02/22/1978
IWDM Study Library
Ethnic Survival Day
Atlanta GA

By Imam W. Deen Mohammed
The most gracious, the most compassionate. To the Muslim Student Association. William Robinson, President Morehouse Student Government Association. William Ali, representative of the city of Atlanta. Brother Imam Ibrahim Pasha. Imam Sheik Shabazz. All distinguished guests on the platform here and honorable members of this most distinguished audience. Asalaam Alaikum. Indeed it is an honor and a pleasure to have been received as I was received here tonight and earlier today. And I am very happy and pleased that we are coming closer and closer together. Closer and closer together. This is a relieving, very relieving and soothing fact for us it hurts the heart of sincere people but they're separated from people that they should be united with. And for too long we've been separated from people that were doing the same work you're trying to do, that carried the same sentiments that you were carrying and were devoted to truth, righteousness and justice. Yes we were separated because we did not communicate each other. Language is a very important thing. We developed our own ideas and began to speak our own separate languages and these separate languages prevent us coming together. The language of the Nation of Islam is it's own unique language. The language of the Civil Rights movement was it's own unique language. We all had our own languages and we were going in our separate ways, but it proved we were all chopping at the same stuff to remove it so that a living tree could grow again.
Dear beloved people I would like to begin tonight with a reading from the Qur'an, our holy book. The book that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad said was perfect. He said his teacher, Dr. Fard Muhammad followed a holy book and told him the that it is a pure book, and taught him that holy means unpolluted, unmixed, not tampered with in any form. A pure book he called it and he gave to us and he taught us to respect it. He taught us to give it the respect that we gave no other book. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us the etiquettes of the Holy Qur'an. He taught us to hold it high, not to hold it below our belts and never pick it up, read from unless the hands were washed clean. He told us also to put it in a high place in the home. When did the Honorable Elijah Muhammad tell us to take the Bible and put it in a high place in our home? When did he ever tell us to wash before picking up any other literature? Never. So by the treatment that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad gave the Qur'an, he himself lifted the Quran higher than any other material given to us under his leadership. He himself by his treatment of the Holy Qur'an established the Qur'an as the authority over all authorities in this community. Though I know he didn't preach that much from the Quran but still when we examine his treatment we have to agree that the Qur'an had more value in his eyes than any other pamphlet, book or literature that was passing out to his followers.
You know it's really strange, I'll use the words of scripture, says that G-d works in mysterious ways. Believe me my book lines up with your book. Here it is. What is with you must vanish. What is with Allah will endure. And we will certainly bestow upon those who patiently persevere their reward according to their best of their actions. Whoever works righteousness man or woman and has faith verily him We will give a new life, a life that is good and pure and we bestow upon those their reward according to the best of their actions.
Well I don't intend to keep you here all night tonight. You know I kept saying in Chicago if you had the patience I'm not in a hurry. We were talking for 8 hours but I'm telling you I think Imam Ibrahim Pasha he got the rap, the Imam with the greatest rap. I thought no one could chill my spine like Dr. King did in one of his major speeches he made. But I'm telling you Imam Ibrahim Pasha he did it. Not just tonight. i was here before and he got to preaching and before I knew it, electricity was going all down my spine. Our problem as a people trying to grow up out of the harmful effect of slavery, gain comfortable existence, stable existence in American society and dignity as a people throughout the world. There's no deeper struggle for a people. There have been many people who had to struggle for the same thing. Most of us are acquainted with the Jews in scripture. We know how the Jews served centuries under the cruel task master Pharoah and the Egyptians and how they won their freedom and went on to become a great people. Now I don't know how we can treat the Jewish history because it is a reading mostly our scripture but we can point to something real historical examples.
I know the nature of the Bilalian people, the nature of African American people. I've been raised as you have been raised. I experienced the same kind of things you've experienced throughout history. The kind of awful things, bad things, degrading things, ugly things, the cruel things that have been in the atmosphere for the last forty some years in my life. I have been paying very, very good attention to it just that you have. So I know, I believe I know the emotional makeup and the sentimental makeup, so excuse me if I make things a bit uncomfortable for you sometimes. It's not done to hurt anybody, it's done to edge us on, the edge us on to more and more human dignity. You can never become people satisfied with our self image until we get the courage to do what is right, just and right minded. And many of us think that we have that courage and that we are doing what is just and right but it is far from being true. Most of us are moved by sentiments and emotions and little rational sense.
Our whole life is determined by the kinds of faith that are put into the atmosphere of emotionalism and sentiment. We think that we have to respond to sentiment rather than respond to rational proof. The human being in his natural makeup is a creature of sentiment and a creature of intelligence. The two are necessary to make a human being. A human being can't be dry, rational substance without that being harmful to his sentimental makeup. It's just as bad when you don't have the intelligence and have only the sentimental makeup. They're just like leaves in the trash in a windstorm. You can't find them anyplace, they're never placed, They're just like dust in the air. If the wind become still they become still. And I'm telling you that description right there is the description that is the fate or the end of the whole people. They are some exceptions. In the 1960s, look what we were doing. Before that in the fifties, look what we were doing. In the 1970s, early seventies pardon me, look what we start doing. What motivated us? Was it was rational doctrine or was it emotionalism? Someone raised a black fist and said black pride in revolutionized African, African-American thinking. Say it loud, I'm black and proud came along and changed the whole mind of the African American community. Then Hollywood TV come out and show us some dressed up peacocks, simp pimps in long chinchilla coats. Big stacks on their alligator shoes and we turned into a bunch of pampered sissies.
