I wrote:
>> Early Malcom X and the NOI suggest black
>> awareness, expressed as explicit black nationalism, as an endpoint while
>> the later Malcolm X represents black awareness as a starting point.
You responded:
>here's a question i have re the formulation above. how does one distinguish
>between identity as an endpoint and identity as a beginning? doesn't
identity
>posit, however implicitly, a destiny? and doesn't destiny delimit freedom?
>these are general, more philosophical questions, and not specifically about
>malcolm x or the noi... now, i know there are complications to these
>questions, but i can't think of a a situation in which they become redundant,
>or no longer pertinent.
I think of identity as a way to describe moments of self-understanding that come out of social relations and history. (Or what Stuart Hall, among others, has called the production of social subjects.) For example, we want people to understand their positions within capitalism as a way of encouraging them to oppose capital- ism.; we want people to understand their positions within gender circulations of power as a way of encouraging them to oppose sexism.
But I try not to use the word identity because complicated understandings of the changing (sometimes even in one moment, in one aspect of political tensions, one site of organization) nature of identifications often get lost when I hear people respond to the word. So, above I talked about awareness to describe how some black people (in some places, under some conditions), thinking about their place in a world of Jim Crow segregation in one moment and the general acceptance of racist outcomes on the part of the apparatuses that speak for the state, could have welcomed NOI's strategies, analyses, and rituals for cultural engagement as a good idea. Within these terms, the NOI becomes a means by which some black people express their anger and their feelings of isolation.
The class conservatism of the NOI, its sexism, and its homophobia are sub- sumed in what it seems to offer: a program of small black proprietorship capitalism, an opportunity to be part of a middleman operation between black people as a group and big "c" capitalism, mixed in with some articulations of spiritual and aesthetic values. For many others (myself among them) who resist and oppose the NOI while being similarly aware of the same history and the same racism, what the NOI offers is not only inadequate, it is an ugly dead end: a bad idea.
If we think of identity as changing, always depending upon what our self-awareness is responding to, or what it is resisting, then identity isn't destiny, it's an organizing principle, or a moment of political awareness, or a response to a present moment's impositions. What I think that considering, repeat considering, Malcolm X's rhetoric has to offer at the end that it didn't offer at the beginning, is a way for black people's self-awareness of their place in U.S. history to extend itself to thinking about the world. Some earlier posts referred to particular kinds of black nationalism existing as a way to help black people become aware of the international dimensions of exploitation and oppression. In this vein, Yoshi Furuhashi wrote: "Furthermore, the most progressive variety of black nationalism often has a pan-Africanist orientation and even a seed for solidarity with all the wretched of the earth. This internationalist dimension is most often missing from the organic common sense of the white working class in America (which is a curious mix of individualism and small-holder populist mentality)." The progressive variety of black nationalism that she notes is an antidote to the commonsense conservatism of many black people whether or not they think of themselves as black nationalist. Pan-Africanist orientation circulated both within and outside of self-identified black nationalist rhetoric, organizations, analyses, etc.
If the above is an insufficient response to your really important questions, I will write more when I get back from work.
Wahneema
****************************************************************** Wahneema Lubiano Duke University, Program in Literature PHONE: (919) 681-2843 FAX: (919) 684-3598 [Note new e-mail address: wah at acpub.duke.edu]