only be a
deterrent to crime, but also another
form of Black-on-Black aime where
the offender and the victimized, as has
been the case so often, both lose. Only
this time, it would be a form of geno
cide openly and officially sanctioned
by the government.
And Finally...
All in all, the minister was not totally
disappointing—^he did hit some good
points about historically Black institu
tions and their need to free themselves
from the whims of White-run govern
ments and train their students in a more
productive manner, which would ulti
mately result in their power to change
the environment for other African-
Americans. His Biblical parallel of King
Herod ordering the death of all Israelite
males to stifle their progress and the rise
of a prophet with America’s placing
African-American males in life-threaten
ing situations at home was interesting.
And his plausible expression of the
hypocrisy of America in thwarting the
progress of African-Americans for free
dom and then asking us to fight around
the world for the freedom of everyone
else while we ourselves are not free was
a continuation of the discussion of mili
tary service and the paradox of loyalty—
something African-Americans have dis
cussed in past wars.
But in conclusion, Minister Louis
Farrakhan’s speech was not impressive.
The man is very exciting, has taken some
very strong stances and is a fighter for
what we all want—the uplift of African-
Americans. He says his message makes
him a marked man, but for the wrong
reason. He thinks it is because his way is
the way. If he’s a marked man, it’s
because his message, although underde
veloped, is closer to providing an an
swer and agenda than his adversaries
would like to see.
“Leadership must meet the moral
challenge of its day,” said Jesse Jackson.
Minister Farrakhan may have met the
moral challenge of many of my peers in
Greensboro that night, but I seek some
thing deeper in scope and more defini
tive and comprehensive in nature that
will take us all to higher ground and
uplift all African-Americans. Peace.