I don't know about here in Atlanta. Conditions are bad here too like they are in Chicago, Los Angeles and other places. In Chicago, the community of African-Americans are a community of welfare people. You can hardly find a person that's not on welfare. In fact, we made welfare so popular we got Caucasians earning government checks and welfare checks at the same time. We need to make a serious change. And in order to make that serious change we have to make a serious change in the way we think. We have to learn to think as intelligent people. Now I know this might seem as a slap in the face for some of you who know you are intelligent. You can be learned and not have the ability to execute intelligence. Look at the United States of America. United States from America is the most advanced nation on the face of the earth. No people have achieved what America achieved in terms of industrial knowledge, human knowledge, scientists. All the knowledge has been developed much greater than it has been developed in any other part of the world. 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 50 years ago, America was a great learned nation. Isn't that something? A 100 years ago, 120 years ago, America was a great learned nation. But look how violent of a conqueror America was. So don't think because you have knowledge you are intelligent. You can have knowledge and behave very silly. And I think that our problem is temperament and emotions. I keep hitting on this and people say well how can you live without being sentimental and emotional?
I'm not saying that you shouldn't be sentimental or emotional but I'm saying that you should also be intelligent and one should protect the other. The sentimental nature of the human being should protect the intelligence from going into a kind of hard rock dry life. And the intelligence should protect the sentiments from dissipating itself in the society. And that's where we come in. People who dissipate our life force in the society. People not conscious, people not respecting discipline, people not respecting direction. We are part of the whole sickness now that has taken over the American society. There was a time when it was just us you know. We were the only ones wasted but now America is wasted and there are very few people that's not wasted.
What are we going do? How are we going survive? The government of the United States, how it stay powerful enough to sustain the American society, hold and sustain the life of American society If it's people if the children of the leaders are dying off and no new leadership is being born. How many good leaders do we have now waiting to go into the White House, waiting to go into the Governorship, waiting to go into the Mayors office. How many qualified, strong leaders do they have? If they don't have a dope habit, , they got an alcohol habit. If they don't have an alcohol habit, they got a sex habit. it's a seeding habit. If it is not that it's some other crazy thing. They like to smell dirt. We've become a weird, weird society. We can't get people to help lift humanity up and build the city of human dignity again because they hung up in weird habits. We a strange people and I tell you I know people say that the Imam sure talks big. I don't see how anybody can sit and listen to him. Where did he get the authority to talk so big. Everybody in the United States has become so dumb they think he is very big.
Moses was a great Prophet who led the Hebrews. Moses had to contend with a rebellious people. The people who Moses was trying to save, those people were slaves in Egypt and cruelly treated. Moses was successful in getting them out of Egypt but at every turn they was pressing him for something. He had a great victory that was his. He had successfully led them out of Egypt but still he was questioned at every turn. Explain this. How can you prove it? Where you get the authority from Moses? That's us. The only way are going to change our condition and really put ourselves in the image we want to be in and get the respect of the world we are going to have to deal with all our problems not from the emotional point of view or position but from a rational scientific point of view. We are going to have to approach everything with the eye of a rational scientific thinker. That's the only way. How come racism still exists in the United States? The Honorable Elijah Muhammad he reversed the psychology and showed the southern bigot his shame.
Marcus Garvery, Frederick Douglass long before he, long before Marcus Garvey. He raised the American conscious and got them to see their shame. How come it still exists? Now here in 1978 we have become racists. I listen to the radio, what they call the black network. I read the papers called the black press, black papers, magazines and others. And I'm hearing somebody's voice and I'm wondering who it is. And I finally I recognized, I know who this is. This is the racist black man. I was trying to remember where I heard that language from. I remember the Chicago Tribune Union that has changed, thank you G-d. It used to half separate ads white and black.
It brought opportunity for white, for black. This is how it was printed in the Chicago Tribune. One of the biggest papers we had in Chicago, I remember hearing Caucasians talking on the radio. They spoke as though their were no African American citizens in this country. Now I'm hearing Bilalian African American people talking just as they talked. Your black network, get your black afro comb. Two in the pack, three in the pack, four in the pack. Take one to put in the side pocket, two to wear in your afro. And you running with that. Everything is black, black this, black that. We've become so black conscious, that we are no longer conscious of ourselves as human beings. We treat each other so bad, doesn't take anything than the slightest little thing can make us kill each other.
 Nobody trying to dignify our community, nobody trying to save ourselves from the influences of a long history of physical bondage in this country. And they come make the problem much worse by turning our community into a community of sleeping nobodies. Then you had a plethora of inferior products. Your own so-called brother, even the word brother has been turned into a weapon that whips your conscience into committing your pocket to a robber who calls himself brother. How can we go on like this? Why haven't we made a scientific study or racism? Why haven't we studied color, people in a rational scientific way?
Because we don't have rational minds, we have emotional minds. You have to live in the streets the same way you live in home. In the home and you're trying to arrive at some sensible answer to a problem or situation and the members of the house are the person you are dealing with just keep rising up in emotions. What do you tell them. You tell them quiet down. Why don't you stop being so emotional. You can't make sense. You can't communicate sensibly between each other If you're going to be all heated up in emotions. You have to settle down, let the mind clear so the eye can see what you're dealing with. Emotionalism, over sentimental feelings clouds the mind, fogs the eyes and leave you reaching out in the dark. At home you tell the wife, please calm down so I can talk to you. I can't talk to you while you're excited like that. But we go out in the street and say "We got to have jobs! The black people got to have jobs!"
50% or more of those that saying we have to have jobs will never accept a job. We got a problem, serious problem. We got the great majority of people in our community just all caught up in a kind of sentimental racism. And we can't get them to support any sensible program or follow any sensible direction because they don't have intelligent life in them. They might be high school graduates, they might be college graduates but the great majority just don't have any intelligent life in them. They think the way to settle things is with emotional ranting. Come out like monkeys trying to discharge the enemies so that they can go back for another year and relax. I was reading a science book that says a certain breed of monkeys that don't fight each other physically but once a year they confront each other. This is true, this is true. They form lines and confront each other. And they just rant and rave and act like they going to kill each other.
