I Am Malcom X

I have been reading Manning Marable’s gorgeous biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. This was no accident. I am back to a lengthy car commute and audio books definitely help pass the time. Perhaps more fundamentally, throughout the Zimmerman trial liberal pundits drove me to near shoe throwing distraction as they refused to acknowledge how poorly the trial was going for the prosecution. I am very much with the juror that said that based on Florida law she had to acquit, but she still felt George Zimmerman got away with murder. Brother Malcom didn’t have much use for white liberals. I’m pretty much sick of them at the moment myself, even though I am one. On the conservative side, a series of missteps by the media, the prosecutors, and the police gave white race hustlers a wide berth to complain bitterly of unequal treatment for poor Hispanic George Zimmerman. The undertow of “See, we’re not racist. We’re defending the Hispanic guy!” was stultifying. I’m pretty sick of all of them. 

So it was more than the re-ignition of my hour-each-way commute that drew me to Marable’s book. I have enormous respect for Malcom X. Marable paints a far more complex, and in way mays more troubling, picture of the Black Muslim leader than either Haley’s biography, or Spike Lee’s movie, but it is so much more a human portrait. He suggests that the Malcom the hustler, then known as Detroit Red, was perhaps less a gangster than he wanted to let on, but the commitment to Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam (NOI) was at least as deep, if not deeper, than we had previously known.

Yet what emerges is a powerful human soul searching for an honest understanding of the world around him and the ways that he could act to change it for the better. Marable tells the many stories of the times when Malcom X dipped his toe in the cool waters of integration and community. The minister debated Bayard Rustin, at least three times.  In the exchanges he often bitterly ridiculed the entire civil rights movement. Labeling civil rights leaders—people many people, myself included, consider giants of American history-- as Uncle Toms was a well-worn tactic in Malcom X’s rhetorical tool-bag. But in a sign of the complicated milieu in which Malcom X operated and the subtle ways his mind worked, years later A. Phillip Randolph, the African American leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, named Malcom to a collation he formed to address racial concerns in Harlem, their shared home. It is a measure seriousness with which Malcom approached the goals that Randolph espoused that he took the work seriously and work cooperatively.

Randolph and Rustin are founding fathers of the non-violent, integrationist civil rights movement. They   worked together for decades before the March on Washington, where Dr. King gave his “I have a dream” speech. The two men had primary roles in organizing the March. Biographies of both King and Rustin suggest that Rustin, who was gay, steered King towards non-violence. Attacking these men alienated Malcom from the mainstream civil rights groups operating at the time. It’s a shame because there was lot of truth buried beneath some of that bitterness.

Malcom X rose twice, in two distinctly separate circumstances, to break loose of chains that bound him to lesser versions of himself. This story of redemption, woven inextricably into America’s DNA, is of course the majestic story of the life of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, Malcom X. Marable’s book shows, brilliantly, that the story is many shades different than what little most of us already know. Both the Autobiography, co-authored with Alex Haley, and the Spike Lee Movie suggests sudden stops and transformations, the first after prison and then the second after his Hajj to Mecca. What we see in this new telling is that Malcom’s entire life was a hajj, a pilgrimage in search of, and for, reason. Malcom travels frequently between the world and ideas of hot militant pan-African nationalism and cooler, more conciliatory coalition building with moderate civil rights leaders. Long before the transformative trip to Mecca Malcom already knew that political change could only come through a blend of the hot and the cold. He also came to see the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, as a deeply flawed ultimately conservative leader, who was leading his people down a dead end path.  

