The Birth Of Indoctrination (Part 1)

Weekends were usually laundry day for my mom and being her youngest of five children I was under her watch as usual. I was a typical 8 year old in that I wanted my way and wasn’t too pleased being told I couldn’t have more money for the snack machine so I stormed out of the Laundromat and stumbled across a little white boy about my age. In him I saw a perfect opportunity to take out my frustrations on him. I was carrying a cup of cool-aid and without provocation I threw the drink in the kids face to his surprise. To my horror my mom witnessed my assault and rushed out of building and grabbed me rather forcefully by the arm. “What did he pour on you”? Mom asked. “cool-aid’” the boy answered. My Mom made me apologize and for fear of reprisals I won’t say what my punishment was. It took me years to understand the motive for my rage at that little white kid. It would help to understand that I was born Muslim, to very young parents from the south (dad from Mississippi and Mom was from Arkansas) who were deeply entrenched in the black separatist movement which was the core message of the nation of Islam-led by The Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. My parents married while still in their teens-my mom was actually 15! My dad was an aspiring entrepreneur who due to my mom’s impressionable age was the major influence in the relationship so she accepted Islam.

I along with my siblings attended a Muslim School, Muhammad’s University No. 18 in Cleveland. The school included grades 1 through 12 and was certainly not heavily focused on the teachings of the Koran. Young men were required to be clean shaven, wear suits and address all adults and mam and sir. The boys and girls attended class separately (boys in the morning and girls in the afternoon). Those were hardly bad values to teach young black children at the time however all of these positives came wrapped in heavy daily doses of racially charged politics. The core of the message was the white man is the devil and the black man must separate him in order to achieve total liberation. Up until the time I was 6 I thought that whites were officially called devils and not Caucasians.  You sort of get that message when you attend speeches and listen to audio tapes of how the white man is the source of the world’s ills.

 The nation of Islam was very attractive to young blacks in America at that time given the oppressive climate that had existed in the country for most of the 20^th century. It preached economic self-reliance and self-respect along with separatism. It preached that the black man should respect the black woman, himself and his community. The NOI taught that drugs, alcohol, gambling, adultery and promiscuity were immoral and such activities should were discouraged. The message to blacks was that racism and oppression in America could best be defeated with discipline through Islam and the teachings of the honorable Elijah Muhammad. Unfortunately after the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975 the Nation of Islam began to splinter into competing factions. The school I attended shut its doors as well as did others around the country. My siblings and I were forced to attend public schools for the first time and needless to say it was a very difficult adjustment. I went from the rigid discipline of a quasi-religious Muslim school to an environment of kids who were primarily raised Christian and there wasn't much discipline at all.  Christianity was considered the white man’s religion by many in the nation of Islam so I entered public school with a bit of a superiority complex-that I was more enlightened than those Christian “Negro’s”. My new classmates were welcoming overall however I did feel that many of them thought that I was strange and for not believing Jesus was god as they were raised to believe.

 I attended a neighborhood school which was predominately composed on black teachers. There were many instances where I came across students who hated whites and/or Jews so coming from the Nation that wasn’t too strange. My 5^th grade teacher was particularly outspoken on race matters.  During an inexplicable rant on black economic empowerment, she exclaimed “white people control the money”. Again, I was hardly startled by this since I was hearing these kinds of comments on a daily basis in the Nation. These were things that you heard and moved on-not realizing what this does to your subconscious as a child.

Public school is where I first encountered the ‘acting white” theory. I was sometimes accused of this for committing the cardinal sin of speaking in complete sentences. I was the subject of jokes about my Arabic name, my dark complexion or religion. I got many probing questions about what it was like to be a “moolism” or if I believed in Jesus. Deep inside I still harbored anti-Christian and Anti-white sentiment. It would take more than a decade to to begin to purge this thinking from my consciousness.