Magazine yesterday coming out with another one. Some brother walking around with the African map hanging off of his chest. All they have to do is put some well dressed black people on tv looking like they into something and next thing you know you will see the Bilalian people all walking around with a cross hanging off of their necks. It shows you that our mind is not settled or established upon anything. We have to change that. How do we change it? You have to create a new discipline for the people. The old disciplines have faded. They don't work anymore. We still have churches and Mosques. They are still there but they are not reaching this great majority that are wasting themselves. They just keep on blowing in the wind. How can we reach them? We are going to have to get control of the environment in order to reestablish them in the correct nature.
Oh that's too much for you Chief. Well I don't adopt that mindset. I am living for the future with a new mind and I know that America needs leadership and I am going to make my contribution. I believe that there are people who have enough faith left in them to see the promising direction that we are moving towards. Dear beloved people we've blessed in the world community of Al Islam in the West to understand the powerful supreme wisdom that is written into the most powerful scripture, the Qur'an. We have found in scripture the formula for remaking human life on earth. It is a natural formula. It's the one that led human life in the beginning. What are you talking about Brother Imam? I'm talking about language. Human beings are formed by language. Other things influence our development but nothing influence our development more than language does.
If you can create a new language environment for a people, you can give that people a new lease on life. But as long as we keep the same language, the people will not grow more than that language environment let's them. If that language environment doesn't have the room for the human being to grow, you won't find the human being growing within it. Our language has been corrupted, our language has been degenerated. I don't mean the English you learn in school, I mean the language you speak in the street. It's degenerating in terms of meaning, in terms of communicating sensibly or properly. The language is falling apart. Freedom has become a destructive term, a destructive thing in our lives. Freedom even to the college student has come to mean the right to destroy self and society. The right to commit suicide. That's what freedom has become. The right to kill self and kill others. That's terrible. What fine principles do we have now for the society? What ideas do you have now to hold up human life, to hold up society in America? We used to preach the idea of freedom and inspire people. We used to preach excellence and improve the pride of the people. But now you talk about excellent and it hits these people's minds like water on a ducks back. They don't want you talking about excellence. So if those terms, if those ideas that used to inspire are dead now, not being powerful motivation anymore then where is hope for us in this life? G-d, what G-d does do for us? About five years ago, people began having ignorant things to say regarding us inviting them to G-d. You don't have no right to try to convert me to G-d. If you want to believe in G-d you believe in G-d.
 What we need to do is realter the inner life of our people as a society. That's what have to be done, we have to give people principles today that they can appreciate and devote themselves to. Principles that they can accept to give value and disciplines to their lives. This is what we need. The innate wisdom of scripture we find that human principles that uphold societies is compared with the bones that uphold the body. If we had nothing but this flesh and muscles, we couldn't even stand up. Flesh and muscles can't stand the human being up. We have to have bones. Societies that have only have flesh and muscles can't stand up. Society must have principles, high, strong principles, principles that grow out of human nature. Human nature tells me something. Freedom is a precious commodity. Human nature told the Founding Fathers that democracy is worth striving for, dying for, sweating and bleeding for. But what does human nature in this day and age tell us? Get a pill, get a downer, get a upper, trip out with LSD. That's what human nature is telling us now., Why? Because our minds have been so corrupted.
It takes great understanding to read the New Testament. So many destructive things have been done by people who truly feel that they are believing in the word of G-d. There are some who have become very cruel. Because they read the bible and interpret it literally and they think that the cruelty in it is justified. Bible testify. They read what the Bible says "As they have dealt unto you do to them as well. They read where it says that there will be no mercy on the fruit of the womb. Then the babies were taken, snatched from the mother and their heads bashed against the stone. They read where Christ is going to return and just drench his garment in the blood of religion. They read these things and interpret them literally and then claim with conviction and practice all of this cruelty.
The surviving testimony to this kind of influence on the mind of so called Christians is existing right now in that secret underground organization called the KKK. They carry crosses, pray to G-d, execute injustice and cruelty to the human being in the name of Jesus Christ. Where do they get the inspiration to behave like that? They get it from a literal reading of the Bible. Don't you know that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad with his reverse psychology throwing the same dirt back in the face of those people who threw dirt on us and myself with my kind of sober, clear, social interpretation of the Bible that is to be applied in our lives, in our daily lives to the social problems of our life. Don't you know we can make the greatest contribution to the revival of Christianity then all the Christians have made? Yes. We are doing more to revise the purity of Christianity that all the Christians have been able to over the past 2,000 years. How many there have tackled the problem like that? They fear to do it. They fear because they know if they do that they're going be thrown out of the circle of Christianity. But we can do it. We already outside the circle of Christianity. So we in a position to help Christians more than they can help themselves.
Dear beloved people religion is beautiful once you understand it. We fail to understand that religion is speaking to the needs to develop intelligent life, moral life, civilized society, order, leadership, government. This what religion is speaking to. In Genesis we read says in the beginning the earth was without form and void. Darkness was upon the deep. The spirit of G-d moved upon the face of the water and G-d said let there be light and there was light. We read that and we are caught up in myth. We think that the bible is saying this is how the world was made. That the whole creation was a big void and formless. And suddenly their was a big body of water that was there already unformed and the spirit of G-d began to move in the darkness of that physical water. And G-d said let their be light. And a great light rose up out of that water and went up in the sky. And another light went up out of the water and became our moon. And another came up out of the water and became our stars. Then after that G-d forget to bring life to the earth.
