The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Cone’s Martin and Malcolm and America, on the contrary, is useful precisely because it explores the cultural, racial, and religious roots of Malcolm’s public moral thought.27 Cone, the widely acknowledged founder of black theology, has been significantly influenced by both King and Malcolm, and his book is a public acknowledgment of intellectual debt and personal inspiration. In chapters devoted to the impact of Malcolm’s northern ghetto origins on his later thought, the content of his social vision, and the nature of his mature reflections on American society and black political activity, Cone discusses Malcolm’s understanding of racial oppression, social justice, black unity, self-love, separatism, and self-defense that in the main constituted his vision of black nationalism.28

  Cone performs a valuable service by shedding light on Malcolm’s religious faith and then linking that faith to his social ideals and public moral vision, recognizing that his faith “was marginal not only in America as a whole but in the African-American community itself.”29 Cone covers familiar ground in his exposition of Malcolm’s views on white Americans, black Christianity, and the religious and moral virtues of Elijah Muhammad’s Black Muslim faith. But he also manages to show how Malcolm’s withering criticisms of race anticipated “the rise of black liberation theology in the United States and South Africa and other expressions of liberation theology in the Third World.”30

  The most prominent feature of Cone’s book is its comparative framework, paralleling and opposing two seminal influences on late-twentieth-century American culture. It is just this presumption—that Malcolm and Martin represented two contradictory, if not mutually exclusive, ideological options available to blacks in combating the absurdity of white racism—that generates interest in Cone’s book, and in Lomax’s To Kill a Black Man.31 But is this presumption accurate?

  As with all strictly imagined oppositions, an either-or division does not capture what Ralph Ellison termed the “beautiful and confounding complexities of AfroAmerican culture.”32 Nor does a rigid dualism account for the fashion in which even sharp ideological differences depend on some common intellectual ground to make disagreement plausible. For instance, the acrimonious ideological schism between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois drew energy from a common agreement that something must be done about the black cultural condition, that intellectual investigation must be wed to cultural and political activity in addressing the various problems of black culture, and that varying degrees of white support were crucial to the attainment of concrete freedom for black Americans.33 Although Washington is characterized as an “accommodationist” and Du Bois as a “Pan-African nationalist,” they were complex human beings whose political activity and social thought were more than the sum of their parts.

  The comparative analysis of King and Malcolm sheds light on the strengths and weaknesses of the public-moralist approach to Malcolm’s life and career. By comparing the two defining figures of twentieth-century black public morality, we are allowed to grasp the experienced, lived-out distinctions between King’s and Malcolm’s approaches to racial reform and revolution. Because King and Malcolm represent as well major tendencies in historic black ideological warfare against white racism, their lives and thoughts are useful examples of the social strategies, civil rebellion, religious resources, and psychic maneuvers adopted by diverse black movements for liberation within American society.

  The challenge to the public-moralist approach is to probe the sorts of tensions between King and Malcolm that remain largely unexplored by other views of either figure. For instance, it is the presence of class differences within black life that bestowed particular meanings on King’s and Malcolm’s leadership. Such differences shaped the styles each leader adapted in voicing the grievances of his constituency—for King, a guilt-laden, upwardly mobile, and ever-expanding black middle class; for Malcolm, an ever-widening, trouble-prone, and rigidly oppressed black ghetto poor. These differences reflect deep and abiding schisms within African-American life that challenge facile or pedestrian interpretations of black leaders, inviting instead complex theoretical analyses of their public moral language and behavior.

  The comparison of King and Malcolm may also, ironically, void the self-critical dimensions of the public-moralist perspective, causing its proponents to leave unaddressed, for instance, the shortcomings of a sexual hierarchy of social criticism in black life. Although Cone is critical of Malcolm’s and Martin’s failures of sight and sense on gender issues, more is demanded. What we need is an explanation of how intellectuals and leaders within vibrant traditions of black social criticism seem, with notable exception, unwilling or unable to include gender difference as a keyword in their public-moralist vocabulary. A comparative analysis of King and Malcolm may point out how they did not take gender difference seriously, but it does not explain how the public-moralist traditions in which they participated either enabled or prevented them from doing so.

  By gaining such knowledge, we could determine if their beliefs were representative of their traditions, or if other participants (for example, Douglass and Du Bois, who held more enlightened views on gender) provide alternative perspectives from which to criticize Malcolm and Martin without resorting to the fingerpointing that derives from the clear advantage of historical hindsight.

  As Cone makes clear, Malcolm and Martin were complex political actors whose thought derived from venerable traditions of response to American racism, usefully characterized as nationalism and integrationism. But as Cone also points out, the rhetoric of these two traditions has been employed to express complex beliefs, and black leaders and intellectuals have often combined them in their struggles against slavery and other forms of racial oppression.

