celebrating el hajj malik el shabazz & black history month

On February 21, 1965, less than two months from his 40^th birthday and a year removed from his pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm X was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.  He was in the process of writing a new chapter of his life post-hajj, which is precisely why he was taken out.  The world is worse off for his loss considering what a more politically seasoned Malcolm X, as venerable statesman and illustrious champion of his people, could have done and helped to achieve by influencing and shaping domestic and international politics over the past 48 years.  Despite his life being tragically cut short, in 39 years he accomplished many things yet his two greatest legacies were reconnecting the American Negro to his/her African past and for restoring the collective dignity and self-respect of his downtrodden people.   

It’s why boxer Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammed Ali, why poet LeRoi Jones changed his name to Amiri Baraka and moved uptown to start the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem after his assasination.  The Black Arts movement spread across the country and with it, the Black Power Movement.  It’s what he’s getting at in this short video clip below:

The essence of Malcolm’s argument here is that it was time for the American black population to wake up, shake off the yoke of ideological and physical oppression of white supremacy, discard the dysfunctional legacy of self-loathing and self-sabotage brought about by their slaved and jim crowed past, reconnect with the motherland of Africa and stand up to their white oppressors.

Malcolm Little went from petty street criminal (Detroit Red) to Nation of Islam (NOI) spokesperson (Malcolm X) to champion and redeemer of black humanity (El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz).  He was the late bloomer who shone so bright and so quickly and so unrepentantly in opposition to the powers that be that he ultimately paid for this rapid ascension with his life.  He was a great man worthy of veneration and scholarship.  

I credit Malcolm with cracking my untapped and unsuspecting psyche when first reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964) in 9th grade.  He turned me on to thinking critically though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it as such if you had asked me then.  He turned me on simply by looking at things from a different perspective.  Since then, I’ve spent some years studying and training myself to think critically and engage society in a discursive manner.  I have made some progress but there is always more to learn and more to do and that is what I would stress to any student of mine studying in any academic realm or plying any artisan trade.  Never stop learning. As the late great Max Roach (and let us never forget Max Roach) was known for saying, you got to put in that time.  In other words, devotion is not borne overnight.

What specifically registered for me when I first read the few speeches of his I could get my hands on was his assertion that there is a “corrupt, vicious and hypocritical system that has castrated the black man” here in the United States of America.  Malcolm's words here were as bold and true as the sun is hot and bright.  The force of clarity he spoke with always impressed me and this clarity indicated to me he was well-read even if he was not an “accomplished” professional intellectual. Back then, there weren’t many accomplished African American intellectuals.  This being the Post-war consensus Era of McCarthyism of the 1950's that turned into the hosing of protesters and firebombing of black children in churches of the civil rights era of the 1960's.  It is important here to note that Duke University, the home of Mark Anthony Neal (a contemporary scholar worthy of your attention) is currently celebrating its 50^th year of having black students in the student body!!!(!!!) http://spotlight.duke.edu/50years  I mention this to reiterate to the younger generation that American social progress that may be taken for granted in 2013 is only most recent.  Separate and unequal was the America Malcolm grew up in, that our parents and/or grandparents grew up in and this is the same country we were born into.  It is this collective conscious of American history that informs our society culturally today whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

(1899)

