Rep. Keith Ellison wrote that the Constitution is evidence of a racist conspiracy

With Rep. Peter King’s hearing on the threat of radical Islam set to begin today, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) has been in the news. Congress’ only Muslim member, Ellison will testify in today’s hearing and has vocally criticized its intent and purpose.

But Ellison’s past as an apologist for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan deserves more scrutiny than it has gotten. Writing for a college newspaper, The Minnesota Daily, on November 27, 1989, Ellison wrote an article defending Farrakhan from critics. That article is not posted online but the Tatler has obtained the article in its entirety. Writing under the name Keith Hakim, Ellison wrote the following to defend Farrakhan and the NoI against charges that he and his organization are racist. Ellison/Hakim first establishes his own definition of racism, then makes the very incendiary charge that “their Constitution” is racist.

Racism means conspiracy to subjugate and actual subjugation. That means planned social, economic, military, religious and political subjugation of whites. It cannot be intelligently argued that the Nation of Islam is doing this. In fact, blacks have no history of harming or subjecting whites as a class. On the other hand, whites have it written into their very Constitution that blacks shall be considered three-fifths of a person for purposes of taxation and representation of their white owners. Their Constitution also makes provision for the return of runaway slaves. Their constitution [sic] is the bedrock of American law; it’s the best evidence of a white racist conspiracy to subjugate other peoples. (emphasis added)

The repeated construction “their Constitution” hints that, at least in 1989, Ellison did not accept the US Constitution as a legitimate source of legal authority.

Farrakhan, of course, has a very long history of making remarks that can only be fairly construed as racist, and that history dates back to before 1989, and up to the present.

Elsewhere in the 1989 article, Ellison/Hakim attacks “white barbarism,” blasts “America’s genocidal crimes,” and defends Malcolm X (Malik Shabazz’s) distinction of “colonial masters and slavers of Western Europe, America, Australia, South Africa, and Israel” as “very devilish.”

The article dates to 1989. The question is, does Ellison continue to hold any of these views today?