[News] Dragging Malcolm X to Obamaland

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Dragging Malcolm X to Obamaland

Created 04/27/2011 -

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
http://www.blackagendareport.com/print/content/dragging-malcolm-x-obamaland

Manning Marable’s rendition of Malcolm X’s life 
should be read very carefully, so as not to 
confuse Malcolm’s evolving worldview with the 
late Columbia University professor’s 
left-reformist politics. “Marable tries to 
convince us that Malcolm must have contemplated a 
reformist political path in his mind, if not in 
practice.” The author’s mission is to discredit 
revolutionary Black nationalism as outdated and 
primitive. Black Democratic Party activism and 
support for President Obama are hyped as the new Black Power.



Dragging Malcolm X to Obamaland

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“Marable grows so bold in pushing his 
back-to-the-future reformist fantasies, by page 
333 he describes a Malcolm X who has become ‘race-neutral.’”

In packaging the life of Malcolm X for a wide 
audience, the late Dr. Manning Marable has 
presented us with an opportunity to reignite the 
debate over the meaning of Black 
self-determination, a discussion-through-struggle 
that effectively ended when the Black Freedom 
Movement became no longer worthy of the name. 
Unfortunately, it appears this was not Dr. 
Marable’s intention, since Malcolm X: A Life of 
Reinvention is largely an attempt to render 
useless the vocabulary of Black struggle. 
Essential terms such as “self-determination,” 
“Black nationalism,” “revolutionary” and 
“empowerment” lose their meaning, abused and 
misused in order to portray the great Black 
nationalist leader as inexorably evolving into a 
“race-neutral” reformer on the road to Obamaland.

This article does not address the complaints of 
those angered by Marable’s insistence that 
Malcolm X had a youthful homosexual relationship 
with an affluent white man, although it is 
shocking that Marable would throw this in the mix 
based on wholly inferential evidence and the 
author’s own psychological speculations. Our 
overarching concern is that Malcolm’s politics 
have been distorted by often clumsy, sometimes 
clever manipulation of the language of struggle, 
so that the politics of today’s left-reformers 
and Obama supporters, like Marable, appear vindicated.

Marable’s interventions in Malcolm’s mental 
processes begin in earnest on page 285, in the 
“Chickens Coming Home to Roost” chapter. It is 
early 1964, and Malcolm is contemplating a final 
break with the Nation of Islam. Marable takes 
over as the Black icon’s muse, deconstructing 
Black Muslim theological doctrine, as he 
speculates Malcolm must have struggled to do, and 
concluding that “a new religious remapping of the 
world based on orthodox Islam would not 
necessarily stigmatize or isolate the United 
States because of its history of slavery and 
racial discrimination. Instead of a bloody jihad, 
a holy Armageddon, perhaps America could 
experience a nonviolent, bloodless revolution.”

“Malcolm derided those who conceived of 
revolution as anything other than bloody.”

While Malcolm was certainly questioning the 
catechism of inevitable, white man-scorching, 
Allah-directed Armageddon, it is another thing 
entirely to have Malcolm pondering a “bloodless 
revolution” in America. Malcolm derided those who 
conceived of revolution as anything other than 
bloody, and he was speaking in secular, not 
religious, terms. His best-known speech on the 
subject is “Message to the Grassroots,” 
<http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=1145>October 
10, 1963 [7].

“There’s no such thing as a nonviolent 
revolution. [The] only kind of revolution that’s 
nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The only 
revolution based on loving your enemy is the 
Negro revolution. The only revolution in which 
the goal is a desegregated lunch counter, a 
desegregated theater, a desegregated park, and a 
desegregated public toilet; you can sit down next 
to white folks on the toilet. That’s no 
revolution. Revolution is based on land. Land is 
the basis of all independence. Land is the basis 
of freedom, justice, and equality.”

Malcolm never did accept the notion of revolution 
as bloodless, nor did he recognize the fight 
against segregated public accommodations as 
revolutionary. But Marable tries to convince us 
that Malcolm must have contemplated a reformist 
political path in his mind, if not in practice. 
This is William Styron-style biography, as Morgan 
State University’s Dr. Jared Ball has suggested, 
with Malcolm forced to play Styron’s Nat Turner.

By 1964 Malcolm had made a strategic decision to 
support Black integrationist efforts, at least 
rhetorically, but there is nothing that leads us 
to think that integration had become his 
end-goal, or that he believed integration was 
revolutionary. He had decided to become part of 
the broad “movement,” in order to both influence 
and benefit from it. Marable would have us 
believe (page 298) that Malcolm’s public 
endorsement of desegregation and voter drives 
signified that he had scaled down his 
liberationist aspirations, or that he thought 
voting equals or leads to African American 
self-determination –some very faulty logic. 
Revolutionary Marxists have also seen the value 
in electoral politics at certain junctures, but 
that didn’t mean they stopped preparing for the 
forceful overthrow of the bourgeoisie. 
Nevertheless, Marable tells us that Malcolm’s 
movement activities “marked an early, tentative 
concession to the idea that perhaps blacks could 
someday become empowered within the existing system.”

