The Foundation for Intercultural Hypocrisy

YOU WOULD NOT ask Paul Tsongas to donate money to Bill Clinton's presidential campaign. You would not expect Iraq's United Nations representative to vote for the resolution condemning his country in the Gulf War. You would not count on a sane squirrel to stop mid-stride to let a dog catch him in a mad dash across the Yard.

These occurences just don't happen and few assume that they should.

Surprise, surprise. Right here on campus, a student-run group bucked such expectations and sponsored and event that directly contradicts the organization's mandate. The Student Advisory Committee (SAC) of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations funded a speech two weeks ago by Conrad L. Muhammad, national student representatives of the Nation of Islam.

This is no sudden discovery. The Foundation's funding was announced before the talk and reported in The Crimson the following day. What is surprising is the absolute silence that has greatest the Foundation's actions.

What should people be upset about?

The Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, a group whose stated goal is "to improve relations among racial and ethnic groups within the University," granted money and brought to Cambridge one of the most racially divisive speakers this campus have seen all year. This guy makes Leonard Jeffries look like a pussycat.

Muhammad didn't limit himself to divisions along racial lines. He made sure to lash out at women, Jews and sell-out Blacks of the "White establishment"--few groups escaped the minister's vitriol.

BILLED AS A PANEL talk on rap with Chuck D, Muhammad's lecture was more of a diatribe by a Louis Farrakhan protege than a statement about current music trends. Muhammad minced no words when discussing America's white people.

Directing his words to Blacks in the audience, Muhammad said of whites, "They would stab you, stick a knife in your back in a minute. "Saying "We must fight the evil of the white man," Muhammad told Black students to "go into the sewers and the subways and actually carry out guerrilla warfare."

Blacks too involved with "white society," Muhammad said, were guilty of "selling out" and therefore "worthy of death." Blacks, the minister said, should not be at Harvard, studying "the curriculum of the enemy." With such talk, the Foundation certainly succeeded in bringing "a view which is absent or lacking on campus," one of the group's criteria for receiving a student grant. But fostering dialogue is different from sponsoring a call for violence and racial warfare.

Muhammad's comments about women were perhaps the most offensive of the evening. "Woman's nature is to submit and to find comfort in a man," Muhammad stated, and further asserted that "the Black woman is the field of the Black man. If the Black man would be what God made him to be, Black women wouldn't resist."

Muhammad saved his words about Jews until the very end. He held up a Nation of Islam book titled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks And Jews, a tract filled with Jeffries-esque assertions about Jewish domination of the African slave trade. Muhammad then began defending his mentor, Louis Farrakhan, from accusations of anti-Semitism, saying "The criminal has turned it around on the good citizen."

When a Jewish `member of the audience asked the speaker, "Who's the criminal?" Muhammad shot back, "You and your people have a history of crime as long as the highways of America."

"Israel is an outlaw nation," Muhammad continued. "Zionism is a racist philosophy. I don't believe if there is a God anywhere in the universe that he will acquit you and Israel and your brothers in America and Europe of the crimes you have committed against humanity."

But that's not all. Muhammad had more to say: "We don't stop with humanity. Because if you think your crimes are limited to humanity, just ask the ozone layer, the rivers, the streams, the oceans, the land." I guess Jews have worse body odor and all that extra deodorant has ripped a whole in the atmosphere above Greenland. I'll have to start buying extra strength Rite Guard.

DOESN'T IT SOUND like intercultural and race relations were improved in Sanders Theater that night? And what about the Foundation's started goal--"to reduce the isolation and estrangement felt by minority students without encouraging the separation of races." Nothing like reverse psychology. By funding Muhammad, the Foundation supported the very concept that it supposedly is working to erase.

And no one among the organizations which usually work to promote positive intergroup relations on campus is speaking out. There is a Radcliffe Union of Students representative sitting on the Foundation's Students Advisory Council. With no peep of protest, it seems that women on campus and the group that advocates women's concerns were not offended by funding the dissemination of the minister's sexist remarks.

SAC'S CO-CHAIRS, Muneer I. Ahmad '93 and Natosha O. Reid '93, offered explanations, but they are unacceptable. Ahmed cites "the need to place speakers in their context. If Muhammad was speaking on anti-Semitism he would not have been funded."

Reid agreed, saying "We are not judging his political views but how he contributes to a particular project."

