Muhammad deplores the $21 million annual subsidy the Holocaust Museum gets from the government, while there is not a dollar available for James Cameron's efforts to launch a black museum in Milwaukee, an effort detailed on 60 Minutes and begun when Cameron survived a lynching.
Muhammad has been so vitriolic about Jews and his allegations of Jewish involvement in the slave trade that the Congressional Black Caucus instigated a censure of the Muslim, which in turn led to Louis Farrakhan's removing Khallid from his official posting.
Muhammad goes off on the press and those blacks who would muzzle him.
"You got me busted, and I'm going buck wild on your behind. . . . I don't care about your newspapers, I don't care about these damn cameras . . . these half-baked, half-fried, bootlicking, butt-licking, buck-dancing, bamboozled, half-punkified, half-sissified, pasteurized, homogenized niggers and Uncle Toms."
He ridicules one specific black leader, loping around the stage imitating a chimpanzee, scratching, mugging.
"I yam a-some-body. I yam a-some-body. I don't know who the hell I yam, but I yam a-some-body."
It is Jesse Jackson, the shadow representative for Washington, D.C., in Congress, who has helped orchestrate the condemnation of Khallid Abdul Muhammad, the same Jesse Jackson whose career was almost extinguished when he referred to New York City as "Hymietown."
There is a lesson here.
Jesse Jackson is much on my mind when I go to see Goodfarb the next day.
I empathize with this judge. I grew up in a construction family and worked as a pipe fitter, learning a trade and a roughhewed vocabulary that included every ethnic put-down.
Unlike Goodfarb, I was raised a bigot by my parents. At an age when I had not yet discovered girls, we lived next door to a black social club. My father could see me listening to the music floating out of the building so close by, and his words were short and sharp: "If I ever catch you with a black girl, I'll cut your penis off."
His words of smoldering savagery made an impression on me, and I was my father's boy.
I can clearly remember telling a teacher that she could not force me to sit next to a black kid if I wanted to sit with the whites.
But something happened; I met black people.
I went to an inner-city high school where blacks were the overwhelming majority. We played ball together and hung out together. I defied my father in ways he had not imagined.
The old man's hatreds became unexplainable to me, not that an explanation was ever offered.
I still cannot discuss race in my family. The two relatives I am closest to had a different coming of age: One was raped by blacks in a jail cell; the other still carries the emotional scars of brutal interracial confrontations in the cafeteria and rest rooms of Houston's schools.
Though this judge grew up using the same language as my family, there is little bond that I can see between my father's squinty-eyed racism and Goodfarb's racist crack. He is simply one more person, like so many whites--and blacks, for that matter--who resort to gutter talk as aggravation shorthand.
®MDNM¯For those who are the victims of ®MDNM¯ethnic isolation, any defense of the judge tastes like chalky mendacity. Just as my family is beyond reach on the topic of race, so too are those who've run out of patience with Stanley Goodfarb. But is the outlook of a victim a reasonable tape measure? Who will not be fitted for a racist's bib overalls if the tailor is hunched over in pain?®MDNM¯
Janice Moore, with the law firm of O'Connor Cavanagh, expressed her feelings about Goodfarb, not in terms of pain, or hurt, but rather of wrath.
"The plain reality is that in the minds of far too many in the bar and in this society at large, I am nothing more than a 'nigger lawyer' who has achieved senior partnership status at one of the most prestigious law firms in Phoenix. Although I am the first 'nigger' to have achieved that result, no doubt based upon misguided 'affirmative action,' I carry the weight of my entire race each day I am given the chance to practice."
Moore told me that "one slip of the tongue" and Goodfarb ought to be off the bench.
"When you make this ignorant statement from some vile abyss, and you are a judge, it is different."
Judge Goodfarb's apologies do not much sway Moore.
He has recently taken a class on multicultural diversity, as well as submitted to anger counseling, both of which, I think, are a foolish waste of everyone's time. What Goodfarb needs is a lunch with Janice Moore.
I am predisposed to think that any class on "multicultural diversity" is lost on a 63-year-old man. As if to prove the point, Goodfarb, in our discussion, recalls an old adversary. Shaking his head and clamping his lips together in frustration, he blurts out, "The little faggot."
Don't roll your eyes.
You cannot dictate that a man's tongue will be the equal of his heart (though sometimes you do just want to clip Goodfarb on the side of the head, the way you'd slap a jukebox to make it skip past an unnerving scratch).
