I also find Arthur McGee's response, filled with gutter language, rather troubling. In responding to me, he can't even get right that it was Malcolm X himself who felt ashamed of what he done as a member of the NOI, not the white left who shamed Malcolm X. Indeed we find here a reluctance of the white left, starting with the SWP, to express criticism of Malcolm. Of course the right will dis him for his violence, but the white left seems hardly bothered by his separatism, black belt secessionism, open support for nascent third world fascists, and ill defined black nationalism. We are just happy to have him as a hero and assimilate him into all our multiculti syllabi.
Malcolm X's criticism of the Kennedy administration, the Civil Rights establishment, and Farce on Washington--while accurate in many ways--is compromised by the positive vision that undergirds that criticism: a racially defined black nationalism or separatism to be achieved through violence. That is, his criticism is not simply of the non violence or the reformism of the civil rights movement but (as already suggested) of the goal of desegregation and integration itself; after all, he declared that the NOI would kill Black Muslims who assisted the integration leaders and was not willing to even attempt to actually organize the armed self defense of civil rights workers until he broke from the NOI. That is, Malcolm X's criticism is in many important ways a radical one from the far right vision of complete racial separatism. This is why I prefer James Forman's criticism, though I am sad that late in his life James Forman has himself moved to support of black secession--despite his earlier criticisms of Stokely Carmichael and other black nationalist types.
Louis P is correct that I think this NOI vision which Malcolm X accepted and never fully broke from is accurately characterized as black fascism. Or to put it another way, it was only in the form of the NOI radical sounding demagogue Malcolm X then and Louis Farakhan now that Jim Crow or apartheid generally could appear in respectable form to blacks and non racist whites.
Ken is bothered that I would raise such criticism of Malcolm X's radical criticism without mentioning another alternative or guide to action. But there were rank and file voices within SNCC which called for armed self defense and militance. Ken argues that militants drew inspiration from Malcolm X's defiant speeches and that they understood NOI Malcolm X's speeches (incorrectly it turns out) as a call for arms in the struggle to end apartheid; yet there is also the question of how his anti white demonology did damage to the movement and the determination of what the long term goals actually were and are.
Malcolm X never broke from black separatism; he was not sure what he meant by black nationalism at the end of his life. He moved back and forth from support of violent secession through guerilla warfare to control of businesses in the ghetto perhaps through set aside programs by black govt officials to be put into power by the ballot. The latter strategy has been tried, thanks to Richard Nixon, and has proven not to be helfpul to ghettoized blacks. Indeed the black urban regime--one goal that followed from Malcolm X's revised black nationalism--has turned out be a nightmare. In the Joe Wood, ed. volume, Patricia Hills Collins raises some tough questions about the meaning and limits of Malcolm X's most developed ideas on black nationalism.
Malcolm X's internationalism reduces to the support of emergent national bourgeois leaderships in the third world without any sense of the new reign of oppression that they would inaugurate. This follows from a racial theory of history in which the concept of class is eclipsed, and here Malcolm X proves less prescient than Fanon. It also follows from his vision of blacks as a nation waiting to realize itself in the black belt.
If one reads Malcolm X's speeches from Jan and Feb, 1965, it is clear that his exposure of the NOI/Klan links is what brought the wrath of Farakhan and Elijiah Muhammed down upon him. After all, Malcolm X should have known that he would be killed for exposing this link since he himself had articulated that NOI policy years before. And Malcolm X did know and indeed predicted his assasination.
I also find it dishonest of Malcolm X and Alex Haley that *The Autobiography*, now everywhere on syllabi, includes no discussion of the NOI/Klan link that Malcolm X would later die for exposing. While as a political theorist I think Malcolm X is deeply flawed, I do think Malcolm X is a hero for feeling shame over his meeting with the Klan and consciously facing his death in order to expose the very NOI that has now ascended to respectability or at best endures usually lame criticism. But he is certainly not more of a hero than those who did not phrase monger, did not meet with the Klan and did risk their lives collectively every day in the civil rights struggle. In Race and Class more than five years ago, Barbara Ransby has expressed how bothered she was by the worship of Malcolm X at the expense of many forgotten heroes.
Daniel contines to argue that factoid history matter less than what Malcolm X meant then and now. Yet it is over the meaning he wanted to give to the contemporary NOI as an anti racist organization that this discussion of Malcolm X's politics began.
I also think Malcolm X's radical anti white speeches were actually intended for whites. Or perhaps to get a rise out of them in order to entertain blacks. But in so far as his attacks on whites--as evil because of their race, genes, Ice Age Ancestry--implies the deep difference of blacks due to their race, genes, Sun Land Ancestry, I think this kind of anti white mythology (or essentialism!) is quite disturbing both in the attitude towards truth it encourages and in the psychological games it plays with black people.
I do welcome all criticism, and if I have failed to respond here to honest criticism, it is only because I don't have the previous messages with me.
yours, rakesh