“It is foolish to the Jews, who ask for signs from heaven. And it is foolish to the Greeks, who seek human wisdom. … This foolish plan of God is wiser than the wisest of human plans, and God’s weakness is stronger than the greatest of human strength. Remember, dear brothers and sisters, that few of you were wise in the world’s eyes or powerful or wealthy when God called you. Instead, God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful. God chose things despised by the world, things counted as nothing at all, and used them to bring to nothing what the world considers important.”—1 Corinthians 1:22,25-28
Many politically astute news-conscious Black folk have recently become outraged as a result of statements made by Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee. Her administration, similar to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ administration, has ushered forth a vigilance against what has been dubbed “woke” public school curriculums. Gov. Huckabee has instructed her Department of Education to drop AP African American Studies classes and she has stated:
“We cannot perpetuate a lie to our students and push this propaganda leftist agenda teaching our kids to hate America and hate one another.”
The governor’s juxtaposition of the teaching of Black (African American) History with the teaching of hate is a false equivalency. But it is not a new or novel reaction to the sharing of Black History with Black people. It is reminiscent of the criticisms of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and His “Message to the Black people of America.”
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The powerful and transformative life-giving Teachings of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad have been falsely labeled as “hate teachings” for many years by those who are afraid of what Black people will do if the masses of us ever realized the severity of what was done to us in America during slavery and beyond.
The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s best student and National Representative, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, has offered insight into this kind of toxic reaction to the teaching of true Black History to our people in the following profound statement.
The Minister has stated that:
“The White man of America is possessed of the mind of Cain. For when Cain killed Abel, he said to himself ‘Now every man that sees me will slay me.’”
So just as Cain became deathly afraid of his sins being exposed, the White ruling class in America is afraid of their sins being exposed to Black people; they are all but consumed by the fear of retaliation.
Yet over and over again, the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Minister Farrakhan have successfully channeled any negative emotions that have arisen among our people, as a result of learning the truth of our suffering, into the constructive work of self-development and the building of an independent Nation.
Juxtapose the mass rallies conducted by the Nation of Islam to the January 6siege of the U.S. Capitol by former President Trump and his supporters. They lost an election and organized to retaliate against the seat of the American government. This is something never seen in the aftermath of any of the Nation of Islam’s mass gatherings.
Recently I purchased a book, written by two Yale Law School professors. The book is written by the married duo of Professors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld. The couple, who are both attorneys, Ivy League professors, and legal scholars, published a controversial best-seller back in 2015 titled “The Triple Package: How 3 Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.”
I am drawn to their research findings and conclusions because they offer a rather important vindication of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s message that students of Minister Farrakhan who love the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad may use to defend it against the charge that Muhammad’s message is “hate teachings” or that Muhammad is guilty of teaching “Black supremacy.”
According to Chua and Rubenfeld:
“It may be taboo to say so, but some groups in this country do better than others. Mormons, Cuban, Nigerian, and Chinese Americans have all recently achieved astonishing business success. Why do these groups and other groups come out on top? That certain groups do much better in America than others—as measured by income, occupational status, test scores, and so on—is difficult to talk about. In large part this is because the topic feels racially charged.”
The research findings of Chua and Rubenfeld have identified “The Triple Package” of cultural traits that are responsible for collective group success and upward mobility in American society as being: a superiority complex; insecurity and impulse control.
Chua and Rubenfeld write powerfully:
“Superiority Complex: This element of the Triple Package is the easiest to define; a deeply internalized belief in your group’s specialness, exceptionality, or superiority. This belief can derive from widely varying sources. It can be religious … it can be rooted in a story about he magnificence of your people’s history and civilization…it can be based on identity defining social distinctions that most Americans have never even heard of … or it can be a mix.
A crucial point about the Superiority Complex is that it is anti-thetical to mainstream liberal thinking, which teaches us to refrain from judging any individual or any life to be better than another.
Everyone is equal to everyone else. And if individual superiority judgments are frowned on, group superiority judgments are anathema. Group superiority is the stuff of racism, colonialism, imperialism, Nazism. Yet every one of America’s extremely successful groups fosters a belief in its own superiority.”
