Your Thoughts Exactly

In order to keep the blog’s momentum rolling, I am tempted to write an entire entry about what an asshole David Harris is. He keeps trying to trade me Travis Henry, even though I have Chris Brown on my team and thus know that Henry is going to be spending the year as a backup. Just stop Dave; peddle your wares to some other rube. I suggest Lee Roth.

Realizing I couldn’t get an entire blog entry out of bashing Dave, I have decided to share my thoughts (and consequently, your thoughts,) on the last book I read: The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The story of Malcolm X’s life is a fascinating one, as he rose from a street hustler, through time in prison, to be the leading spokesman for the Nation of Islam in the 1960s. Following a break from the Nation, due to personal conflict with the Nation’s founder Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm traveled to Mecca, where he spiritually redefined himself as a Muslim in the “traditional” sense. The spiritual redefinition subsequently changed his outlook on the racial situation in the United States. Whereas before, Malcolm had trumpeted the Nation’s view of the white race immorally suppressing the black race due to the white race’s collectively devilish nature, he began to change his views towards blaming American society as causing the system of oppression. On the whole, he had never fully developed a new political philosophy for how to fight racism within the United States when he was killed by members of the Nation of Islam. (Or the FBI, or CIA, or whomever you believe.)

This is an incredible story, where Malcolm goes into the depths of his hustling days, his days in prison, and makes you understand where he came from, why he ended up taking the views that he did, and exactly the extent to which an oppressive, discriminatory society can psychologically destroy a capable person’s mind. The full embracement of the Nation of Islam, of a philosophy that explained the despair Malcolm and his African-American peers found themselves in is a sharp lesson to the power of loyalty that forms in a human if he or she believes themselves to have been saved by a higher being. For embracing Nation of Islam and its philosophy did save Malcolm from death, drug abuse and prison. It gave him hope when he had none. You cannot put a price on that, and the political philosophy of the Nation of Islam has a lot of truth in it, and to a person with Malcolm’s personal history, the resonance was overpowering. More than saving his life, the philosophies of the nation put into context the oppression of blacks by whites and, more importantly, were a philosophy that celebrated the black race, in a society that fundamentally degraded the black race.

But that is not to say that he did not develop a complex take on racial relations. Malcolm is a man who viewed every interaction he had with a white person through the lens of racial relations, as well as someone who understood how his own personal behavior throughout his early life, (with straightening his hair being one example,) was shaped by what he determined to be shame in his own racial heritage, derived from what he was taught by American society. Because he believed racism to be so ingrained in America, Malcolm always spoke of the false hope of integration, in terms of providing true equality between whites and blacks. He derided the actions of the NAACP, for going after the wrong goals, using the wrong methods, and especially for utilizing white people as allies. He could not believe that white Americans could determine black interests truthfully. He was especially wary of what he referred to as “the white fox…” the liberal white who claimed to want integration, yet still wanted the black man “in his place.” Was he right to not trust this strand of the racial movement? I do think that, if we have achieved integration today, (which I think we have in the standard "liberal" definition of the term,) we certainly have not achieved equality, from a standpoint of economic welfare, or political power between races. More importantly, Malcolm realized late in life that the true goal was to achieve a color-blindness in society, of putting one’s humanness before one’s racial complexion. This was something that Malcolm experienced for himself in Mecca, and later, in Africa, and what he realized his true goal should be in terms of reshaping the American racial landscape.

People often discredit Malcolm X through discrediting the Nation of Islam's admittedly kooky beliefs. But you know what? The Mormons are just as kooky, yet seem to be accepted as leaders of the US Senate. To some exten all religions are kooky. One of the key tenets of religion is a belief in the divine, or the unexplainable. To deride someone’s personal beliefs as foolish or untrue while holding firmly to yours, even if your personal beliefs are shared by more people, is hypocrisy. If you choose to believe that Jesus died for our sins and was the embodiment of God on Earth, two thousand years ago, you can’t deride the Nation of Islam for arguing that God returned in the 1930s on the streets of Detroit, under the personage of Mr. Wallace D. Fard. Now atheists, such as Mr. Lim, can feel free to deride all they want!

So while Malcolm did embrace certain beliefs at some times that I would personally have a hard time accepting, he was remarkably prescient on issues of society, and to discredit his philosophy or insight would be a mistake. Later in life, he embraced Islam as a religion, because he believed it to be a spiritual method towards spreading equality in the United States. He believed in exhausting all solutions, be it the right to defend oneself, or challenging the U.S. with human rights violations in the UN, but he believed above all else that a spiritual transformation was key to the U.S. He believed that segments of the U.S. society were responsible for divisiveness, oppression, and racism. Moreover, he believed that Christianity, and specifically American Christianity, was spiritually bankrupt and responsible for propagating such societal ills. Malcolm understood how the spread of Christianity, and the spread of Westernism through colonialism and oppression, (a truly violent spread) were responsible for the plight of African Americans, and non-whites throughout the world.

Today, we need Malcolm just as badly as they did in the 60s. For it is a continued strand of exploitation and divisiveness, backed by the false front of Christian morality, that today controls the American government and continues to destroy the fabric of American ideals to profit its own, with no regard for other people, the environment, the rest of the world, or the minorities and disadvantaged that exist in the U.S. today. From reading this book, I have understood one man’s take on this America. Malcolm, due to his past and upbringing, focused on fighting the way this strand of society had oppressed him, through the color of his skin. We must all focus on our own areas of struggle, to fight this fight, to spread peace and understanding, and create a society he would have been proud of.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X: Highly Recommended

# posted by Marmaniac @ 11:23 AM