By Stacey Patton

“In the past, yes, I have made sweeping indictments of all white people.  I will never be guilty of that again . . . True Islam taught me that it takes all of the religious, political, economic, psychological and racial ingredients, or characteristics, to make the Human Family and Human society complete.”

– Malcolm X

How do you say, eh uh, house Negro in Arabic?

Just before the Thanksgiving holiday I posed this very question to a Jersey City taxi driver named Mikhail, an Egyptian Christian who speaks English, Arabic and French.  Because I couldn’t get in touch with an Arabist or professor of Near-Eastern Studies at one of the local universities, I relied on Mikhail’s expertise and interpretation.  Days before, on November 20, The New York Times reported that Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, called President-elect Barack Obama a “house Negro” and compared him unfavorably with “honorable black Americans” like 1960s black Muslim leader Malcolm X.  As I read the front-page article, I found myself jaw-dropped, chuckling and almost choking on my cup of white peppermint hot chocolate.

“Is this a joke?  The Times?  They’ve got to be kidding me,” I mumbled to myself.

Just to be sure I hadn’t accidentally picked up one of those tabloid dailies or some spoof edition, I checked for the little “All the News That’s Fit to Print” box at the top left-hand corner of the paper.  All the while I kept imagining some frail, bushy-beard man clad in a turban hat or linen Galabiyya sitting atop some desert mountain calling Obama a house Negro as his armed, sun-kissed, cave-dwelling associates took notes on how the new Internet video should feature Obama praying with Jews juxtaposed against a bearded Malcolm X praying alone in a mosque.

The New York Times piece went on to describe a recent Al Qaeda video, which contained archival footage of Malcolm X speaking in 1963 about the differences between “field Negroes” and “house Negroes.”   The video also shows the Al Qaeda deputy calling former and current secretaries of state, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice “house slaves.” The piece said that American officials believed that the tape was authentic and that antiterrorism officials and other experts “dismissed the video as a desperate tactic by a terrorist group that suffered defeat in the global war of ideas with Mr. Obama’s election.”

After watching the video I couldn’t help but think that it was some kind of manufactured ploy to undermine Obama’s credibility with black Americans and people of color around the globe who rejoiced when he won the presidency.  Throughout the course of his election bid, Obama was called an Arab, a Muslim, black radical, terrorist and a Socialist by Americans – everything but the n-word.  He brushed off those attacks, kept his cool, and made history.  Now some outsider, from the least likely corners of the world, reached deep from within African-American history and culture, borrowed a symbol dating back to the slavery era, and hurled it at Obama.

The article and video made me think about all those black folks who had ever been publicly called out as house Negroes. Of course there was Malcolm X referring to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other “Uncle Tom ministers” and civil rights leaders who advocated non-violent direct action as a response to white violence and degradation. I remembered my childhood days hearing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and chief opponent of affirmative action and Republican political activist Ward Connerly being called house Negroes and Uncle Toms. And in a 2002 radio interview, singer and activist Harry Belafonte, a Jamaican, denounced Colin Powell, another Jamaican, as a house Negro because of his political activities in the Bush administration.  I’ve even heard comedian Paul Mooney refer to Condi Rice as “Aunt Jemima with a degree.”

While I have grown accustomed to black folks playing the dozens, never have I ever heard someone outside of the race use the term “house Negro” to describe another black person.

So I asked Mikhail, the Jersey City cab driver, what he thought about all this.  When I asked, “How do you say house Negro in Arabic?” he leaned forward with his eyebrows scrunched together and shot me a confused look in his rearview mirror.

“Cchowse,” he paused.  “Neee-gro?”

Oh, boy.  How do I explain this to Mikhail?  I knew that I didn’t have much time to go into the social and psychological impact of American slavery on blacks, the history of racial oppression during the Jim Crow period, or the various class-based ideologies and various black leadership strategies of the modern civil rights movement.
“Okay, how about house slave?” I asked.  “How do you say house slave in Arabic?”

“Cchowse slave?” Mikhail still seemed confused.  “Do you mean cchowse slave like for man.  O’ for woo-mon?”

To overcome our cultural language gap, I proceeded to explain the article I had read in The New York Times and it turns out that Mikhail had read it too.  He explained that “abeed-al-beit”, or house slave, meant that al-Zawahri was saying that Obama was a black man who was going to live in the White House, a symbol of the white government which represents the interests of white people in America and in the western world.  He also said that al-Zawarhri was a “crazy man” and that Americans are wrong for talking about him, various extremist groups, and Islam all in the same breath.

“Uh-merrikans don’t understand,” he lamented.

What troubled me most about The New York Times piece was its treatment of Malcolm X.  When the mainstream media talks about Malcolm X, they always seem to highlight his “white devil” speeches, ideas about racial separatism and black armed self-defense, and his composite sketches of the “field Negro” and “house Negro.” In the mainstream American imagination, Malcolm X largely remains an angry militant leader – a nightmare.  But how can scholars, The New York Times, or even an Al Qaeda deputy talk about Malcolm X without addressing his transformative journey to Mecca, the most holy Muslim city in the world?  That’s not correct, that’s writing fiction, not truth.

When he was 39, Malcolm X took his Hajj to Mecca.  His experience there produced a fundamental change in his view of American race relations and global human relations.  In subsequent letters and speeches he said, “In my 39 years on this earth, the Holy City of Mecca had been the first time I had ever stood before the creator of All and felt like a complete human being.”

It was in Mecca where he came to accept that whites were not inherently evil or racists, where he learned not to dismiss the humanity of others, and where he adopted new words like tolerance, brotherhood, unity, and common humanity.

Of practicing orthodox Islam with other Muslims, Malcolm X noted: “They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blondes, to black-skinned Africans . . . displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experience in America had led me to believe could never exist between the white and non-white.”  Towards the end of his life, he noted that his new friends were brown, red, yellow, white, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, atheists, capitalists, Socialists, Communists, and yes, “even Uncle Toms.”

Malcolm X recognized that the Black Muslim movement, which had schooled him prior to his journey to Mecca, had an ambivalent relationship with the larger Islamic world.  His hunger for racial justice, his quest for personal growth, and his yearning to embrace the universality in the message of “true Islam” was a nightmare then for the U.S. government establishment, Elijah Muhammad’s organization, the Nation of Islam and is today for the extremist Al Qaeda.

To ask whether today Malcolm X would call President-elect Barack Obama a house Negro is an ahistorical question.  However, one of his daughters, Illyasah Shabazz, said “no” to that very question in a recent interview with Larry King. But if he had the chance to speak to us today, perhaps Malcolm X might rightly recall the names of Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, men who led the most famous slave rebellions in American history.

And by the way, they were all house Negroes.