Malcolm X
By Walter Block, College of the Holy Cross,
Because of Spike Lee’s new movie “Malcolm X,” this black leader is once again in the news. In the eyes of some young black males who live in the deteriorating districts of many inner cities Malcolm’s message is one of violence against the “blue‑eyed white devils.” And for them this is a heady brew indeed, able to drown out the voice even of the revered Martin Luther King, who urged peace and reconciliation.
In the view of others well‑intentioned white liberals, for the most part the meaning of this man’s life was, on the contrary, not too different from that of Dr. King’s.
Who is right? Each has a bit of the truth, for at different points in his life Malcolm espoused very different philosophies, stretching from war‑fare to co‑existence. It is sometimes said that this man was like a mirror: we could see in him what we wanted to see, so great were his interests, so variable his viewpoints over his life.
There are some things, however, for which Malcolm must ever be known. He was one of the most riveting, charismatic speakers imaginable. Whether or not you agreed with him, when you heard him speak, you knew you were in the presence of a very remarkable person.
He stood for one thing his entire (mature adult) life: black is beautiful. He was notable for instilling pride into the lives of African‑Americans. He urged that they throw away their hair straighteners and dyes, which they had used in an attempt to “look white.” He encouraged black people to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps: dress neatly, live cleanly, eschew drugs, alcohol and promiscuity. The Black Muslim organization he headed had a greater success rate in dealing with drug addiction in the local community than any other. He was vociferously in favour of economic development for blacks, and many of the Shabazz stores he built and inspired are still in business, decades after his initial attempts in this direction.
Above all, Malcolm remonstrated against the welfare system. It was demeaning. It was infuriating. It bred dependency on the white man. It stifled creativity. It was a trap. Far better in the case of immediate dire need was charitable giving, limited to the local community. And for the long run, stores, factories and businesses were the answer, not the dole.
In a sense, the life of this Black Muslim leader was an example of his own philosophy. Born in 1925 in the mid-west, Malcolm travelled east and ended up in . For a while he was “Detroit Red,” a hoodlum named for his special hairdos. He was a pimp, a rapist, a thief and a jailbird. And yet, somehow, he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. Thanks in large part to his religion, he studied hard. He became a spell binding orator. He went through an anti‑white racist phase, but in his later years, he began to renounce this philosophy as the dead end it is.
In the coming months, there are many who will try to seize on the vision of Malcolm X. They will claim some part of him for their own. Paradoxically, and rather unexpectedly, conservative‑libertarians can also make a just claim. What else can you call a person who eschews welfare, drugs, spirits, and promiscuity, and champions clean living, hard work and business enterprise?
Even his call for the of , a new country for American blacks, to be fashioned out of large swatches of , , , the and other parts of the Confederacy, can be reconciled with this vision. Not for him a Marxist oriented defence of land reform based on taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Instead, Malcolm saw this as part and parcel of reparations based on private property rights.
The plantation owners had stolen the life‑long labour of his grandparents. In 1865, the slaves should have been compensated for this outrage by at least being given the land they had been forced to homestead. Instead, this was passed through inheritance into the hands of the grandchildren of the enslavers. Malcolm’s idea was to turn this property over to its rightful owners the African‑Americans who would have received it as a bequest had justice been attained at the end of the civil war.