“Marable would have us believe that Malcolm’s 
public endorsement of desegregation and voter 
drives signified that he had scaled down his liberationist aspirations.”

The clear inference is that Malcolm was wilting 
in his desire to wipe “the existing system” off 
the map. What existing system does Marable refer 
to, precisely? White supremacy? Capitalism? 
Bourgeois electoral pay-for-play democracy? 
Marable keeps Malcolm’s mind vague and cloudy, 
although in his actual historical voice the 
“evolving” Malcolm hates capitalism and U.S. 
imperialism more intensely than did the “old,” 
Nation Of Islam Malcolm. Marable also introduces 
his trick word “empowered,” which he will use 
repeatedly in the book to confuse, rather than 
clarify. Blacks “could someday become empowered 
within the existing system” – to do what? To 
determine their collective destinies? To defy 
white majorities? To push aside the rule of 
capital? Marable tries to cage Malcolm, while 
assuring us that the revolutionary Black 
nationalist was “tentatively” becoming a liberal reformer.

Gratuitous, non-defensive violence, in Malcolm’s 
NOI talks, always came from the hand of Allah. 
Malcolm never rejected the right of self-defense; 
otherwise, he would not have become Malcolm the 
icon. Marable knew this, so he again invades 
Malcolm’s mind (page 302). “By embracing the 
ballot, he was implicitly rejecting violence, 
even if this was at times difficult to discern in the heat of his rhetoric.”

What kind of violence was Malcolm rejecting? 
Certainly, not defensive violence. And Malcolm 
had never publicly urged Blacks to commit 
unprovoked aggressions against whites. The 
purpose of Marable’s sentence can only be to show 
alleged movement by Malcolm toward some state of 
non-volatility, which we are expected to 
associate with political moderation: reform.

Marable grows so bold in pushing his 
back-to-the-future reformist fantasies, by page 
333 he describes a Malcolm X who has become 
“race-neutral.” On May 21, 1964, Malcolm spoke at 
Chicago’s Civic Opera House, telling a crowd of 
1,500 people, “Separation is not the goal of the 
Afro-America, nor is integration his goal. They 
are merely methods toward his real end – respect 
as a human being.” Malcolm went on the say: 
“Unless the race issue is quickly settled, the 22 
million American Negroes could easily adopt the 
guerilla tactics of other deprived 
revolutionaries.” Not that he necessarily advocated that. (wink)

“Obamites cannot imagine that others are not as enamored of Power as they are.”

Three days before he was assassinated, Malcolm 
said, “I’m man enough to tell you that I can’t 
put my finger on exactly what my philosophy is 
now.” But, not to worry, Dr. Marable has the 
vision and the answer. He concluded that Malcolm 
had “made his race-neutral views clear in 
Chicago
.” There is no rational basis for 
Marable’s amazing interpretation, other than he 
thought it moved his political story line on 
Malcolm’s evolution (or race-neutralization) forward.

The opposite of race-neutral, Malcolm lived and 
died a Race-Man, meaning simply that he put the 
Race first. As he wrote to an Egyptian Muslim 
Brotherhood luminary who was disappointed that 
Malcolm was so decidedly non-race-neutral, “As a 
black American, I do feel that my first 
responsibility is to my twenty-two million fellow black Americans.” (page 368)

In the final “Reflections on a Revolutionary 
Vision” chapter, Marable speaks for himself – in 
the process confirming that he has been sneaking 
his own words, thoughts and politics into 
Malcolm’s head for four hundred pages. The 
Columbia University professor of African American 
Studies claims to know what Malcolm really, 
really wanted: “What Malcolm sought was a 
fundamental restructuring of wealth and power in 
the United States – not a violent social 
revolution, but radical and meaningful change nevertheless.”

Although the description is so vague, wishy-washy 
and – damnit!! – so soft and noncommittal as to 
bear no resemblance to any incarnation or 
developmental stage of Malcolm X, it fits the 
self-image of Manning Marable and his circle 
perfectly. They are the left Black Obamites, 
purported radicals who have a perpetual love 
affair with Power. Such people cannot imagine 
that others are not as enamored of Power as they 
are, and are eager to graft their own 
vacillations and corruptions onto others, by rhetorical hook or literary crook.

If this assessment seems harsh, it is certainly 
not as outrageous as Marable’s gall in 
superimposing his politics on Malcolm X. Even 
when Marable speaks in his own voice, he manages 
to intimate that Malcolm would agree with him. 
“If legal racial segregation was permanently in 
America’s past,” wrote Marable on page 486, 
“Malcolm’s vision today would have to radically 
redefine self-determination and the meaning of 
black power in a political environment that 
appeared to many to be ‘post-racial.’”

“Marable insists that Malcolm would be forced to 
redefine self-determination and its sibling, Black Power.”

Marable appears to think these are heavy 
questions, but they’re actually products of an 
unfocused, but deeply biased, mind. First of all, 
legal segregation was defeated before Malcolm’s 
death, and no sane person at the time thought it 
would be brought back. Malcolm had time to find 
out what life was like for Black southerners 
without state-sanctioned Jim Crow. Marable’s 
question is badly put. If he means, What would 
Malcolm think about today’s levels of 
segregation, then the answer would be that the 
northern cities would remain very familiar to him 
in their racial composition, and are in fact 
blacker than in Malcolm’s day – which might tend 
to indicate to Malcolm that self-determination 
was an even more critical concern.