What African Americans have had to overcome historically and strictly symbolically-speaking, to restore their pride and dignity and what alternately passed for white entertainment is disgusting, degrading and impressive in its scope: The old minstrel show of Jim Crow, minstrelsy in general, the Black Sambo, shucking and jiving, Stepin Fetchit - all images depicting the black as a dandy, but the dandy as dumb and comically (i.e. commercially) valuable.  Behold the magical coon!  This uniquely American history is as vast as it is virtually unacknowledged today.  Many white folks don’t consider the racial history of America.  Americans have been aided and abetted by a power structure that prefers our history wiped clean like a blank slate lest we remember the original sin that America was conceived upon.  Whitewashing is a political act the State enacts against its citizens (and therein citizens sometimes engage in themselves with encouragement from the State) and it is up to artists to reinforce the images of a history that must never be forgotten.  It is who we are for better and for worse.  Most Americans want to live in a colorblind society – yet for every genuine expression of people hoping for such, there is also an ideological scheme at work that plays to such naïveté, that stirs racial resentment even further for the "how dare they" aspect of re-conjuring these offensive images and implicit (mis)characterizations.  Make no mistake, this is an orchestrated effort against the citizenry to quell any legitimate dissent all the while maintaining the status quo which simply means to keep their money and political influence in perpetuity.

the dancing sambo (1940)

If any citizen assumes the ideology of the State nonpareil, then one is nothing more than a tool of the state, a mouthpiece and a lackey flag waver – I believe nothing in life should be accepted nonpareil – except for love.  And even that will get you into all kinds of trouble as evidenced by the grim reality of Malcolm’s demise 48 years ago to the day. Make no mistake, Malcolm was not born a hater, he merely and strategically matched a society’s propensity to hate him and his people commensurately.  It is also important to distinguish that reacting is the not the same as provoking.  The following passage is taken from a speech given by Malcolm on February 14, 1965, one week before his assassination:

"Why, he's advocating violence!" Isn't that what they say? Every time you pick up your newspaper, you see where one of these things has written into it that I'm advocating violence. I have never advocated any violence. I've only said that Black people who are the victims of organized violence perpetrated upon us by the Klan, the Citizens' Council, and many other forms, we should defend ourselves. And when I say that we should defend ourselves against the violence of others, they use their press skillfully to make the world think that I'm calling on violence, period. I wouldn't call on anybody to be violent without a cause. But I think the Black man in this country, above and beyond people all over the world, will be more justified when he stands up and starts to protect himself, no matter how many necks he has to break and heads he has to crack.”

Don’t get it twisted.  The mock outrage of the whites of those times convinced no one outside of blind racial allegiance or (senti)mental weakness.  As Malcolm said, if he was as violent as they claimed him to be, he would’ve been put in jail.    

One of the most admirable aspects of Malcolm’s personality was his love of books and passion for knowledge.  His desire to read even in the dim light of his jail cell remains a strong political statement following in a tradition of fellow African American social and political activists.  This pathway to knowledge through literacy has always been central to the struggle of African American people since the days of the prohibition of literacy amongst the slave population.  The best example being the story of the great Abolitionist Frederick Douglass who taught himself how to read as outlined in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845).  To bring things current – fundamentally capitalist as we Americans are, we find ourselves in a results oriented society that doesn’t always value the process of knowledge acquisition rather merely aggrandizing the economic bottom line.  Today we teach our children to tests instead of teaching better ways to empower them through independent problem-solving skills. 

Too often in American society, fellow citizens follow only the bouncing ball of consumer culture, get caught up in the solipsism of immediate gratification; of material wealth and petty drama and internalize everything the way an infant wants things their way, right now.  American society mandates more exquisite consumers not more exquisite thinkers.  This is something that needs to change if our society should continue to improve for the next generation. 

There is little subtlety and nuance, if any, in satisfying the immediacy of urges, from smartphones to fast food to pornography to the media and its slash and burn news cycle. And this is the cultural climate in which our children come of age today.  Make no mistake, all of these “conveniences” come at a cost.  Costs associated in how we mentally calibrate and physically function in relation to them i.e. how we’ve been socialized as well as costs in terms of the method and means of production.  How can we as Americans sulk over hourly rates (and I can give you a good answer but I won’t) when just below us geographically in our own hemisphere lies a nation so economically disadvantaged such as Haiti where men and women subsist on less than a dollar a day.  Perspective is always key and perspective is one thing that the powers that be don’t want you to maintain. They want to blind you with their razzle dazzle, the bling bling, the streets paved with gold.  Now of course there is some truth to that archetypal “rags to riches” narrative, moreso than any racist and genocidal narrative such as Manifest Destiny. 

