Chicago City Wire

Harvard Professor and Hyde Park native Khalil Muhammad says white women should do more to defend the right of grade school teachers to instruct their students on sexual topics and so-called Critical Race Theory.

The great grandson of Nation of Islam founder and Louis Farakkan mentor Elijah Muhammad, he made the comments Wednesday during a school forum in Boston, at Harvard's Institute of Politics.

Muhammad and Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, lamented the opposition of former President Donald Trump and "red states" to early grade school instruction on sex, transvestism and Critical Race Theory— which argues white Americans are all inherently racist, and that America was founded primarily to exploit blacks and perpetuate slavery.

Muhammad, who led a "white privilege" training of American Express employees where he lectured on such topics, said such opposition amounts to "discrimination" by white men against not just transvestites and blacks, but their white wives and white daughters, as well.

“I’m always astounded by the silences within the broader white woman community,” he said. “Good old-fashioned moderate white women… essentially are standing on the sidelines as their own daughters are in schools where you cannot talk about gender discrimination let alone the attacks on trans children and their parents.”

Trump’s opposition was “far more effective at silencing the truth of our past.. of miseducation, of distortions, of attacks on the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Transvestite) community,” Muhammad said “Trump was the tip of the iceberg. But the iceberg turns out to be much bigger.

“Discrimination is... in the soul of American society,” he said. "Only in America does history play no role in how we understand the society we live in.”

Muhammad, 49, was raised in Hyde Park and attended Kenwood H.S. in Chicago before leaving for University of Pennsylvania. He currently teaches history at Harvard.

Muhammad's central thesis, he told American Express, is that "the American Dream... and the system of capitalism is fundamentally racist and based on 'racist logics and forms of domination."

Headquartered in Chicago's Chatham neighborhood, located 20 blocks south of Hyde Park, the Nation of Islam was founded in 1930.

According to Britannica.com, Elijah Muhammad "believed that the white race was created by Yakub, a Black scientist, and that Allah had allowed this devilish race to hold power for 6,000 years. Their time was up in 1914, and the 20th century was to be the time for Black people to assert themselves."

"Elijah also encouraged his followers to drop their “slave” names in favour of Muslim names or, in most cases, an “X,” signifying that they had lost their identities in slavery and did not know their true names," Britannica.com said.

The Southern Poverty Law Center deems the Nation of Islam (NOI) a "hate" group.

"Its theology of innate black superiority over whites and the deeply racist, antisemitic and anti-LGBT rhetoric of its leaders have earned the NOI a prominent position in the ranks of organized hate," the group said.

"During the early 1980s, the deeply bigoted language for which NOI is now infamous became daily fare, exacerbated by the charged atmosphere surrounding Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential bid," it said. "(Current NOI leader) Farrakhan made several of his most infamous remarks during the campaign, including calling Hitler “a very great man” and Judaism a “dirty religion.”