A Practice Round for the Inner City: Circum-Caribbean Occupation, Crack Cocaine, and Religious Duty in Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam

Abstract

Throughout the mid-1980s, the Nation of Islam—via its newspaper the Final Call—condemned American expansion of empire in the circum-Caribbean. Domestically, articles focused on President Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs, characterizing it as a farce justifying the imprisonment and genocide of Black people. These were not separate thought experiments, however. For the Nation of Islam, the same racist, imperialist justifications served as the basis of both occupations, one foreign and one domestic. American military action abroad was simply a precursor to subjugation of Black America with tanks, guns, and bombs. This article explores this intellectual and internationalist discourse and the real solutions that emerged from it through the Nation of Islam’s Dopebusters program, which fought drugs and violence in Black communities. I argue that these tactics were a religio-political response, combining Islam, Black nationalism, internationalism, and anti-imperial discourses to translate theory and rhetoric into community action.