Minister Louis Farrakhan

The Origin of Blackness

By Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan | Last updated: Jun 1, 2009 - 10:50:34 AM

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[Editor's Note: The following text is excerpted from an April 8, 2001 message delivered by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan at Mosque Maryam in Chicago, Ill. This is part one of two articles which first appeared in FCN Vol. 20, No. 36 (June 19, 2001) Click here to order CD/DVD of this message.]

In The Name of Allah, The Beneficent, The Merciful.

You and I are a people that walk in darkness. We are without form, and, we have been made void. Anything that is voided has no value. You throw it away.

You have been voided. You are not yet making history. You are inside the womb of America like a baby is in the womb of its mother, functioning off of White America's system, feeding from its system, while trying to develop a system of your own; but as you begin to evolve, it is not until you are free from White America that your Genesis will begin. That is why Moses is given in both Bible and Qur'an as the main man that the last man would be like. Why? Because you are a people like Moses' people.

You are a Black man that doesn't have any value. So, when they want to move you, they move you. When they want to kill you, they kill you. When they want to beat you, they beat you. When they want to raise you, they raise you, but always it is when they want to; and, it is only after you press and press that they give in.

It is like a baby growing in the womb. The mother may not want to give an inch but the baby may twist and kick its foot, and, if it kicks a nerve, the mother's legs may go out from under her. She didn't mean to lose her balance, but, it is that which is in her moving that is messing up her balance. So it is with you today. You are moving inside the womb of America. You are not yet free, but, your movement is causing trouble inside the womb, inside the nation. The White man is feeling the movement of the Black man because life is now coming into you and it is only a matter of time before we will all be free.

You may wonder: “Why am I Black?” Are you Black because you are cursed? Some of you have awakened and looked in the mirror at your Black face, your hair, your lips and you wondered to yourself, “Why couldn't I have come into the world White? Why did I have to be Black?”

The Bible teaches, “In the beginning...”—it does not tell you when that beginning was, but it is letting you know there was a beginning—“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” So darkness preceded light. Now let us take a look into this “darkness.”

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said that, “The darkness that we see now is not real. When the night comes you are in the dark, but it is not real darkness.” How do you know? Because when the light comes, the darkness goes. Where did it go? It vanished. Why? Because it wasn't real in the beginning. The thing that is real is what produced the darkness.

If you go outside and let the sun strike you, if you are facing east the sun striking your body will send a shadow toward the west. When you look at the shadow you see this dark thing following you, but, that which is following you is not real. What is real is you. What is real is the sun, and, as the sun strikes you and you block that sun, you produce what is called darkness or a shadow.

When one side of the earth is in the light of the sun, the other side is in the shadow of the Earth. When you are in the shadow of the Earth, you call that night, but, the darkness is not real; it is produced by the motion of the Earth in relationship to the sun. What kind of darkness was that when there was no sun, when there was no moon, when there was no star? That is the darkness that is beyond the diameter of sunlight.

At the wall of the universe where light does not go beyond it, there is darkness. That darkness is not a shadow. That darkness is real. When scientists talk about a black hole, they are not talking about some unreal shadow. They are talking about real darkness, and, real darkness contains a power.

There is a power out there that is always bringing new objects into view. Stars are dying and stars are being born. That power that is out there is bringing new objects out of darkness that is real into light. The darkness of the womb is not a shadow; that is real darkness. The Holy Qur'an calls it “triple darkness.” It is layers of darkness, but, in that darkness is the power to create life. In that darkness there is the germ of light. That is why any Believer in Allah (God), no matter how dark the day seems, no matter how dark the trouble is that you think you are in, yet, in that darkness there is light, and, there is life if you hold on and do not let the darkness overtake you until your mind becomes as dark as the darkness that envelops you.

The power of darkness is that it can create you after itself. For example, sometimes we get in a bad spirit. We may liken it to darkness. A gloom comes over the mind because of a thought that we are thinking, real or imagined, and, then that thought begins to reflect itself in our skin. It begins to reflect itself in our posture—our shoulders begin to droop, we do not feel good. What happened? A thought that is in your brain is remaking you according to the darkness of that thought. So, you become as dark and as gloomy as what is in your mind.

So, it is with the real darkness that was in existence before there was light.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said to us that, “An atom sparkled in the darkness and God began to create Himself out of the material of the darkness.” The Honorable Elijah Muhammad is telling us that matter was there but the matter was doing nothing. It had no form, aim or purpose until an atom sparkled in the darkness.

Look at you, Black man and woman. Allah (God) said you are created in His image and after His likeness. How did you start? From a tiny life germ, the one that impregnated the egg that you cannot see with the naked eye, that is how infinitesimally small that sperm was. That is how infinitesimally small the egg was, but, that sperm with a little tail and a head had some intelligence in it because it knew where it wanted to go and it knew what it wanted to do.

In the dark that sperm found the egg and the first cell of life began in darkness, but, the cell had a light of itself—electricity inside the cell, a neutron, a proton and an electron. The cell of life was like an atom. The light of itself caused it to start rotating around the light of itself and it began breaking down and building up.

We do not know how long it took for brains to form in the darkness, but, the first thing that forms when a baby is conceived in the womb is not the tail. The first thing that forms is the head. It is the head that calls the arms into existence, the feet into existence, and, the organs into existence.

When you didn't even have thought, before you could think there was an intelligence working in you that is the Light of Allah (God), the Power of Allah (God). Even before the growth of intelligence in the darkness, we were being fashioned out of a tiny life germ—sperm mixed with ovum. We were called into existence by what was in that tiny sperm, the head of it, and, at the end of nine months, we came forth knowing nothing, but, with a capacity to learn everything.

So, when the Holy Qur'an, in Surah 112, says, “He neither begets nor is He begotten.” The first God was the Originator of Himself. He was not begotten. The One that comes in the end does not beget. He does not need a son from His loins. He produces a nation from the wisdom of His mouth. He fashioned Himself out of darkness. We learn how environment can influence heredity; therefore, we must be careful what environment we put ourselves in because no matter what is in you of good, if you are in the wrong environment, that environment can affect the good that is in you and turn you into itself.

Who is the Original Man? Are you Black because you are cursed or are you Black because you took your color out of the darkness out of which the First Life came? Since we agree that environment influences heredity, if the real darkness before there was sunlight had matter in it that was real, how then could the God make Himself up in darkness and come out white? If He made Himself up out of darkness and the darkness covered Him, then, the God who originated the heavens and the earth is a Black God. This is what the Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us. The question that has to be asked is, “Is this a made-up teaching,” or, “Is this Divine Revelation?”