We read it and think it means that. We can't give the message. What good is knowledge if you can't hear it. The Bible says blessed is he that has an ear. Is that right? So what's good is this book of knowledge the Bible if nobody can hear it? The streets is where we have a problem. The masses need this knowledge. We need something to discipline our lives. We need something to rally around. We need something to devote ourselves to. Is that right? Yes. So what good is knowledge if it can't speak to me in a language that I can hear? G-d caused the rain to come down and water the garden and he formed a man but the man lonely. So He made for him a helpmeet. By doing what? By going and destroying the beautiful work He had made. He had made Adam a beautiful, perfect being then He decided that Adam was lonely and he needed a wife. So He went in there and gouged a hole in him.
Now excuse my language but I'm trying let you see that you've been getting religion in kindergarten to terms or kindergarten terminology. it says that G-d gouged a hole in the mans chest and pulled out a rib and with a rib He made a woman. Says then He closed up the womb. Didn't even say used a clean knife no matter say he fell out the life. How can we make a human being with a rib? But that's the Bible isn't it? What does that make the woman if she believes that? It makes her an inferior creation. Here it didn't even take the whole man to make the woman. And to prove that is what Genesis had in mind, it goes on to say that the woman tempted the man.
Yes and she became a problem for him that worked against him and made life difficult for him. From Genesis to Revelation, Genesis to Revelation. With this kind of idea of the world in our minds we can't live intelligent lives. it's impossible for us to become a true and civilized and intelligent society. Don't you with all of the learning they have that America is still the most savage people on the face of the earth. There's more senseless of killing of each other in America than it is on any other place in the earth. There's more perverted human behavior in America then their is anywhere only the map You learned people shouldn't that shock you and make you want to seek some logical explanation for this? Powerful America with all of it's learning is the most savage, the most self destructive, the most suicidal civilization on the face if the earth.
We should want a deep, logical explanation for this behavior with this weird set of behavior occurring in a civilized nation like America. We should want to find some explanation for it. Where is the explanation coming from? That explanation has to come from our concepts. The way we see reality is more primitive than the most backwards man on this earth. Think that G-d says to man that in order to advance mankind you have to get with the woman, be fruitful and multiply. And then when they committed the sex act you curse them. This is the idea in most Christians mind isn't it? Original sin. Why don't the Pope tell us what original sin is? Why don't the Pope tell us that we have been committing original sins on the minds of the masses? In Christian society man and a woman get a license, marriage license, legally mated together. Now you go on with your life. You finally make it to the bedroom and you about to get undressed and she says turn off the lights. For what? She act like I am about to steal something.
We have been given corrupt concepts of human life, of human nature, of the world reality even of G-d. Don't you know it's insane for a person to think that G-d in order to redeem man, sinful man, He had to come down on earth Himself. He made the sun without standing on earth. He made the moon in the sky without standing on earth. He populated the earth with people without standing on earth. But now to get sin out of the earth He has to come down Himself. Now He's not coming down just to make Himself physically visible. He's coming down to commit suicide. Excuse me for putting it to you this way but this is the way it's put to me.
When they tell me that G-d became flesh and allowed man to put Him on the cross and He gave His life to save sinners, to me that says G-d had to commit suicide. That's what it says to me. Say, oh that wasn't G-d, that was His son. I thought about that. I still had a problem. Because I remember the preacher said they are three in one and I heard the preacher say when you see the father, you see the son. When you see the son, you see the father. So that's what bothered me, that G-d Almighty could be a split personality with terrible guilt complexes for the sins of His civilization of His creation and come down here and tell people, crucify me so your heart will be turned to love. Now dear beloved people, the same kind of split personality, same kind of guilt is in the mind of the Christian society. Same suicidal inclination.
When we feel that we've done wrong, we give ourselves to more wrong. You leave the house. Go out and get in the car, drive 90 miles an mile in a 25 miles and hour zone. Just do things to kill ourselves. We want to die. We want to die. Go and visit sister so and so. Get into her bed and stay right there until the husband come home. And know what time he coming home. And get shot. We want to get shot. Get stopped by police for making 35 miles an hour in a 25 miles an hour zone. We just can't get a ticket. We have to get shot. "You ain't taking me nowhere sucker." Boom. He had to give his life for his sin
G-d made everything it is good. First day and it is good. Second day and it was good. Third day and it was good. Then He make the man from the dust of the earth and every man sinned. And how does He correct this? By coming down out of the sky Himself. And take on flesh so He can feel pain. And they start whipping and lashing Him. He could have stayed up in the heavens but instead He felt so guilty that He handed Himself over to man so that He could be punished for what He had created.
 Nothing was holding in American life but fear. When the fear was removed, the harmful destructive influence of Trinitarianism of New Testament doctrine, it took control our mind, dismembered our life, shattered our thinking, drove us downhill to the valley of death. Self suicide, suicide. Dear beloved people a few decades ago the American people were a disciplined people. They were people who had respect for authority, for power. They had respect for mom and dad. They had respect for the police, respect for the nation. Now no respect. No respect. We don't fear anything. It wasn't the healthy ingredients of religions that was holding our life, holding our life up. It was fear that was holding our life up. Now I know some of that say it was love. But I know I grew up in those churches. I used to go to churches more often than I went to the temple in those days. I used to go to churches just to see what was happening in church and I found preachers preaching, preaching, preaching, preaching love, love, love and the people they were preaching to hated each other more than the people that was not getting that deep.