Another Malcolm gem: "I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands even if he’s wrong than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil".  In essence, this is the complicated racial history of the U.S.A.  America was founded on lofty words yet with sundry practices that contradict outright those words declaring independence much less the universal rights of man (ladies?) vis a vis its citizens.  “Democracy equals hypocrisy” as again X would say.  For what its worth I don’t believe American democracy as a project is irrevocably broken but the point he makes is clear enough.  He boldly highlighted these obvious contradictions on a highly public and national level at a time when no one outside of Martin Luther King would.

State ideology, replete with signs, songs and slogans, has been etched into the collective conscious of this county and a large part of this symbolism centers around white supremacy.  This ideology is only constructed by the State to leverage one arbitrary group of citizens over another and for what? For profit.  So for me, to listen to Malcolm and to read his autobiography, I didn’t know the system back then but his rhetoric had me on his side.  He seemed more logical and real to me than the hooded dudes burning his family’s house down.  

Harlem

In a culture where symbolism informs us and we as adults are not properly equipped to critically engage it or at least acknowledge that fact, certain groups rose from the vacuum of Malcolm’s leadership to carry the torch of waking their country and its people up.  His legacy carried on through the actions of people that came out of that era, artists and thinkers and foot soldiers in the Black Arts and Black Power Movement.  What those twin movements were about was not simply about wielding shotguns, it was more about autonomous control of the black community – black self-determination.  It was a movement that Malcolm embodied when he called for blacks to stand up for themselves, to not turn the other cheek, and to have some dignity and self-respect.  Because at that time, American society was ruled on segregated measures that openly exploited the black community, as it did all other such non-heteronormative communities and were never to be acknowledged as any kind of normative (and normative as defined by that State).  There was no room for gendered, racial or sexual minorities in the first two hundred years of American history.  

 

So in this context and on this day in American history and in honor of Black History Month, it’s important to remember that reading is very much a political act, studying history is a political act.  Writing new histories is a political act to combat against the unyielding whitewashing of history.  So while we all may not be out there standing in the way of the Keystone pipeline or picketing the White House trying to force President Obama’s hand on climate change legislation or the practice of surveillance drone killings, there are still yet other ways to affect social and political change.  We must make these facts associated with the legacy of Malcolm X remain common knowledge, to not let them fall in the dustbins of our collective conscious going forward because doing so would be doing a great disservice to not only Malcolm but to ourselves as American citizens.  We must take our diverse collective history, tragic, triumphant, hopeful and maintain it and develop it further into a strength.   

We must never become debilitated by fear of judgment as it relates to the discourse of race relations in America.  If you're scared, say you're scared and speak up for yourself.  To America’s credit, nobody talks race as often and as well as we do.  In this country, thanks in major part to the efforts of Malcolm X, the honorable Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and poets like Amiri Baraka and other intellectuals like Cornel West, Melissa Harris-Perry and Michael Eric Dyson, we have been able to at least have conversations.  Clearly we are stronger than ever as we stand together and it is with this love that I write this on the occasion of Malcolm’s passing.  Love can overcome all but love has to be fought for like anything else in life, along with always fighting for the basic tenets of universal human dignity and respect.  Because as always there is still so much work yet to be done and we surely have not arrived as a society nor should we ever stop trying no matter the protests from those who just want us to leave things well enough alone.  No struggle, no progress.

Thanks for reading.

PPG

ps - Here is Malcolm's 'By Any Means Necessary' Speech given on June 28, 1964 where he announces the creation of the Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU).  This speech came roughly one month after his pilgrimage to Mecca at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem where he would be murdered the following February.

The full text of this speech can be found here:
http://www.blackpast.org/?q=1964-malcolm-x-s-speech-founding-rally-organization-afro-american-unity