(This is the second part of the review.)
NY Review of Books, March 11, 2021 issue
What Dignity Demands
by Brandon M. Terry
Reviewed:
The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and
Martin Luther King Jr.
by Peniel E. Joseph
Basic Books, 373 pp., $30.00
Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X met only once, at the US Capitol
during the Senate debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That chance
encounter was immortalized in a photograph that shows the two men
shaking hands and smiling but reveals little trace of the public feud
that has linked them in our historical imagination. Their conflict has
cast arguably the longest shadow over African-American politics and the
struggle for racial justice of any contretemps since the one between
W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington at the turn of the twentieth
century.
Just a few years after King came to international renown as the
spokesman for the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, Malcolm delivered a star
turn in The Hate That Hate Produced, a 1959 television documentary
hosted by Mike Wallace, who introduced Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam
(NOI) sect, to which Malcolm then belonged, as a living “indictment of
America.” While Malcolm was most notorious for the prosecutorial zeal
with which he cross-examined the propaganda of white supremacy, he also
made attacks on King a recurring element of his rhetoric and
transgressive allure. Malcolm charged King with being “cowardly” and “a
traitor to his own people,” insulting him as an “Uncle Tom,”
“handkerchief head,” and, most spitefully, “house Negro.” He suggested
that King’s great betrayal was his promotion of a self-defeating
philosophy of racial integration and nonviolence, which would ensure
that its adherents suffered racial domination peacefully and without
resistance.
Newspapers and magazines could not resist such a rivalry, nor could
intellectuals obliged to adjudicate the dispute. Harold Cruse’s The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) treated Malcolm and King as
emblems of the enduring struggle between “integrationism” and
“nationalism,” which Cruse characterized as the central fault line of
Black political life. Battles over such ideas, Cruse rightly noted,
could be traced back to Frederick Douglass’s campaign against
emigrationists like Martin Delany, who argued at times that mass flight
from America was the best solution to the plight of black America, an
oppressed “nation within a nation.” Recovering this past, Cruse and
other historians placed Malcolm’s brazen, implausible defense of “Mr.
Muhammad’s solution” of a separate Black nation-state in a sweeping
historical context.
But for all of Cruse’s intellectual acumen and the more measured
statements scattered throughout his book, his decision to foreground
this grand narrative exacted severe damage on the popular understanding
of Black intellectual and political life. Debates among Black thinkers
on questions of gender, religion, democracy, internationalism, and,
above all, political economy were reduced to an overarching struggle
between two traditions.
After Malcolm’s and King’s assassinations in 1965 and 1968, this
moralized opposition attracted a host of others. In popular and
political culture, Malcolm and Martin represented not just separation
and integration but hate and love, particularism and universalism,
resentment and reconciliation, North and South, the street and the
church, and, to King’s particular frustration, masculinity and
effeminacy. The cumulative weight of these facile dualisms helped cement
one of Black politics’ most enduring questions as a three-word loyalty
test, as simple as it is bewitching: Martin or Malcolm?
In the first part of this review, I discussed Les and Tamara Payne’s
biography of Malcolm X, The Dead Are Arising. For all the book’s
virtues, the Paynes nonetheless reprise this Malcolm–Martin dichotomy
with a script that is as false as it is familiar. While “King dedicated
his lifework to hammering away at the segregator’s ‘false sense of
superiority,’” they argue, it is Malcolm who “worked single-mindedly to
help Negroes, the segregated, overcome their ‘false sense of
inferiority.’” But King, at least as early as the Montgomery bus
boycott, conceived of protest precisely as a way of showing reverence
for Black dignity. Rather than nursing an obsequious focus on white
racial attitudes, King fervently believed that African-Americans would
“betray their own sense of dignity and the eternal edicts of God
himself” if they were to acquiesce to racial domination without protest,
even at risk to their lives.
James Baldwin, one of the few people who spent significant amounts of
time with both men, showed greater fidelity to their complex thought in
muddling this dichotomy. In a 1972 essay for Esquire, Baldwin
provocatively wrote:
Malcolm and Martin, beginning at what seemed to be very different
points…found that their common situation…so thoroughly devastated what
had seemed to be mutually exclusive points of view that, by the time
each met his death there was practically no difference between them.
This view of Martin and Malcolm as being pushed by circumstances toward
a philosophical and political reconciliation has attracted a handful of
prominent defenders over the years, including historian Clayborne Carson
and the late journalist Louis Lomax. Yet it has never received as
comprehensive and elegantly rendered a defense as it does in Peniel
Joseph’s powerful dual biography, The Sword and the Shield.