  Lomax, by comparison, more rigidly employs these figures to “examine the issues of ‘integration versus separation,’ ‘violence versus nonviolence,’ ‘the relevance of the Christian ethic to modern life,’ and the question ‘can American institutions as now constructed activate the self-corrective power that is the basic prerequisite for racial harmony?’”34 Lomax is most critical of Malcolm, leading one commentator to suggest that Lomax’s assessment of Malcolm betrayed their friendship.35 Lomax points out the wrongheadedness of Malcolm’s advocacy of violence, the contradictions of his ideological absolutism, and the limitations of his imprecisely formulated organizational plans in his last year. His criticisms of King, however, are mostly framed as the miscalculations of strategy and the failure of white people to justify King’s belief in them. Lomax’s vision of Malcolm loses sight of the formidable forces that were arrayed against him, and the common moral worldviews occupied by King and his white oppressors, which made King’s philosophical inclinations seem natural and legitimate, and Malcolm’s, by that measure, foreign and unacceptable. One result of Lomax’s lack of appreciation for this difference is his failure to explore King’s challenge to capitalism, a challenge that distinguished King from Malcolm for most of Malcolm’s career.

  Another problem is that we fail to gain a more profitable view of Malcolm’s real achievements, overlooking the strengths and weaknesses of the moral tradition in which he notably participated. Malcolm was, perhaps, the living indictment of a white American moral worldview. But his career was the first fruit as well of something more radical: an alternative racial cosmos where existing moral principles are viewed as the naked justification of power and thought to be useless in illumining or judging the propositions of an authentically black ethical worldview. Not only did Malcolm call for the rejection of particular incarnations of moral viewpoints that have failed to live up to their own best potential meanings (a strategy King employed to brilliant effect), but, given how American morality is indivisible from the network of intellectual arguments that support and justify it, he argued for the rejection of American public morality itself. Malcolm lived against the fundamental premises of American public-moralist judgment: that innocence and corruption are on a continuum, that justice and injustice are on a scale, and that proper moral choi
ces reflect right decisions made between good and evil within the given moral outlook.

  Malcolm’s black Islamic moral criticism posed a significant challenge to its black Christian counterpart, which has enjoyed a central place in African-American culture. Malcolm challenged an assumption held by the most prominent black Christian public moralists: that the social structure of American society should be rearranged, but not reconstructed. Consequently, Malcolm focused a harshly critical light on the very possibility of interracial cooperation, common moral vision, and social coexistence.

  A powerful vision of Malcolm as a public moralist can be seen in Goldman’s The Death and Life of Malcolm X. Goldman captures with eloquence and imagination the Brobdingnagian forces of white racial oppression that made life hell for northern poor blacks, and the Lilliputian psychic resources apparently at their disposal before Malcolm’s oversized and defiant rhetoric rallied black rage and anger to their defense. Goldman’s Malcolm is one whose “life was itself an accusation—a passage to the ninth circle of that black man’s hell and back—and the real meaning of his ministry, in and out of the Nation of Islam, was to deliver that accusation to us.” Malcolm was a “witness for the prosecution” of white injustice, a “public moralist.” With each aspect of Malcolm’s life that he treats—whether his anticipation of Black Power or his capitulation to standards of moral evaluation rooted in the white society he so vigorously despised—Goldman’s narrative skillfully defends the central proposition of Malcolm’s prophetic public-moralist vocation.36

  Goldman’s book is focused on Malcolm’s last years before his break with Muhammad, and tracks Malcolm’s transformation after Mecca. Goldman contends that this transformation occurred as process, not revelation, and that it ran over weeks and months of trial and error, discovery, disappointment. Additionally, Goldman sifts through the conflicting evidence of Malcolm’s assassination.37 Goldman maintains that only one of Malcolm’s three convicted and imprisoned assassins is justly jailed, and that two other murderers remain free.38 Goldman says about Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), which he founded in his last year, that its “greatest single asset was its star: its fatal flaw was that it was constructed specifically as a star vehicle for a man who didn’t have the time to invest in making it go.”39

  When it was written in 1973, and revised in 1979, Goldman’s was the only fulllength biography of Malcolm besides Lomax’s To Kill a Black Man. The virtue of Goldman’s book is that it taps into the sense of immediacy that drives Lomax’s book, while also featuring independent investigation of Malcolm’s life through more than a hundred interviews with Malcolm himself. Goldman’s treatment of Malcolm also raises a question that I will more completely address later: Can a white intellectual understand and explain black experience? Goldman’s book helps expose the cultural roots and religious expression of Elijah Muhammad’s social theodicy, an argument Malcolm took up and defended with exemplary passion and fidelity. He describes Malcolm’s public moral mission to proclaim judgment on white America with the same kind of insight and clarity that characterized many of Malcolm’s public declarations.

  Explaining Malcolm as a public moralist moves admirably beyond heroic reconstruction to critical appreciation. The significance of such an approach is its insistence on viewing Malcolm as a critical figure in the development of black nationalist repudiations of white cultural traditions, economic practices, and religious institutions. And yet, unlike hero worshipers who present treatments of Malcolm’s meaning, the authors who examine the moral dimensions of Malcolm’s public ministry are unafraid to be critical of his ideological blindnesses, his strategic weakness, his organizational limitations, and his sometimes bristling moral contradictions.