This is idea of separating the speaker's personal opinions from his or her topic of discussion is ridiculous. Sure Muhammad was part of a program on Black rap music, but could he be expected not to focus on the divisive doctrines of the Nation of Islam during his speech? After all, he's their campus representative. Would SAC grant money for David Duke to speak about African-American or Jewish culture, ignoring his Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazi past?

Even if there is significant Black Muslim influence in rap music, granting money to bring a leader in the Nation of Islam--a group led by a man who called Judaism a "gutter religion" and termed Hitler a "great man"--to Harvard could only do more harm than good, leading to further polarization of campus racial and ethnic groups.

But even if Muhammad's association with Farrakhan were not reason enough to refuse funding the minister's lecture, Muhammad's past statements should have been enough to hint that he wasn't stopping by for the weekend to talk music but to bring anger and prejudice to a boil and preach the passionate polemics of hate.

But to research speakers receiving Foundation grant money would be asking too much, I suppose, from the student group. SAC Members recall little, if any, debate accompanying the rapper/racist Chuck D/Conrad Muhammad project proposal at the group's February 10 grants meeting.

In fact, the meeting lasted for six or seven hours, and many members who now claim they would have argued against funding a talk by a Nation of Islam leader left the committee gathering before the grant came up for discussion. Those who stayed said the Muhammad grant met with much less resistance than other proposals on the table.

But, unfortunately, this scenario presents nothing out of the ordinary according to members of the committee. Little research is ever conducted to investigate the background of speakers included in grant applications submitted to the Foundation.

Perhaps the large number of applications would overwhelm a student group. But read the following description of SAC found in the Foundation's booklet: "[SAC's] primary responsibility is to review student grant requests and award funding with the approval of the Faculty Advisory Committee." It's not too much to expect SAC to perform its "primary responsibility" in a thorough and respectable manner.

It is also not unreasonable to expect SAC to conduct in-depth checks on speakers under consideration, seeing that the group may pay the individual for coming to Harvard. Even our parents occasionally want to know what they're getting for their $20000-plus tuition bill.

To its credit, SAC does suggest in its grant guidelines the submission of a "short biography...to help us better evaluate the project." But apparently this portion of the application, if included, rarely embarks upon anything more than the speaker's title and place of residence. In any case, if SAC members did have Muhammad's biography during their meeting, then they have exhibited even greater irresponsibility and insensitivity than if they had simply approved the Nation of Islam grant unaware of Muhammad's past.

Someone didn't do their homework. And it wouldn't even have been so difficult.

CONRAD MUHAMMAD spoke only a month and a half ago in the Philadelphia Civil Center, introducing Louis Farrakhan before a Martin Luther King Day crowd of 16,000. Muhammad was featured in national headlines--ranging from The Washington Post to the Cable News Network--for his role in bringing Farrakhan to speak at the University of Pennsylvania less than four years ago.

Conrad Tillard, as he was known in his pre-ministerial days, was a student at the University of Pennsylvania from 1986 through 1988, when he left without receiving a diploma to become the national youth representative for the Nation of Islam, a post Farrakhan created for him.

While at Penn, Muhammad split the Black community on campus by forming the Organization of Black Consciousness, challenging the already-existing Black Student League.

While in Philadelphia, Muhammad frequently addressed audiences using inflammatory and racist rhetoric, calling white people at one time," the blue-eyed devil," another time, "the enemy of humanity" and still another time, the "killer" who creates an "unseen reality" that manipulates Blacks to commit violent acts against each other.

In his introduction of Farrakhan's 1988 address at Penn, Muhammad called the Nation of Islam leader "My God." Is this the kind of role model you'd want a healer of racial wounds to bring to Sanders Theatre?

With information like this readily available, there was no excuse for Foundation money to have been anywhere near Conrad Muhammad two weeks ago. This man's job for the past four years has been to travel from campus to campus advocating the separation of races, a doctrine directly in conflict with the Foundation's goals.

The Foundation's Student Advisory Committee owes this campus an explanation of its self-defeating and irresponsible decision. And it has to come up with something better than the separating-the-person-from-the-topic argument which could be used to justify Foundation funding of an Adolf Hitler address on homosexuality.

Expecting such and individual to limit his comments to the contribution of rap music to culture is naive at best. Even if SAC had no clue of Muhammad's past racist comments, funding a Nation of Islam speaker does anything but follow the Foundation's motto to "enhance the quality of our common life."