could get a straight answer out of him, and anyway, I figured that we might be able to use an ally in what was proving
to be a series of sticky negotiations with Ms. Alvarez. If the storefront he had in mind met the necessary specifications,
I said, then I was willing to propose it as one possible alternative.
So Rafiq and I formed an uneasy alliance, one that didn’t go over too well with the DCP leaders. I understood their
concerns: Whenever we sat down with Rafiq to discuss our joint strategy, he would interrupt the discussion with long
lectures about secret machinations afoot, and all the black people willing to sell their people down the river. It was an
effective negotiating ploy, for with his voice progressively rising, the veins in his neck straining, Angela and Will and
the others would suddenly drop into a curious silence, watching Rafiq as if he were an epileptic in the midst of seizure.
More than once, I’d have to jump in and start shouting back at him, not so much in anger as simply to slow him down,
until finally a small smile would curl under his mustache and we could get back to work.
When the two of us were alone, though, Rafiq and I could sometimes have normal conversations. Over time I arrived
at a grudging admiration for his tenacity and bravado, and, within his own terms, a certain sincerity. He confirmed that
he had been a gang leader growing up in Altgeld; he had found religion, he said, under the stewardship of a local
Muslim leader unaffiliated with Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. “If it hadn’t been for Islam, man, I’d
probably be dead,” he told me one day. “Just had a negative attitude, you understand. Growing up in Altgeld, I’d
soaked up all the poison the white man feeds us. See, the folks you’re working with got the same problem, even though
they don’t realize it yet. They spend half they lives worrying about what white folks think. Start blaming themselves for
the shit they see every day, thinking they can’t do no better till the white man decides they all right. But deep down
they know that ain’t right. They know what this country has done to their momma, their daddy, their sister. So the truth
is they hate white folks, but they can’t admit it to themselves. Keep it all bottled up, fighting themselves. Waste a lot of
energy that way.
“I tell you one thing I admire about white folks,” he continued. “They know who they are. Look at the Italians. They
didn’t care about the American flag and all that when they got here. First thing they did is put together the Mafia to
make sure their interests were met. The Irish-they took over the city hall and found their boys jobs. The Jews, same
thing...you telling me they care more about some black kid in the South Side than they do ’bout they relatives in
Israel? Shit. It’s about blood, Barack, looking after your own. Period. Black people the only ones stupid enough to
worry about their enemies.”
That was the truth as Rafiq saw it, and he didn’t waste energy picking that truth apart. His was a Hobbesian world
where distrust was a given and loyalties extended from family to mosque to the black race-whereupon notions of
loyalty ceased to apply. This narrowing vision, of blood and tribe, had provided him with a clarity of sorts, a means of
focusing his attention. Black self-respect had delivered the mayor’s seat, he could argue, lust as black self-respect
turned around the lives of drug addicts under the tutelage of the Muslims. Progress was within our grasp so long as we
didn’t betray ourselves.
But what exactly constituted betrayal? Ever since the first time I’d picked up Malcolm X’s autobiography, I had tried
to untangle the twin strands of black nationalism, arguing that nationalism’s affirming message-of solidarity and self-
reliance, discipline and communal responsibility-need not depend on hatred of whites any more than it depended on
barré
(Barré)
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