Farrakhan.

CRITICS OF Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam tend to take a fever-chart approach to their bigotry--bad outbreaks in New Jersey and Baltimore; milder readings from appearances on Arsenio Hall and in New Jersey a second time. This therapeutic analysis misses the point. As James Carville might say, It's the religion, stupid. Farrakhan and his group are the heirs of a black triumphalist sect founded in Detroit in 1930 by one W. D. Fard. From the beginning, its disciples have believed that all non-black races are the products of a prehistoric breeding experiment conducted on the island of Patmos by Dr. Yacub, a malcontent exiled from an original black Eden centered in Mecca. The role of whites, the most degenerate of the half-breeds, has been to persecute blacks until the appearance of a Messenger (Fard) who would reveal the truth and set black minds free. This was what Elijah Muhammad believed, what Malcolm X believed until he converted to orthodox Islam, what Louis Farrakhan has believed for forty years.

Any group with views so disgusting and so risible might be expected to occupy a lonely position in the American intellectual outback. But in fact Farrakhan's sect has successfully claimed solidarity with mainstream black politicians and institutions. Jesse Jackson used him as a warm-up speaker at campaign rallies early in 1984. When Farrakhan called Judaism a "gutter religion," he was temporarily put beyond the pale. But last year, the Congressional Black Caucus affirmed a "sacred covenant" with the Nation of Islam, which it annulled only because of the bad publicity surrounding recent utterances. When the House voted to condemn remarks by Farrakhan's aide, Khalid Muhammed, most Black Caucus members voted "present" (i.e., abstained). The NAACP has invited Farrakhan to attend a black leadership caucus this spring. What makes this equivocation especially troubling is that the rhetoric of the Nation of Islam is not just some theoretical black "nationalism" unrelated to political reality; it includes incitement to beat and rob those whites, in particular Jews, who own small businesses in the ghetto. Somebody might get killed.

But the willingness of some not all--mainstream blacks to tolerate Farrakhan is not some peculiar moral lapse. Nor is it confined to blacks; white liberals have too often been queasy and tentative in their criticisms of the Nation of Islam. Indeed, American society as a whole is half-paralyzed when it comes to any question involving race. The average university professor, corporate executive, advertising copywriter, or physician cannot see even Farrakhan outside the context of black victimhood, an expression as much as an expresser of black "rage," a crescent that white society must bear for its sins. These responses are not the result of conscious reflection; they are merely the intellectual counterpart of what we have been doing about race in America for a generation. If we had sought to justify it rationally--in fact, we have avoided justifying it because we have denied doing it--these are the rationalizations we would have concocted. They now cloud our thoughts and hobble our actions, as our baffled hesitations over a Farrakhan reveal to us. As the historian Shelby Steele argues in a brilliant essay in the New York Times, "something much larger than Mr. Farrakhan must be repudiated, and many more of us must do the repudiating."

That something is "the pattern of social reform that America has offered its former victims for 25 years," specifically "entitlements like affirmative action and diversity programs." Such a pattern "brings out the Farrakhans in every group so that they can be used as wedges in the group's negotiations with the larger society .... If you are seeking entitlements on the basis of oppression, you must have your Farrakhan or your ACT-UP or your radical feminists." These bad cops serve as auxiliaries who "embody" the "alienation and anger that could become manifest in the entire group if the entitlements are not forthcoming."

The challenge to repudiate entitlements is not issued just to liberals. Mr. Steele notes in passing that group preferences were first codified during the Nixon Administration. Most conservative politicians today, when confronted with the issue, roll over and play dead (William Bennett and Pat Buchanan are rare exceptions). That is no longer acceptable. Dick Cheney, Jack Kemp, Phil Gramm, and other would-be leaders cannot be less brave than a nonpartisan historian like Shelby Steele. If they duck the challenge, there will be more Farrakhans in our future.