Why I Am a Five Percenter by Michael Muhammad Knight

Author:Michael Muhammad Knight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

In efforts to make the culture more empowering for women, Cuba published an alternate version of the Student Enrollment’s first degree:Who is the Original Woman?

The Original Woman is the Asiatic Blackwoman, co-maker, co-owner, womb of the planet Earth, mother of civilization and Goddess of the universe.80

Cuba’s work is less inclusive on race, condemning what he calls the “Baby Yakub Devil Worship Cult” of Five Percenters who attempt to make the movement more friendly to whites, and arguing that changes in Allah’s positions on race were only for political expediency and did not reflect his true teachings. Regardless of how Cuba would feel about it, his writings have contributed to this devil’s understanding of gender in the Five Percent. I can’t call Cuba a feminist with full confidence—at one point he puts the word in quotation marks, as though smirking at the idea—but he has nonetheless brought Five Percenter and feminist ideas closer to dialogue with each other, creating an opening in which I Self Lord And Master could represent total liberation.

It seemed that a Five Percenter feminism would rescue this white male from having to choose between white-dominated feminism and male-dominated black power. The stories of both Ham and Eve can be erased. Taking the devil off the planet would mean recognizing the ways in which sexism and racism feed each other, causing black men to be hurt by sexism, white women to be hurt by racism, and everyone’s lives to be shaped by both.

As the beneficiary of both racism and sexism, I have seen my reality written by them. Apart from the countless ways in which whiteness and maleness define me every day, I can trace histories through which racism and sexism lured me into each other. Taking my views on gender as a teenager from Malcolm X, my treatment of women was therefore influenced by the psychological impact of slavery, poverty, and disenfranchisement upon black men: the legacy of racism made me a sexist. Similarly, if commitment to antisexism causes me to forget my whiteness and all that comes with it when in dialogue with Muslim communities or the Five Percent, then the legacy of sexism has made me a white supremacist. I have to respect what Malcolm X and Mary Daly could say to me, but also what they would say to each other.

Considering the interplay of these American tragedies, I cannot imagine that it would benefit anyone for me to see women as less representative of God than men: for a white man to do so in the face of black women repeats more than one old crime. If self-possession after everything that America throws at her means that an Original Woman names herself God, I’m the very last person who can say no, but this does not mean that I can decide the place for women in the Five Percent. There are also Five Percenter women who don’t want to be God, and who find fulfilling meanings exclusively in their title of Earth, just as

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