I saw preacher preaching brotherly love and concern for each other. That you could be concerned that you could sacrifice like Jesus did. G-d loved us so much that He gave His only begotten son. Those very people didn't love each other enough to pick up a hat that was dropped and take care. Here's your hat. No courtesy, no human decency. So many of them they were hearing the teachings and it was having no effect. And the church people in my community were satisfied to do nothing but just talk about Jesus and righteousness all day long all and do nothing about their condition. And I'm not saying this about all Christians. But they wouldn't go out and buy no narcotics. Why? Because the feared something. They wouldn't go out and rob no banks. Why? Because they feared something.
This whole freedom idea is taken to extremes. As intelligent we have been we don't fear nothing. Do anything, anything people. With the fear gone, now here come the bad influences taking over our life. All the things that we read about in the Bible now we're doing them. Homosexuality, going with animals. I hate to use this language but it's in the Bible. People who just loafers I guess like some of us are. Say they would set up on the wall, walled cities and drink their own urine. I'm not going to use the word the Bible use. The Bible use a word that starts with a p. Drink their own urine and eat cakes mixed with dung. Yeah this is the Bible. It's in there. So now what are we doing? We doing those things. About 20 years ago or less then that the Ivy Leaguers start swallowing goldfish to show how crazy they were. Take live goldfish and swallow 'em. Crowd into a phone booth, see can they get 30 in a booth, 25 in a Volkswagen. This is an exaggeration but I don't know how many they got in there but I didn't believe the paper. I saw the paper. I couldn't see how they got in the Volkswagen. There's all kind of crazy things they are trying. Where they get these ideas from? There must be something in our learning environment, our Christian learning environment, there's something. Our commercial environment, there's something in our environment that's bringing these crazy destructive ideas. The behavior in us. Something is causing this kind of behavior. We should examine the society, examine the religion, examine everything because we have to save our life. Where will our children be?
They're are people in the Middle East who plant olive trees. They plant those trees not to eat from those trees. They know they'll never eat from the olive trees that they planted. They'll be dead and gone before the olive trees produce any olives. The olive tree is a tree that lives a hundred more years. Long lived trees. When you plant it you don't eat from it, your children eat from it. They plant olive trees not for themselves for their children. What are we doing for our children? What are we planting for our children, what are we building for our children? Are we saying this is for my children. I'm not going to eat from this. That man over there in the Middle East, a part of the world they call the underdeveloped world is planting the olive tree. Not for him to eat. He knows he can't eat from it. he's planting it for his babies for the future. How many of us are saying I'm not going to eat this fifty dollars. I'm going to put this fifty dollars into the development of my child. I'm going to put this fifty dollars somewhere it can grow and produce for my children. How many of us are doing that? Very few.
The wealthy of society. They don't allow leaders to waste the wealth of the nation. And the leader won't allow his people to waste the wealth of the nation. They insist that they live moderately moral and virtuous lives. Do we think we are going to become strong as a people drinking, getting drunk every weekend, gambling our money away, spending money in sex. Don't you know sex take a lot of money now. Not that I used to buy any but I know how the value of the dollar has gone down and how hard money is to get and how much it take to satisfy some of these women nowadays. Sex must be costing a big dollar. And then there's so many other added expenses now. You know you just can't have sex. You used to have sex for a few dollars and a raincoat But now you have to have a vibrator. And about a week of zinc pills, iron pills, 8 millimeter x-ray film. You turn on the film and play that, run that film after eating all the pills and stuff. And then once you get at it, you ain't satisfied until every organ has had a taste of it. You got to put the arm and the elbow and the knee in it.
Put the ear in it. It costs more hours. You paying for more hours now. It's expensive. Money pills and other devices, artificial devices to stimulate you. Sometimes eight millimeter film and then all night long. Can't we see that we're a sick people that's getting sicker and sicker.
First our people were health conscious to improve their health. Now they're health conscious they're trying to make themselves iron bars. I hear 'em, i hear 'em. In fact I've even been approached by some of them. Hey, this is real good. Good for what? I say nah, I don't want that. Eating nuts, dried fruit, yogurt, Vitamin E in the liquid form and pill form. Eating all that stuff for what? To prove to the female that he's strong. Where's his strength? They gotta spend all that money on pills and stuff. Where's his strength? He ain't got no strength. Brother and sisters, this kind of mind exist in our society because the thinking in the society is self destructive. Self destructive. We don't have to have a revolution like they had in Russia, the Bolshevik revolution or the revolution led by Castro to put light back on this planet for America in a strong form. All we need to do is recognize that we have been given a picture of the word that comes from the language of mythology and not the language of truth. That's all we have to do. I know there's some preachers who just charging me with trying to convert Christians to Islam.
But I tell them to go to their Bible and if they got faith in G-d, faith in truth, read the Bible for themselves and they'll see that there's two forces contending with each other in the Bible. Not just the voice of G-d and the voice of Satan but the voice of human being, of the human being, of the concerned human being and the voice of the devilish people. And the concerned human being says in the Bible in this language inspired by G-d that the worst of all sin was found in the sanctuary. Said that a certain one was taking another called son of man on a tour of the city. Then he brought him into the gates of the city and he said, See son of man the sins these people are practicing. Then he took him on into the city to the gates of the temple and told him to see what sins these people are practicing right around the gates of the temple. Then he took him into the sanctuary where the holies of holies were. He said there he saw the abomination of abominations. The Bible is telling us with these words that there will come a time when the people are going to discover that the real problem for them is right in the church. That the worst of all evils against the human being is right in the holies of holies, right in the very sanctuary itself. Now if you don't like this language coming from me, destroy the Bible. That's where I got it from.
