When the Word is Given...: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim WorldLomax, Louis E.
Religion
When the Word is Given...: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim World
Lomax, Louis E.
Black Muslims
If the white man says to you, “Johnny, go back home, I have no work for
you today,” you go back home and sit down and wait for the white man
to send for you (when he sees fit) to come back and work on his job.
You don’t try to create a job for yourself. You are shiftless because
the lack of “proper” education and self-knowledge has left you lifeless
(mentally, economically, and otherwise).
I am not making fun of you. I am trying to lead you to the point where
you can see the basic cause of your condition. I am one of you. I came
through the same trials and tribulation and the same hell that you
did. What I say about you I am also saying it about myself. I am your
brother; I am here, if necessary, to give my life to save yours. I am
not running from death. I am running to save your life. So take me for
a friend and not an enemy.
You must learn to make jobs for yourselves so that the next time “boss”
tells you he does not have any work for you, you can tell him that you
are going to do some work for yourself.
Three hundred years under the persecution of your slave master has made
you into a blind, deaf, and dumb ... and an absolutely “dead” people.
He has taught you to eat the rotten and worse type of foods, even the
flesh of that poisonous animal, the swine (pork) ... filling your
stomach with this poison meat (pork) has deteriorated you physically,
mentally as well as morally. The Arab word for the pig is “Khainsuer.”
(“khain” means “I see,” and “suer” means “very foul.”) This word
thus means “I see something that is very foul, filthy, diseased” ...
something that is not fit to be eaten by intelligent, civilized people.
Your slave master reared you on this poisonous meat, which has dulled
your brains, and you ceased to think about your past history, and then
you were deprived easily of the knowledge of your own God and your own
religion. Thus it became easy for the slave master to deprive you also
of the knowledge of your own kind, and the knowledge of his kind. Now
you don’t know the way back to your own kind, and his kind won’t accept
you ... so they call you Nigger or Negro, which means deaf, dumb, and
blind ... neutral, dead, lifeless.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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