Malcom X appears as both a better man then we previously knew, but also a more deeply flawed individual. Yet, I can only aspire to the kind of courage he found to rise above his limitations, especially in breaking with the NOI when he had to break with the ideology that literally saved his life. It is the reason, even today, I admire Malcom X , so much. I was reminded in reading of the many facets of Malcom X’s public persona. He was a separatist militant, and political savant, and the minister for a flock scattered over dozens of temples across the country. He drew from the poor and working class, many of whom were isolated.   His life resonated because the minister’s central theology, and that of NOI religious practice, was based on the ability for those following the Messenger, as Elijah Muhammad was called, to completely transform their lives. The spiritual house built by Malcom X and the NOI resulted in lifting tens of thousands from the desperation of crime and drugs.

Beyond the black supremacist dogma which was real, piercing, and in some cases stunningly off track, the core of his political argument was that integration was doomed to failure because white society would never cede their supremacist authority over blacks. Though Marable indicates Malcom X had far more, and much earlier alliances, with integrationist civil rights leaders, he makes clear that Malcom X neither trusted or particularly believed the Southern integrationist civil rights leaders or their white Northern liberal partners. He was highly critical and deeply skeptical of the black middle class’s commitment or intention to reach out to the mass of poor and working class blacks with which he had the greatest affinity. Until his split with the Nation, Malcom suspected the motives of all parties except the NOI. Ironically, it was members of the Nation that would arrange for this death, albeit under the watchful eye of the FBI.

The Muslim religious profile is not for me, and other areas of the program are of course problematic. But this last the critique of a society which may or may not move towards complete equality between the races, and within which he perceived the real potential for powerful interests to  coopt societal forces struggling to achieve real and lasting change, this Malcom is still worthy of examination. Marble does a wonderful job of that.   

Beyond the personal reformation the Nation offered, Malcom X’s political solutions were threadbare, and during much of his time in the NOI nearly cartoonish. Often they were naïve. However, as he predicted, a disturbing core of poverty and want, isolation and fear, if allowed, would fester and metastasize. Ironically, Dr. King, particularly at the end of his life was making similar arguments.

Malcom X was right about too much. He openly challenged the suggestion that an integrationist strategy would ever free what were then 20 million Negroes, in the shackles of poverty, both in the deep south and in northern ghettos. He was deeply critical of his own community for acceding to the poverty which engulfed them, and the ills that came with it: Drugs and alcoholism, prostitution, violence and desperation. He was happy neither with whites, who were even then saying, “enough already” and blacks who he felt were weak in the face white devil out to destroy them. It remains to be seen when or how America will resolve its problems with race and poverty.

Today there are 36 million African Americans. Roughly one in two finish high school in four years, compared to four in five whites. 20% get college degrees, compared to 1/3 of whites. Almost the same number of young black kids that finish college are either in prison, jail, on probation, or parole. Much of the explosion in the criminal justice population of young black men came about as a result of the War on Drugs, which was followed closely by the commercialization and development of a for-profit prison system. Only recently have drug laws initiated decades ago, including the Rockefeller laws here in NY come under new scrutiny, and in some states, repeal. In the 80’s and 90’s drug penalties diverged sharply between the white man’s drug, cocaine, and the black man’s drug, crack. This exacerbated the problem. Even though criminal justice experts and politicians knew for decades that treatment was far cheaper and more effective than prison, politicians not wanting to appear soft on crime basically sentenced a couple generations of young black men to prison. It didn’t hurt that many states started to experiment with criminal justice privatization which created profit incentives for some if prison populations increased. The results of these racially tinged, morally repugnant, policies is now held up as exhibit “A” in the criticism of the black community as a whole.

Recently conservative pundit, Bill O’Reilly, a fine race hustler in his own right, garnered a lot of press for noting that 70% of black children are born out of wedlock. He seemed to blame this statistic, along with rap music, for the violence and poverty in black communities. In addition to the usual parade of disgruntled yahoos that make up his audience, some liberals and moderate whites applauded, including a friend of mine, who I love like a brother.