Joseph, a prolific historian of twentieth-century African-American
politics, an indefatigable public commentator, and arguably the leading
chronicler of the Black Power movement, sheds light in The Sword and the
Shield on the complex intellectual and strategic dynamics beneath the
publicly fractious relationship between Martin and Malcolm. By
uncovering the more subtle forms of influence they exerted on each
other, Joseph aims to upend the depictions of Malcolm as “the political
sword of the black radicalism that found its stride during the heroic
years of the civil rights era and fully flowered during the Black Power
movement” and of King “as the nonviolent guardian of a nation…[whose]
shield prevented a blood-soaked era from being more violent.” For
Joseph, these simplistic oppositions prevent us from reckoning with how
Martin and Malcolm
traveled down a shared revolutionary path in search of black dignity,
citizenship, and human rights that would trigger national and global
political reckonings around issues of race and democracy that still
reverberate today.
Joseph persuasively places each man at the center of the other’s most
dramatic transformations. King’s later radicalism is unintelligible
without grasping how Malcolm, primarily through his influence on the
Black Power generation, shaped King’s views on civil disobedience, white
supremacy, and, above all, American imperialism. Even more persuasively,
Joseph shows how, despite Malcolm’s disparagement of political protest,
a mix of envy and admiration for King’s commitment to direct action ate
at his devotion to Muhammad. It is no coincidence, for Joseph, that
Malcolm’s split with the NOI coincided with his declaration that “I am
throwing myself into the heart of the civil rights struggle and will be
in it from now on.”
Dispensing with the nationalism–integrationism dichotomy, Joseph argues
that Malcolm and Martin converged around two ideals: “Radical black
dignity” and “radical black citizenship.” The former involves the
revaluation of Black identity and support for self-determination
movements at home and abroad; the latter insists that questions of
economic justice, civic participation, and the redress of racial
injustice are crucial to being a free, equal member of the polity.
The question of dignity, as Malcolm appreciated, involves confidence in
our moral standing as people who warrant equal respect and who are
responsible for lives that are worth living well, with virtue and
excellence. “So-called Negroes,” he proclaimed at Yale Law School in
1962, “not only have been deprived of their civil rights, but…have even
been deprived of their human rights…the right to hold their heads up,
and to live in dignity like other human beings.” The NOI argued that
white supremacy determined value in ethics, politics, economics, and
even aesthetics in the US. Railing against the chemical relaxing of
kinky hair, skin bleaching, and other Black beauty practices as
capitulations to white supremacy, Malcolm asserted that anti-Black
racism had gone so far as to alienate African-Americans from their own
bodies. In hating “our African characteristics…our features and our skin
and our blood,” he said, “why, we had to end up hating ourselves.”
Under the influence of Elijah Muhammad’s racist metaphysics, Malcolm’s
earliest responses to this degradation slid easily into a Manichaeanism
that celebrated Black chauvinism as “racial pride” while judging whites
to be “a filthy race of devils.” But after he publicly converted to
Sunni Islam in 1964, Malcolm ceased defending what he began to deride as
Muhammad’s “racism” and “racialism.” Recasting his intuitions about
pride and dignity, the later Malcolm pointed to the practical need to
shore up the social foundations of self-respect. We need to celebrate
the historical achievements and cultural practices of people of African
descent, he argued, because our judgments, habits, and expectations will
otherwise continue to be shaped by the oft-unconscious inheritance of
centuries of racist propaganda.
As Joseph details and the Paynes minimize, King shared this fundamental
preoccupation with dignity. From the very beginning of his public
career, he argued that under Jim Crow segregation, “many Negroes lost
faith in themselves and came to believe that perhaps they really were
what they had been told they were—something less than men.”
To meet this soul-corrupting threat, King often brandished philosophical
abstractions drawn from liberal Christianity and Kantian universalism.
In the midst of a sermon or essay, he could take flight, extolling the
inherent deliberative capabilities of human reason, or celebrating that
each of us is a bearer of imago dei. Amid the crossfire of political
conflict, however, the organized contempt of white supremacy could make
these presuppositions appear ineffectual, or at least inapposite. This,
after all, was the concern behind Hannah Arendt’s insistence that “you
can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as.” “A person
attacked as a Jew,” she warned, “cannot defend himself as an Englishman
or Frenchman. The world would only conclude that he is simply not
defending himself.”
Malcolm, who often proclaimed he was “not an American,” but “one of the
22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism,” left no
doubt about the identity he thought best to invoke against
anti-Blackness. His sense of Black identity as focal and fundamental
inspired an explosion of Black Power organizing and debate that
ultimately pushed King to publicly embrace a more detailed, particular,
and politically potent account of what black dignity demanded. In Where
Do We Go from Here? (1967), King candidly described blacks as besieged
by racist ideologies that proclaim their “biological depravity,”
cultural “worthlessness,” and physical ugliness while denying their
claims for human recognition and equal respect. Though he never wavered
in opposing political violence, he sounded suspiciously like Malcolm and
his Black Power acolytes as he implored white liberals to see the
“positive value in calling the Negro to a new sense of manhood, to a
deep feeling of racial pride and an audacious appreciation of this
heritage.”