How do these findings relate to the majestic message of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad? His Teachings are falsely labeled as “hate teachings” and sometimes as “Black Supremacy.” Yet according to these esteemed researchers, the most successful groups in America maintain a private teaching and resulting belief in their superiority over others and they are never labeled as “supremacists.”
In fact, they are sometimes a part of the “model minority” stereotype; but in no public way are immigrant groups condemned for their beliefs like the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and his followers are.
They are allowed to practice and benefit from their respective teachings that uplift and empower their people. But it is the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Minister Farrakhan who are condemned and slandered when they teach the divinely revealed message of the uplift of the Black man and woman of America.
What the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches to His beloved Black people in America is divine truth revealed to Him by Allah, Who appeared in the Person of Master W. Fard Muhammad!
It is not Black Supremacy or racism and has not ever produced anything approaching colonialism, imperialism or Nazism. He has taught us that we are the Original People of the planet Earth. He teaches that the Original Man—the first human being—is Allah (God) Himself, the Maker, the Owner, the Cream of the Planet Earth and God of the Universe; and that we descend directly from Allah (God)!
He has taught to the Black people in America that we are in fact the Asiatic Black People and are the Creator’s Nation! Muhammad has taught that we as a people are the fathers and mothers of civilization!
His Teachings though falsely dubbed as “Black supremacy,’ are in fact a verifiable body of divine wisdom and truth. At the heart of the criticisms of His divine message is the fact that they serve as powerful iconoclasts to the notion that Black people descended from Ham, the cursed son of the Prophet Noah.
His Teachings necessarily break the mind-enslaving teachings that the Black people of America were saved from a life of savagery in Africa by God-fearing Christian White folks who brought us to America. His Teachings provide the accurate history of the Black man before we were enslaved in America and before we conquered the jungles of Africa; His message is the root knowledge from which many branch fields of study exist.
The Most Honorable Elijah Muhamad writes on page 32 of “Message To The Blackman”:
“We are the mighty, the wise, the best, but do not know it.”
If we are to believe Chua and Rubenfeld, we must conclude that what the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad has given to Black people in America is the kind of knowledge wisdom and understanding that is the key to Black People’s collective achievement of wealth and power.
However, as they point out, what successful groups teach and believe about themselves conflicts with popular and widely accepted liberal thinking, something of a “pollyanna-ish” concoction meant to inhibit Black empowerment instead of facilitating it! This reminds me of when J. Edgar Hoover looked at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a candidate for the role of Messiah among Black People. He felt that Dr. King could only fulfill that role if he abandoned his obedience to White liberal doctrines.
Space constraints do not permit me to show how the other two elements of what Chua and Rubenfeld call the “Triple Package” are also component parts of the message of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, however, it most likely will be included in one of my next lectures.
As we celebrate the 126th birth anniversary of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad we should reflect on the power of what He gave to us, and apply it in every area of our lives.
Many once called Muhammad’s Message foolishness, hate teaching and Black Supremacy, yet nowadays we can easily see how Allah (God) is causing time and circumstances to band together in a grand conspiracy to vindicate the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and his bold teaching, while exposing it as the path that the masses of Black people need to follow.
We are now some 59 years since integration. And yet metrics that measure quality of life and success show the Black community’s continued endurance of the unending problems of police brutality; a widening wealth gap; a lack of access to quality health care; rising infant mortality rates; disproportionate jail and imprisonment rates among our males.
We thank Allah (God) for giving to us the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, whose great commission has been made known by His best student and helper the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan! Black leaders throughout America should now sit with Min. Farrakhan and carve out a plan to make Muhammad’s life-giving and life-saving message the widely spread and implemented program that it must needs be, in order for the survival of our people into the future!
Demetric Muhammad is a Memphis-based author and student minister in the Nation of Islam and a member of the Nation of Islam Research Group. Follow him on X, formerlly Twitter @BrotherDemetric. Read more at www.researchminister.com.