The US and most Western countries have seen a rise in out of wedlock births across all demographic groups to the point now that roughly one in two American children are born to single parents. Until recently almost all gay parents with children led households as unmarried couples. So, following O’Reilly’s thesis would it not be likely that there was an overall increase in violence across all demographic groups? As the protectors of gun makers have noted repeatedly since Newtown, violence of all kinds has dropped precipitously since the mid 80’s. This is the period when out of wedlock births grew from roughly one in three to its current level of one in two.

Several factors are converging and changing the dynamics of our society not all of them are leading to breakdowns in civility. Western societies are changing at a rapid rate. Teen births are declining, college admissions are increasing, and the age of child rearing is advancing. In the last ten years the rate of teen pregnancies has dropped the most among African American women, who are attending college at rates that rival whites. Between 2006 and 2009 the number of African American women attending college grew from 1.5 million to nearly 1.9 million.

Surveys since 1970 have shown women of all races having children at a later and later age. This is true for African Americans as well as whites, and reflects the availability of sex education in schools, birth control, and abortion, in other words women’s control of their bodies as well as their dramatic presence in the workforce which lies at the core of much of conservative bloviating While O’Reilly hustled his white audience with a single statistic, much of the core of his real anger is that his world is changing, not only in terms of race, but in terms of the relationship between men and women in our society. As he himself said, “The white establishment is now the minority”. He could have added.” The power of women is growing too.”

Conservatives who tsk, tsk the plague of violence in Chicago, and in essence blame the community, refuse to acknowledge the endless marches for peace and pleas to “Put Down your guns” organized within the community. O’Reilly knows these people are out there. He could publicize their stories, bring light to the struggle, but that would not draw the ratings of an inflamed white audience. Since the country largely abandoned the requirement for our shared pressure on our commonweal, liberals have often been all to glad to take up the charge. They anger easily at the charge of a welfare grandma from Milwaukee pulling down checks from seven different accounts. Yet they show little outrage for the $700 billion shoveled into the banks after the melt down on Wall Street. I won’t deny there are those that express outrage at both sides of the graft equation, but they are few and far between, and at least in my experience the bitter anger is almost always directed more squarely on the welfare cheat grandma than the Wall Street banker with the fancy suit and the good lawyers. Class is just a huge part of the issue now. This is something Malcom X addressed with some regularity as did Dr. King.

There is no question but that grinding poverty, the availability of cheap handguns, and out of wedlock births are a viral combination. Federal funds which support positive community based alternatives and which keep foolish, rambunctious, teenage boys occupied have been cut. This is no disparagement. I have one of those. His mother and I scheme every day how to keep him busy and out of trouble. 

The real challenge is the nihilism at the core of so many African American boys and men. While two  million African American women are attending college, only one million African American men do so. When one looks at the difference in college enrollment for black women and black men, you are left with the impression that black women may have in some way given up on their men. This is not dissimilar to what we see in the country as a whole. In a large chunk of the community school is uncool. Compounding the injury, many of the schools serving the African American community are not particularly good. Here again class is a major challenge. Studies have shown that income is an even better indicator of scholastic performance than race and/ or language. This is perhaps a reason demagoguery on race is so appealing. So long as poor whites are fighting with poor blacks, which is essentially the sociological equation in which much of the South remains hopelessly stuck, no one asks questions about the rich.

The wild young men in black communities, these would have been Malcom’s men, and I can’t help but feel that he was more than a little right. Other than to point at and criticize our society has very little use for these kids. Large parts of the black Bourgeoisie has moved on, also has Malcom predicted. Three rungs up the ladder they seldom look back. A sizable chunk of whites grew tired of the movement decades ago. Richard Nixon may have designed a cynical “Sothern Strategy” to take advantage of white impatience with the movement and its increasingly militancy, but he did not invent the attitudes, he merely exploited them. Political attachment of anti-poverty programs to the struggle for Civil Rights and easily stoked racial animosity, essentially wore down white support for those programs. The golden age did not last long. Massive progress was made in raising people from poverty throughout the 1950’s and especially the 1960’s, but Vietnam dried up some of the pools of funding people just stopped giving a shit about poor people. In the last presidential campaign neither candidates spoke of the problems the poor, or proposed any solutions monetary or otherwise to fix them. Instead we were treated to the silly season of 9-9-9, self-deportation, and vaccinations that cause mental retardation.

