Let’s Revisit Yacub

mauludSADIQ

Published in

The Brothers

8 min readNov 27, 2024

You’ll debate me, wrangle with ChatGPT

I wanna call a press conference and do just like Ali in this photo.

You’re not going to like this.

I know you’re not because of all the teachings of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s the story of Yacub is THE most attacked, most maligned, most ridiculed.

It’s dismissed. It’s ignored. And never examined. Framing it as myth and nonsense makes even the most ardent believer reluctant to discuss Yacub without also framing the story as myth.

Well, I’m of the spirit of that early aughts Atlanta rapper, Bone Crusher, “I Ain’t Never Scared.”

And in this, the Second of the ChatGPT assisted articles, I’ll demonstrate mathematically the REALITY of Yacub.

I don’t need a lot of words but you’re going to need a lot of time to reflect. Ready? Ok, let’s go.

I was made to write this.

Thirty eight years ago I was in an AP Biology class. The teacher, who’s name I can’t remember, was demonstrating to the students the Punnett square. Devised and named for its originator, Reginald C Punnett, the graph is used to illustrate how traits are handed down.

As was often the case in these AP classes, I was the only Black person. I often sat in the back and worked on graffiti and kept myself to myself.

But on this day, I found the teaching to be engaging.

The teacher was running down a list of dominant and recessive traits:

“Thick lips are dominant to thin lips, brown eyes are dominant to blue eyes,” he stated unemotionally, “curly hair is dominant to straight hair,” and on he went.

When he asked if anyone had a question, intrigued, I raised my hand and asked, “so does that mean that Black people are dominant to white people?”

The class burst out in laughter, the teacher’s face turned red, and he yelled “get out of here!”

Off to the Assistant Principal, Mr. Peguese’s Office I went to be suspended for disrupting the class. He didn’t believe I was being sincere when I asked that question and my mom didn’t care. All she knew was she had to leave work to come and get me and was pissed off.

That moment never left me and I knew I was wronged.

A year later, I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X.

It was a copy that I still have (though the cover finally fell off). It was given to me by my mother’s brother, whom we knew as PeeWee. PeeWee was an ardent reader and always encouraged us to be the same. I don’t even remember when he gave me that book, I just know it had been sitting around in my room for YEARS before I read it.

At my older brother’s urging, I picked it up and couldn’t put it down. It was there that I first encountered the story of Yacub.

On page 164 of that book Malcolm starts explaining like this:

It was Hilda who said to me, “Would you like to hear how the white man came to this planet Earth?” And she told me that key lesson of Mr. Elijah Muhammad’s teachings, which I later learned was the demonology that every religion has, called “Yacub’s History.” Elijah Muhammad teaches his followers that, first, the moon separated from the earth. Then, the first humans, Original Man, were a black people. They founded the Holy City Mecca.

He went on to say:

Among Mr. Yacub’s 59,999 all-black followers, every third or so child that was born would show some trace of brown. As these became adult, only brown and brown, or black and brown, were permitted to marry. As their children were born, Mr. Yacub’s law dictated that, if a black child, the attending nurse, or midwife, should stick a needle into its brain and give the body to cremators, he mothers Were told it had been an “angel baby,” which had gone to heaven, to prepare a place for her.

Off the rip, if you’re a student of words, Malcolm’s use of the word “demonology” (the comparative study of how different religions perceive and categorize demonic beings, their functions, and their influence on the material and spiritual world) would make you less likely to take the story seriously.

Me? I read it and found it fascinating and moved on. Over the next few years I would become more familiar with the Nation of Islam, would watch Minister Farrakhan lectures repeatedly, and would eventually accept Islam.

That’s where I would encounter the story of Yacub again. In fact, the lesson that deals with His (Yacub) laws is one of the longest degrees. And over the past thirty years I’ve found it to be the most challenging bit of our teaching for outsiders to accept.

Of course the reason why is evident. We’re taught from the time that we’re wee children that the reason that humans look different is because we lived in different climates.

Then, more recently, we’ve had studies that claim that “race” is just a social construct.

Ok, fine.

But are there dominant and recessive genes?

There are?

Ok, so let’s deal with that.

Even as a child I thought the whole climate, natural selection thing to be far-fetched. It just didn’t ring true to me.

Why aren’t Black folks who live in cold places slowly mutating into whites? Why aren’t whites living in Africa turning into Black folks?

If there was a teacher standing nearby, they’d yell at me, “it takes thousands of years!”

Well, I’m not going to bury the lead, it would actually take BILLIONS of years.

I know you don’t trust and believe me — who am I to tell you that? Am I a biologist? Do I have a doctorate? Nope. I’ll let ChatGPT explain it:

You think I don’t know what you’re thinking? You’re like, that’s all 10,000 traits — white folk ain’t all recessive traits. I could take you up on that but I’m gonna let you live.

Let’s say we just reduced it to skin color. Where GG is the darkest Black man and AA is the whitest white man. Two people with GG can’t ever produce AA. Just like a person that is GG and a person that is GA can never produce AA. You need two GA parents.

This is what that looks like:

Yeah, you’re seeing that correctly. 7,500 years.

Oh you still want to cling to migration?

Maybe, possibly after at least 3,750 years you get white SKINNED people. But let’s add straight, blonde hair, blue eyes, and thin lips and see how long it takes.

Back up to 7,500 and that’s with your beloved migration. Let’s add thin nostrils.

Oh boy, we’re up to 8,750 years. You want to add body hair?

That’s just seven traits. And that’s to produce ONE person like that. Let’s increase the population. And eliminate selection because we’re taught in school that evolution is random. Also, I’m going to kill your beloved migration because it was eons before Europe was occupied.

Now it’s taking 491 MILLION years to just get seven traits from the Blackest Black man to the whitest white man.

Here comes the part you’re afraid of — proof of Yacub’s Story.

Disclaimer: I don’t want you to think that you can just open up ChatGPT and type in “is the story of Yacub true?” That OpenAI app will smoke you. It will chew you up, and spit you out.

The old television production adage is true — garbage in, garbage out. As I stated before, ChatGPT be wrong, and unless you know what you’re talking about, you’re going to accept all the wrongness.

Further, if you don’t know how to FRAME an ARGUMENT, you’re cooked.

The last ChatGPT article focused on LOGIC, this has more to do with PROBABILITIES. That being said, you’ve seen how we’ve already framed this argument. Natural selection and no migration would take 60 Billion years or conservatively 491 Million with only seven recessive traits.

So the argument is if that’s not possible what is?

Oh no. You see where this is going don’t you? Selective breeding!

What would that process look like ChatGPT?

What else?

Then what?

You want it spelled out more?

Again, I ain’t say it. ChatGPT did.

The same way I couldn’t hold back from asking that question in my AP class in high school because what was being said was so obvious, I had to ask ChatGPT, “so this Yacub story is plausible?”