Farrakhan on Tom Joyner Cruise: America Will Not Help All Its Citizens Recover

As the nation continues to crawl its way out of the economic quicksand that sunk the entire globe into a fiscal depression, Minister Louis Farrakhan warned African Americans that the United States has no intentions of recovering the entire country when it gets back on its feet. Some demographics, particularly black men, are being deliberately disenfranchised from America’s wealth.

On a “Discussion on the State of Black Men in America,” Farrakhan pontificated on the state of black men from the time of the Million Man March in 1995 to the election of the first African American president in a wide-ranging, two-hour discussion with Roland Martin aboard the Tom Joyner Fantastic Voyage.

The controversial militant minister use an Old Testament passage as an analogy to explain today’s plight of black men. He said when the Egyptians were contemplating a response to the exploding Jewish population, Pharaoh huddled with his closest advisers: Let’s deal wisely with them, less they multiply, join on with an enemy of ours and come against us.

“So what was Pharaoh’s plan?” Farrakhan asked rhetorically. “Kill all the boy babies, spare the female,” he paraphrased the biblical passage. “You see all these black men out of work, with employment rates far out of proportion to the national average. So now you have a black man at home and his wife is working. And when a woman is taking care of her man, she is really raising her first child.”

Farrakhan stressed that blacks, particularly black men, need to become entrepreneurs and the black community as a whole should practice the philosophy of “cooperative economics” and “pool our resources” in order to survive the economic downturn and then thrive when the country rebounds fully. “They have no intention of helping black men. Corporations believe they can satisfy both minority requirements by hiring a black woman instead of a qualified black man,” he said.

Black institutions, Farrakhan implored, must be accountable and step outside of the comforts of the four walls of the church to address the needs of the people who surround and support their churches as they did a generation ago.

“There’s a church on every corner. Preachers are everywhere. And next to that church may be a crack house. And there’s prostitution and gang violence. We cannot stay in the church or the mosque with people who think they’re so holy. We have to get out into the streets where the problems are and deal with our young people,” Farrakhan said to rousing applause. –terry shropshire

Pictured: Tom Joyner, Min. Louis Farrakhan and Roland Martin