Malcom X  preached that integrationists underestimated the guile and strength of the opponents of racial equality. There is no more racist statement that can be made in America today than to deny the problem of racism, but you hear it every day. In state after state Republican politicians have discovered the scourge of voter fraud.  The solution for the non-existent problem just happens to make it harder for minorities, young and poor people to vote. It is not for me to say the intent of these laws is racist. Courts in Texas have already found that to be so. Surely similar conditions exist elsewhere. Police brutality and racial profiling remain as burning an issue today as they were in Malcom X’s Harlem. Just yesterday I saw for the first time the stunning footage which forms the basis for the new movie, Fruitvale Station. The movie is a fictionalized retelling of the death of a young man in Oakland. He was already restrained when he was shot at point blank range, by a police officer who was later found guilty of manslaughter the mildest available charge. The case took place in 2008, and the imagery is shocking. Dozens of people filmed the incident on their cell phone.

I join with those that lament the amount of print and hot air that has been exhausted on the Zimmerman case while a Holocaust was continuing in Chicago, but I part ways when we discuss both causes and solutions and when we minimize these deaths.  

The criticism of rap is so haggard it’s a wonder the horse even gets around the track anymore. The President reminded us once again that he is in fact the first African American President last week with his deeply emotional comments about the Zimmerman case and his own experiences as a young man. Obama may like rap, and O’Reilly’s comments were certainly a good way for him to demagogue his white audience. But c’mon already. O’Reilly is a culturally out of touch demagogue, but I know many of those now applauding his statement grew up when I did. Has everyone forgotten? Conservatives of one ilk or another have been blaming rock & roll, R & B, and “race” music, back in the day, for the decline of everything in this country for 100 years. People used to talk in similar ways about the Rolling Stones. What? Sympathy for the Devil is a gospel song?  Jackson Browne, famously sang Cocaine on the live record, Running on Empty. That’s OK? “We can share the women we can share the wine”, I guess that’s not misogynist? White liberal children of the 60’s pontificating on the evils of rap really are laughable. Obama likes rap in the same way that I do, I think. It’s got a beat and you can dance to it is still good enough for me, and the President I suspect. His Al Green work notwithstanding, The President is a little lame. Gansta’ he ain’t. I saw when they had Carol King in the Whitehouse. Watching him clapping his hands and swaying to and fro, mouthing the words, was a hipster embarrassment.

I do not profess to know how to solve these problems, particularly of nihilistic young black men and boys, but I believe people in these communities know the way out. There are literally thousands of community activists working to stop gun violence and stabilize poor families in communities across the country. There are too many easily accessible guns for sure, but eliminating every single weapon within a 1,000 mile radius of our major American cities will not in and of itself, improve schools, provide better communities, or adequate supplies of food and healthcare. Most importantly they will not build families.

Brother Malcom preached the gospel of self-transformation. He would say, “The white devil won’t lift a finger to help you so you’ll need to take care of yourself.” Many whites of good intention sacrificed an awful lot to help advance the cause of justice for African Americans. Malcom was wrong about that. That said every black kid that adopts that creed will be placing himself ahead of every gang banger in his neighborhood. We all have a duty to help our brothers and sisters, but the less we wait for that, maybe the better off some of us will be. Many people, both black and white, just gave up too easily. The best many people can muster is a tsk, tsk. The first thing most of us could do would be to tone down the criticism and judgmental finger wagging, and dial up the love for our brothers and sisters with the certain knowledge that our life improves, both spiritually and communally, when the lives of those on the South Side of Chicago do.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LW7tJ6T5Tk

"I am Malcom X" Montage from the Spike Lee Movie