There’s 3.5 million American Muslims.
600,000 are black.
Snoop Dogg isn’t one of them.
Snoop associates with the Nation of Islam but also declares himself a “born-again Christian,” not to mention his Rastafarian practice. Snoop is a very broadly spiritual man.
Snoop adores his “dear brother” Louis Farrakhan, the infamous minister who leads the Nation of Islam.
Two weeks ago, Facebook banned Farrakhan alongside several right-wing activists, including Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones.
Snoop protested Farrakhan’s ban in particular. “I stand with him,” Snoop said. “Ban me, motherfucker!”
Farrakhan is 86 years old, and he’s one of the very few old-school black leaders to maintain strong aesthetic continuity with the 20th century phase of the civil rights movement.
Jesse Jackson is pretty understated these days. Al Sharpton is a skinny MSNBC host. Meanwhile, Farrakhan remains a forceful preacher, and the Nation of Islam makes Black Lives Matter look like a rideshare startup.
Routinely, Farrakhan makes cruel, conspiratorial remarks about Jews.
Routinely, the news media summarizes Farrakhan’s political significance in his cruel, conspiratorial remarks about Jews.
Farrakhan has, as recently as this month, suggested a crucial distinction between “the good Jews” and “the Satanic Jews.”
Louis Farrakhan is bad for the Jews in general.
There are plenty of other things to dislike about Louis Farrakhan. For instance, Farrakhan’s sermons are long as hell.
In fact, Farrakhan sermons aren’t just loud and long — they’re colossal.
Farrakhan is a Muslim leader, but black Baptists will also recognize the key elements in the address embedded above: the staging, the fashion, the over-enunciation, the sing-song cadence, the shouting, the ranting against Ronald Reagan, the low dramatization of the Apostles, the tension between comedy and contempt.
It’s a mode.
It’s an ethnic mode which doesn’t require agreement with the minister so much as the mode requires unity among the congregation.
Farrakhan is based in Chicago. So, too, is the infamous Christian pastor, Jeremiah Wright. The two men are friends, they routinely defend one another from extremism charges, and they resemble each other in some important ways. Crucially, Farrakhan and Wright address black congregations, and they express very little regard for white audiences who might fearfully overhear them.
The white person hears Farrakhan and regards him as a classic demagogue barking hatred to stadium seating. Louis Farrakhan hates white people, and worse yet, he hates Jews. How could anyone clap while listening to this man? Isn’t he stumping for a holocaust?
My mom — a black Baptist from rural Virginia — says Farrakhan “mixes a little bit of truth with a little bit of hate.”
Keith Ellison, the Minnesota attorney general who once associated with the Nation, renounces Farrakhan. “I neglected to scrutinize the words of those such as Khalid Muhammad and Farrakhan who mixed a message of African American empowerment with scapegoating of other communities.”
There’s not too many black Baptists who place much faith in the Nation or Islam broadly. They could, on religious grounds, simply disavow Farrakhan. Snoop could plead Methodist.
But black people don’t need to agree with Farrakhan — they don’t even need to share his religious faith — in order to recognize Farrakhan as a social paragon.
Farrakhan is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy preaching to urban black audiences.
It’s easy for black audiences to defend Farrakhan, however wrong-headedly or half-heartedly, because Farrakhan is black, and “black” essentially means “unimportant” as well as “powerless” in larger, national conversations.
There’s no shortage of Limbaugh successors in white American politics, and there’s no limit to what they might accomplish, with or without Facebook.
There’s only one Farrakhan, and his accomplishments are known only to communities at the fringes. He’s otherwise known, simplistically and opportunistically, as proof of “the left’s anti-Semitism problem.”
Snoop is more broadly popular than Farrakhan, though Snoop’s celebrity amounts to a duality, too.
There’s an audience which listens to Snoop and hears nothing but pop music and weed culture. There’s a second audience which hears the weed tropes, too, we’re in on those late-career jokes, but we also hear the angry Long Beach rapper who has struggled, for three decades now, to resolve the tension between comedy and contempt. To the former audience, Snoop’s stanning Farrakhan comes as a trivial surprise.
The tension between popular acclaim and black power: this is the story of rap music, where Farrakhan looms large.
In April, Farrakhan and Snoop both addressed the late L.A. rapper Nipsey Hussle’s memorial service. Nipsey, who was gunned down at age 33, preached a self-empowerment gospel to a black musical audience.
Nipsey was “woke” in the traditional sense: paranoid and problematic, but otherwise intelligent and, most importantly, aware.
Snoop mythologized Nipsey in the language of black power. “Nipsey created a square, buying property, having things like Vector 90” — an L.A. co-working space — “and doing things in the community,” Snoop recalled. “He built his own world.”
In Nipsey, Farrakhan identified a paragon among rappers. “He is the prophetic voice of all in that community,” Farrakhan said.
Farrakhan also mispronounced “Nipsey Hussle” as the rapper’s namesake, the black comedian Nipsey Russell, a few times. Farrakhan seemed far more confident when referring to Nipsey by his birth name, Ermias Asghedom. “I never knew him like you know him,” Farrakhan admitted.
Nipsey’s mourners parsed Farrakhan’s eulogy, which was as cringeworthy as it was invigorating. As always, Farrakhan confounds.
The Newsweek headline about the minister’s eulogy simply asked, on behalf of a different audience altogether, “WHO IS LOUIS FARRAKHAN?”