Don't hit me because I'm not a passive resister I'll take this Bible and beat the hell out of you. Time for us to wake up. We have to wake up. Before we can do anything dear beloved people to better our lives, to destroy racism, we have to first correct our concepts, our Christian concepts of the world, of human life, of the beginning of the races. Some of us think that the racist started in a literal reading of the Bible. We think that G-d made Adam from the dust of the earth, formed him as a mud structure and then breathed some breath in him and that mud became flesh and blood and started walking around the earth. Do you know we got Christians that believe that?
Now isn't that a childish idea? Isn't that something akin to the Santa Claus story, but worse? It's much worse than the Santa Claus story but you got people who believe like that. You got people who believe that we got our blackness, that is the African man and woman got there blackness from curse that G-d put on Ham. We have people who believe that in the church life. We got preachers arguing with their wives right now over their right to be a male chauvinist. See the Bible said Christ is the head of man. And man is the head of the woman. And if she keep arguing with him he'll tell her, Adam was alright until G-d made Eve. And he have a lot of other Eves to reinforce his position. Jezebel, Balye, Salomi. All those wicked women. It's impossible to unify the American life and structure it in an intelligent way with these ideas dominating and influencing our lives. It's impossible going around with this crazy thinking. You might say, well we don't really believe it like that, but you have to force yourself to accept it like that if you are questioned by a religious person. Any religious person ask you if you believe that if you are a religious person you have to say, Well the Bible says that. Is that right? Yes. You have to say that. Have to say the Bible says that.
And if somebody say, well the Bible is wrong, the average person will say no, the Bible ain't wrong. Is that right? So whether we say we live by it or not, we accept to defend it. You don't have to tell me I have argued with some of you all. I heard some folks quoting the Bible literally giving this to me and I said that's not, that's not true. "Every word is true." I said well it needs interpretation. It needs no interpretation. It is true just as it is. A lot of Christians contend that the Bible is not to be interpreted, that you have to accept it literally and they don't know what they're talking about. We have to start right in the concept of the people and explain those concepts so that they will understand what kind of crazy ideas they have inhabited and see the harm that these ideas have had in their lives and then interpret them, translate them and take them back to the real meaning, to the beauty. There's a beauty to behind all this crazy language. Under this strange, crazy language there's beauty.
And once we do that, then we can start building the society. And let tell you, we should start right on racism, color consciousness. After we get these concepts straight that have been destroyed and reversed human progress for us, then we should start right on racism. And how are we going to deal with the question of racism? Deal with it the same way we have to deal with the Bible. With a rational mind. Approach it rationally and scientifically. Treat it with knowledge, not with emotionalism, with knowledge and explain it so a child can understand. He's black if he's black or his whiteness if he's white. That's how we have to deal with it. In our textbook now, we are trying to get rid of the racist feelings or prevent racist feelings from coming in and children by showing the children Bilalians, Caucasians living together in peace, working in peace, playing in peace. Just living in peace. Will that do the job? No. Why won't it do the job? Because that's a picture, that's a picture, that's a picture of some people living together. If the racism is in this public, that child is going to grow up to see that the book is a contradiction, that the book is not the reality. Isn't that right? He go to school and the nice pictures are there. He go back home and hear his mother say, I hate the honkies. I hate the white pigs.
Little Caucasian perhaps has overheard his old bigoted mama saying When they going to send niggers back to Africa or enslave them all again? What effect can the book have when the real world is filled with racists? No effect. And you can't change people by simply creating a picture of what you want. You can't change them that way. The way to change it is to deal it with truth. Apply truth to it. Teach the people to follow truth, to obey truth, to respect truth and follow it. Teach them to interpret, to understand problems of racism as a Doctor of anthropology would understand. These facts that speak to racism from anthropology, from our sciences, these facts are not above the head of the elementary school child, the high school student. They're not above his head. We have to design textbooks that deal with racism in a scientific and specific way. We have to tell children at a very early age the truth about the origin of their color, the origin of the texture of their hair, their features and everything. You might say do we know anything about that? Yes, we do.
Get a good book on anthropology, study physiology. And a lot of these explanations are given in the books that we have presently. We know that the sun is the painter that paints the color of creation. Sun gives the color to the flowers, to the plants, to the animals. Even to stones. The sun give color even to stone and the sun has given us our color. We know that even the texture of the hair is created by climate and environment. Your whole makeup, how you look, your color, your feet, the texture of your hair, your skin, everything is determined by your environment, by the physical environment. What you eat, what you drink, the climate that you live in, the temperature, the dryness of the air or the humidity in the air, the wetness of the air. The cold and the heat, the intensity of the sun rays. All of these things form color and shape, plus language. Even your language gives shape or gives features to your face. If you speak a language that's greatly different, then you are going to look different. Even though you have the same climate, everything can be the same, but if the language is greatly different, then the people in time will have different features. Because the habit of using your mouth in a certain way is going make your mouth grow in a certain way. It's going to even make your bones grow in certain jaws even is going to affect the jawbones, the diet that you have. If you have a soft diet, pretty soon your jaws are going to come together. You're going to be short faced.
 But if you have a rough diet, your teeth will grow longer, your jaws will grow stronger so you'll have a stronger face. You'll have a longer face. This is just scientific explanation, that's all it is. If you live in a hot climate that is humid, the volume of air, the unit of air has less oxygen in it then the same unit of air in a cold climate that is not as humid. The humidity takes up space in the air and the heat expands the molecules of that and makes the volume have less oxygen in it. In a cold climate, the air is condensed and if it's dry too, there is much more oxygen in the same volume of air. So the people who come from the tropics, the humid parts of what we call Africa and the whole tropical belt going all the way around the earth. Find those people in that zone and study their features. I've done it. I find that they have broad noses. The Philippines, many Asiatics, Aborigines and the Africans. Broad noses.