Still, Marable insists that Malcolm would be 
forced to redefine self-determination and its 
sibling, Black Power. But self-determination, as 
a foundational principle of relations among 
peoples, requires no redefinition. Marable 
understands it as “the right of oppressed nations 
or minorities to decide for themselves their own 
political futures,” and he agrees that Malcolm 
“never abandoned” the “ideal.” Why then, would 
Malcolm in 2011 have to “redefine” 
self-determination and the “meaning of black 
power?” Because the political environment 
“appeared to many to be post-racial?” Who is it 
that thinks the environment appears post-racial? 
If Marable is speaking of white people, or any 
non-African American people, their opinions 
cannot be cause for “redefinition” of another 
people’s right. If he meant that Black people in 
the mass believe we live in a post-racial nation, 
he was a damn fool. But even if such Black folks 
existed, that would not require a redefinition of 
self-determination. African Americans would 
simply “determine” that they love post-racialism 
and want to do nothing to change it, as is their self-determinationist right.

Marable risks making himself look stupid simply 
to make the intended point that Malcolm and his 
Black Nationalism and self-determination talk are 
passé and should be dismissed except as 
historical artifacts. For Marable and his Black 
left Obamites, Malcolm’s only other use is to 
somehow authenticate today’s reformers – and even 
President Obama! – as heirs to yesterday’s 
revolutionary Black nationalists. This is the 
purpose put to Malcolm by 
<http://blackagendareport.com/content/dr-peniel-joseph-peoples-historian-or-establishment-courtier-part-two-two-peniel-joseph-vs-h>Peniel 
Joseph [8], the Tufts University professor of 
history and author of 
<http://blackagendareport.com/content/dr-peniel-joseph-peddles-slick-marketing-constructs-%E2%80%9Cblack-history%E2%80%9D>Dark 
Days, Bright Nights [9]: From Black Power to 
Barack Obama, which attempts to draw a 
straight-line historical connection between 
Malcolm X and the corporate politician in the White House.

“For Marable and his Black left Obamites, 
Malcolm’s only other use is to somehow 
authenticate today’s reformers – and even 
President Obama! – as heirs to yesterday’s revolutionary Black nationalists.”

Manning Marable was up to the same trick. “Given 
the election of Barack Obama,” Marable writes on 
page 486, “it now raises the question of whether 
blacks have a separate political destiny from 
their white fellow citizens.” He does not explain 
why Black destinies have changed just because a 
Black Democrat who raised more corporate money 
than the Republican won a presidential election. 
How did that electoral fact entwine Black/white 
destinies in ways that did not previously exist? 
How were the Black masses empowered by Obama’s 
victory, and if they were somehow empowered, why 
would that draw them closer to whites?

It would have been better for Marable to have 
left out his last chapter of Reflections – it 
reflected badly on his powers of reasoning.

Finally, Marable attempts to create artificial 
space between Malcolm X and his direct political 
progeny, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. On page 403 he wrote:

“Had Malcolm continued to mainstream his views, 
it is unclear how he would have negotiated 
relations a few years later with the Black 
Panthers, a group born of much of the 
intellectual framework Malcolm had assembled in the early to mid-1960s.”

It is nearly impossible to conceive of a Black 
Panther Party had there not been a Malcolm X. 
Marable insults a generation of Blacks that came 
into political consciousness in the Sixties – a 
cohort to which he chronologically belonged. He 
substitutes his imagined, inferred, reinterpreted 
Malcolm for the man whose words and bearing 
called forth and virtually sculpted the youthful 
Party that debuted in the year following his 
death. Marable projects Malcolm as if he would be 
a stranger to the Panthers, with whom he would 
have to “negotiate,” when Malcolm’s life tells us 
it is far more likely that the emergence of a 
militant revolutionary nationalist youth movement 
that spoke his language – because they learned it 
largely from him – would compel Malcolm to take 
the struggle to an even “higher level.”

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted 
at 
<mailto:Glen.Ford at BlackAgendaReport.com>Glen.Ford at BlackAgendaReport.com [10].

Source URL: 
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Links:
[1] 
http://blackagendareport.com/category/media-media-justice-and-media-reform/rebranding-movement
[2] http://blackagendareport.com/category/african-america/black-history
[3] http://blackagendareport.com/category/african-america/malcolm-x
[4] http://blackagendareport.com/category/african-america/manning-marable
[5] http://blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/us-history
[6] 
http://blackagendareport.com/sites/www.blackagendareport.com/files/malcolm_obama.jpg
[7] http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=1145
[8] 
http://blackagendareport.com/content/dr-peniel-joseph-peoples-historian-or-establishment-courtier-part-two-two-peniel-joseph-vs-h
[9] 
http://blackagendareport.com/content/dr-peniel-joseph-peddles-slick-marketing-constructs-“black-history”
[10] mailto:Glen.Ford at BlackAgendaReport.com
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