  But if they display an avidity, and aptitude, for portraying Malcolm’s moral dimensions and the forces that made his vision necessary, Malcolm’s public-moralist interpreters have not as convincingly depicted the forces that make public morality possible. The public-moralist approach is almost by definition limited to explaining Malcolm in terms of the broad shifts and realignment of contours created within the logic of American morality itself, rarely asking whether public-moralist proclamation and action are the best means of effecting social revolution. This approach largely ignores the hints of rebellion against capitalist domination contained in Malcolm’s later speeches, blurring as well a focus on King’s mature beliefs that American society was “sick” and in need of a “reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”40

  This approach also fails to place Malcolm in the intricate nexus of social and political forces that shaped his career as a religious militant and a revolutionary black nationalist. It does not adequately convey the mammoth scope of economic and cultural forces that converged during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, not only shaping the expression of racial domination, but influencing as well patterns of class antagonism and gender oppression. As Clayborne Carson argues in his splendid introduction to the FBI files on Malcolm X, most writings have failed to “study him within the context of American racial politics during the 1950s and 1960s.”41 According to Carson, the files track Malcolm’s growth from the “narrowly religious perspective of the Nation of Islam toward a broader Pan-Africanist worldview,” shed light on his religious and political views and the degree to which they “threatened the American state,” and “clarif[y] his role in modern African-American politics.”42

  Moreover, the story of Malcolm X and the black revolution he sought to effect is also the story of how such social aspirations were shaped by the advent of nuclear holocaust in the mid-1940s (altering American ideals of social stability and communal life expectation), the repression of dissident speech in the 1950s under the banner of McCarthyism, and the economic boom of the mid-1960s that contrasted starkly to shrinking resources for the black poor. A refined social history not only accents such features, but provides as well a complex portrait of Malcolm’s philosophical and political goals, and the myriad factors that drove or denied their achievement.

  Malcolm’s most radical and original contribution rested in reconceiving the possibility of being a worthful black human being in what he deemed a wicked white world. He saw black racial debasement as the core of an alternative moral sphere that was justified for no other reason than its abuse and attack by white Americans. To understand and explain Malcolm, however, we must wedge beneath the influences that determined his career in learning how his public-moralist vocation was both necessary and possible.

  PSYCHOBIOGRAPHY AND THE FORCES OF HISTORY

  If the task of biography is to help readers understand human action, the purpose of psychobiography is to probe the relationship between psychic motivation, personal behavior, and social activity in explaining human achievement and failure. The project to connect psychology and biography grows out of a well-established quest to merge various schools of psychological theory with other intellectual disciplines, resulting in ethnopsychiatry, psychohistory, social psychology, and psychoanalytic approaches to philosophy.43

  Behind the turn toward psychology and social theory by biographers is a desire to take advantage of the insight yielded from attempts to correlate or synthesize the largely incompatible worlds of psychoanalysis and Marxism carved out by Freud and Marx and their unwieldy legion of advocates and interpreters. If one argues, however, as Richard Lichtman does, that “the structure of the two theories makes them ultimate rivals,” then, as he concedes, “priorities must be established.”44 In his analysis of the integration of psychoanalysis into Marxist theory, Lichtman argues that “working through the limitations of Freud’s view makes its very significant insights available for incorporation into an expanded Marxist theory.”45

  Psychobiographers have acknowledged the intellectual difficulties to which Lichtman points while using Marxist or Freudian theory (and sometimes both) to locate and illumine gnarled areas of human experience. For instance, Erik Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviole
nce, one of psychobiography’s foundational works, weds critical analysis of its subject’s cultural and intellectual roots to imaginative reflections on the sources of Gandhi’s motivation, sacrifice, and spiritual achievement.46

  As they bring together social and psychological theory in their research, psychobiographers often rupture the rules that separate academic disciplines. Then again, if the psychobiographer is ruled by rigid presuppositions and is insensitive to the subject of study, nothing can prevent the results from being fatally flat. Two recent psychobiographies of Malcolm X reveal that genre’s virtues and vices.

  Eugene Victor Wolfenstein’s The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution is a work of considerable intellectual imagination and rigorous theoretical insight.47 It takes measure of the energies that created Malcolm and the demons that drove him. Wolfenstein assesses Malcolm’s accomplishments through a theoretical lens as noteworthy for its startling clarity about Malcolm the individual as for its wide-angled view of the field of forces with which Malcolm contended during his childhood and mature career.

  Wolfenstein uses an elaborate conceptual machinery to examine how racism falsifies “the consciousness of the racially oppressed,” and how racially oppressed individuals struggle to “free themselves from both the falsification of their consciousness and the racist domination of their practical activity.”48 For Wolfenstein’s purpose, neither a psychoanalytic nor a Marxist theory alone could yield adequate insight because Freudianism “provides no foundation for the analysis of interests, be they individual or collective,” and Marxism “provides no foundation for the analysis of desires.” Therefore, a “unifying concept of human nature was required.”49