Occasionally you find a Caucasian with a broad nose, is that right? But you find many of those people living in the hot and humid climate, many of them you find with broad noses. How come? They need a big opening to get enough air. You hot you need more air. The air expanded so you need more volume. The humidity is high you need more volume. So your nose in time, don't think it would happen now in one lifetime. But over a period of about half million years it can turn a razor sharp Caucasian nose into a Issac Hayes nose. Yeah, in time. So all of these features that you're hung up on, I'm a black man. He's a white man. What are you bragging about? What kind of mind you got? You might be a Blackman with a boy's mind, a white man, or a Caucasian man with a boys mind, right? Or a dog's mind. Ain't nothing to brag about. I would take a sharp razor and hit your black skin real fast. You'll see it's a white pigment That's right. If I hit your real hard and with a sharp razor and lay that meat open, you'll see white. Am I right? I've seen it happen. Not a razor. But I've seen black people, a black person, not more than one get a bad wound, a quick wound and the meat was white. So he's a white man under that skin.
Now look at what the Bible says. It says Ezekiel had a vision in the valley. And there he saw the resurrection, how the resurrection would take place. Saying he saw bones coming together, leg bone with the thigh bone, thigh bone with the hip bone, all the bones come together, put the person back together right? Now look, tell me where in that valley of bones will you find your color superiority? If you're Christian, if you believe that Ezekiel vision was the right one, that G-d is going to resurrect bones, then that resurrection you're not going to have any color superiority. I haven't seen any black bones. Bones all have one color. Is that right? Yeah. So all of the bones look alike.
Oh, I got to have my blackness. Don't take my blackness away from me. We are black and proud. But it's a serious contradiction and we have to deal with it. We want human development, we want community development, but we can't make people come away from being hung up on color. So we can't get to the real job of building up the human being. There is a story that I usually tell, and this is true, A little girl I remember little Italian girl, she was arguing with a bright skinned girl, another little girl over a bicycle. She wanted to ride the high yellow girl bicycle. And little high yellow girl wouldn't let her ride her bike. She was very dark, the little dark girl. Yellow girl called her black. And she said black very sweet. And I was observing. I was raised from my mother's dress. I listen to these Caucasian racist kind things that they had put in the air to make us feel inferior. So I wasn't part of that. I didn't come up like that. I came up thinking that I was the original black man. Asiatic black man, the owner, the maker, the cream of the planet earth, the father of civilization and the god of the universe. So I didn't have any problems. I didn't feel inferior. And I was looking at these two little girls, I was small myself, I was little just like they were. I remember, the picture is plain as day before my eyes right now. And I just looked at the white girl. I didn't tell her and I said to myself, what made her think she look better than this dark girl?
She was white her eyes was buck, her mouth was ugly, face was ugly, she was just ugly. And the little dark girl was a cute little girl. But I could see in that little white girl, she actually thought she was prettier than the dark girl. Ever since then it stuck in my mouth. So once I was at the zoo and I saw a real light looking, I don't know what that thing was, I don't know it was a monkey, baboon, orangutan, I don't know what it was. All I know it had pink lips and freckles in his face. It was a ugly thing. I said to myself, that's how some white people are. It looked just like that thing over there. But that thing was sitting up just as proud looking. Now it has changed. We have the Kentucky coal black, black looking like the nightmare you know that woke itself. We have to come up out of this. If we don't upgrade ourselves, rise above silly emotional identification in color, we are going to be hopeless brothers and sisters. We almost hopeless now. They are calling us a hopeless people. Real identity is in your total self, not skin, not color alone, in your total self.
That's where your identity is. You have to see yourself as a physical person, as a human being as the Holy Qur'an say, a creature made in the most excellent mold. And if you understand it, you get a sense of dignity and self-esteem that make that old color consciousness seem so foolish that you never ever going to give it a second thought. When you think about the human being, every man should see his self image in the human image, not in his color. The Holy Qur'an say that G-d has made you tribes and nations that you should know each other and not despise each other. So G-d says that people who live in these different regions, they look different because He wants them to know each other. Now, if we all look the same, it'll be hard for us to identify a man from the region, by region. Is that right? But because G-d has made us look different in different regions, we can identify each other by regions. This is the sense, this is the good sense we are to make of this. G-d said, G-d tells us that He have made us tribes and families so that we should know each other and not despise each other. Isn't that beautiful? Doesn't that make sense? Is blackness a material? That's what I mean. I find some black things superior and some inferior. Black caviar is superior but a black fly, no one wants that around.
And for our Caucasian brother, how can your white color be a marker for superiority? There are white things that are inferior and there are white things that are superior. There is the white magic. There is the whiteness of leprosy. So how can we look at our world and say black is superior, or white is superior. When we see that black has its inferior and it's superior and white has its inferior and it's superior. And we can't take a color gauge or a color scale and go around and flat scale the things and take out the particles, the excellent things. It's pure ignorance for people to think that their excellence or their superiority is in their color. In the hot climate, white is inferior. But in the cold climate black is inferior.
We're superior in our own home and inferior out of our home. The Caucasian in his climate, he's at home. You in your climate you at home. But if it stay mixed up like this out of our climate, we out of our climate, they out of theirs. In the north that is. In the north we out of ours and in the southern parts, they out of theirs. If we stay mixed up like this, who knows what kind of people we'll be looking like after about half a million years. In fact, science tells us that the poles are changing and in time Europe is going to become a tropic. And the equator, the tropic is going to become a pole. The climate is changing, the ice is going to shift. Right now we find that they predicted that coal is coming to the north again, right? They say coal is coming to the northern country, to Europe and America. But look where it's coming. It's coming down. It's coming down from the cold area. They said ice going come down. So if this happened as some scientists sp predict and the poles shift and those countries that are now cold become warm and those that are relatively warm now become cold and that condition exists for thousands of years, who knows where the black skin will be and the white skin will be. Black people might be created at the poles, formed at the poles and so-called white or white people be formed in the tropics. We don't know. All of these things happen naturally. Nothing happened in any spooky way o, artificial way. Everything happened naturally. Now this is kind of sense we ought to teach our children. We ought to teach our children in the textbook, school books, how they get their color. Everything gets its color from the sun.
In the sun you'll find the basic colors. And a good painter will tell you that you can take those basic colors and make any color you want. We should tell our children how we get the broad noses, how the Caucasian get his slit nose. Tell them scientifically, give them the scientific explanation for it. In the cold atmosphere, the cold region, if you breathe the air with this big wide nose that some of us have and breathe in all that cold air, you'll have tar for brains. You sure better have a scarf over your nose. I saw a Caucasian once his nose was so closed. I was looking, I was a little boy. I was looking and wondering, how does he get any air?
Now I'm a young man, 40 some years old. Just in my lifetime I have seen a slight change in the Caucasian people of states. When I was a boy Caucasians in the United States didn't have as much color as they have now, just in my time I've seen this change. Most of the Caucasians you see now they have more color to their skin than they did when I was a boy. When I was a boy, you see a whole lot pale, real pale Caucasians. And it wasn't makeup, they were using makeup, then they had to use a lot of makeup, rouge and all that stuff. And you saw more red looking, red looking Caucasians. But now they look more healthier. They're not as red, bloody looking. And those that are pale, they're not as pale. And I remember reading an article, the magazine that they had been studying Japanese Americans and they're finding that the Japanese Americans are losing their features. They say they're losing, that they gradual losing their features. Those generations that have been over here for a long time say they gradually losing their features, facial features are gradually changing. So we could get this information from the study of anthropology, physiology and be bold enough to be a student yourself of environment. Don't be afraid. The first man who wrote the theory, do you think he got it from a formal class? No. He got it observing, by making observations and then he discovered that this is an observation that stands up. He had done a lot of study. He didn't get the sample here, he sampled from many places and he come to conclusion that this observation stands up. And he wrote it down and they accepted it. With the crazy ideas he has now for the origin of races and the origins of color and hair texture, who can even question our boldness to write a book on the origin of races.
The features, the skin color. Don't wait for the Caucasians to do it. Do it yourself. Do it yourself. Write the next book. We're doing it in Chicago, but I don't want do it alone. All of us should do it. You have to come up with a book superior to Darwin's. Write a textbook on the origin of races and their features, the origin of the features, how we got their features. Write it. Make your own observations. Do your own study and write it and then offer it to the public school system. Say this is the kind of book that will really do away with the ugly trend of racism in America. Offer to it them. It might be accepted. If they don't accept it, we still won't be the losers. We will accept it. I would accept it. The World Community of Al Islam would accept it and we'll get out there and demonstrate and shame every other Bilalian. And I tell you in about a month we beat the hell out of them if they don't accept it.
We'll get out there and push it. We'll promote it, we'll demonstrate, we'll do everything. We'll go through all kinds of extremes to get the people to buy the new textbook, accept the new language, the new explanation for race. And if they don't accept it, I'll get out there and fight them physically if I have to. But I know that'll never happen. If we come up with it the great majority of our people will appreciate it so much that they themselves be the instrument for promoting the book.
Dear beloved Muslims, we need money. We need to develop our business community. We need some financial strength as a people in the society. It'll never come though. It'll never come until we get cultural strength. We have to have civilized principles that we live by. We have to have a virtual concept of life. Moral, virtuous concept of community life. We have to hate shiftless, lifeless people. And crime and vandalism. We have to hate all these things. We have to hate vulgarity. We have to hate the dozens. We used to talk, play the dozens. You remember we used to play the dozens. Well we grown now. Some of these jobs you won't even stay on. Man, I gotta get me another job. They put you around the worst people that just talk filthy all day long. Stand around all day long talking. We can't rise like that. We have to stop being so wasteful.
 Look how the cost of living is multiplied for us. And then our conscious is bad, the consumer conscious is bad. Rather than put pressure on the chain store that's selling us inferior food we'll go 10 miles to shop with the Caucasian community to do our shopping. Look at the money we waste in gas. And look how the quality of our neighborhood is poor because we don't have the strength to demand quality in our neighborhood from people who are selling us goods. I'm a welder by trade. I know good material when I see it. I remember going to buy a frying pan and the frying pan was not welded well at all. But none of our will tell the man you are selling an inferior product. Your frying pans are garbage. And if somebody tell us there's a new store over there we rush to that store just because it's new.
So when we are the main consumers in a community, the Caucasian can't survive in our community with his business. So they move out. Why? Economically we are like the black plague. Why? Because you don't know how to put pressure on the business operators to keep the prices down. The Caucasian consumer will put pressure on that business. Hell, they will even form a picket line out there, they were even hell. A big man out there from the door. Your prices are too high.
If you were making full demand on the businesses in your neighborhood, they would treat you better as a consumer. But you are too irresponsible. We have a shared responsibility to be more wise with how we spend our money. Instead, we constantly let them mistreat us no matter what happens.
So we have to do better. Stop letting these businesses abuse us. We work to hard for our money. And stop stealing from them. Respect yourself and build your economic dignity. Let's start planning our community life so that we all can benefit from our hard work. So the healthy traditions that made our life strong, healthy Christian principles, healthy ethnic principles, healthy cultural ideas. Let us reestablish those things. Let us hate the Superfly image with a passion. Let us hate the dope pusher, the vulgar man. Lets hate the one that is wasteful, because they are the ones that are keeping us back. Let us hate the one who's wasting the money.


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