Both men, however, understood that exhortations to pride were not
enough. To overcome the humiliation and subjection of white supremacy,
Malcolm argued that it was incumbent on African-Americans to defend the
right of “self-determination…to direct and control our lives, our
history, and our future”—for themselves, Africans, and other imperially
dominated peoples.
Joseph’s book is especially excellent in the way it details Malcolm’s
attempts to drag the provincial Nation of Islam beyond its fixation on
an independent Black polity and toward a more serious understanding of
geopolitics. Becoming a self-appointed international emissary of
Afro-America and a devoted teacher of foreign affairs to Black
audiences, he served as an NOI ambassador to the Middle East and Africa
in 1959, orchestrated Fidel Castro’s controversial visit to Harlem in
1960, and had a crucial part in promoting protests against the
CIA-backed assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961. After
he broke with the NOI, Malcolm used his newfound liberty to advocate for
the United Nations as a possible means of protection and redress for
African-Americans’ violated human rights.
King never seriously entertained the utopian ideas of Black emigration
or the romantic racialism of Muhammad’s Black nationalism. Nor could his
political realism permit him to be optimistic about the likelihood of
the United Nations intervening on behalf of Black Americans, given the
disproportionate power of US foreign policy elites in the Security
Council and America’s coercive economic and military influence around
the globe. Yet the extent to which King’s vision of justice exceeded the
horizons of American nationalism is still perhaps the least appreciated
element of his public philosophy.
For those used to seeing King situated in a progressive story of
American liberalism, it can be surprising to learn that as early as the
1950s, he considered Black freedom struggles to be part of the wave of
anti-imperialist revolt in Africa and Asia. “The determination of Negro
Americans to win freedom from every form of oppression,” he proclaimed,
“springs from the same profound longing for freedom that motivates
oppressed peoples all over the world.” He strongly identified with
anticolonial liberation movements, meeting veterans of Gandhi’s
satyagraha movement in India in 1959 and traveling to Ghana for Kwame
Nkrumah’s inauguration in 1960. Like many leftist figures navigating
cold war politics, however, King’s criticisms of American foreign policy
could often seem restrained, couched in the obligatory tropes of
anticommunism or paeans to pacifism.
It was Vietnam that served as the inflection point for King’s
radicalization on matters of global justice, but Joseph helps underscore
Malcolm’s underappreciated influence on this shift. Malcolm was a
prescient critic of the war from the outset, eviscerating its premises
with a moral clarity that eluded most commentators, who were gaslighted
by lies that US troops were acting as noncombatant “advisers” in
Southeast Asia. “You’re not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that
you can’t face reality,” Malcolm warned, charging that the war was a
“criminal” act made palatable by racism and deception.
Malcolm’s antiwar critique and denunciation of the draft as “the most
hypocritical governmental half-truth that has ever been invented since
the world was the world” found its most important supporters among the
student organizers in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), the first civil rights group to dissent from the war and the
draft. How, Malcolm asked, could one accept being drafted to fight on
behalf of a supposed democracy, only to return home concerned about how
you “can get a right to register and vote without being murdered”?
King, whose political ties to Lyndon Johnson and mainstream liberals
made him more tentative in speaking out against the war, became openly
critical of the administration after young activists pressed him on the
hypocrisy of preaching nonviolence at home while remaining quiet about
militarism abroad. Against the private advice and public chastisement of
some of his closest advisers, he denounced both the war and the systemic
injustices revealed or intensified by the effort to fight it. The war,
he charged, represented a threat to free speech and legitimate dissent,
and it bred cynicism concerning both the use of violence and the rights
of nonwhite peoples for self-rule. Further, he charged the war effort
with the “cruel manipulation of the poor,” lamenting its unethical waste
of vital resources as well as how it sent
the black young men who had been crippled by our society…8,000 miles
away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found
in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem.
In our era of perpetual warfare, with its boomerang effects on domestic
liberties and civic trust, such insights remain unheeded.
The questions both men were converging on concerned the worth of
citizenship in a society riven by economic domination, racial hierarchy,
and belligerent militarism: What, if any, allegiance or sacrifice could
such a society demand? The ideal of “radical black citizenship,” which
Joseph most closely associates with King, contends that full, equal
citizenship for African-Americans requires not just the formal
recognition of equal rights but also the fair value of those rights.
This means not only the ability to act on them as any other citizen
might, but also the inability of a privileged class of citizens to
unjustly enrich themselves at the expense of the least powerful.
In Why We Can’t Wait (1964), for example, King wrote that “Negroes must
not only have the right to go into any establishment open to the public,
but they must also be absorbed into our economic system in such a manner
that they can afford to exercise that right.” As Joseph reminds us, his
conception of civic equality extended to things like “a good job, living
wage, decent housing, quality education, health care, and nourishment.”
Or as King put it in 1967, true freedom in an affluent society cannot
mean the “freedom to hunger, freedom to the winds and rains of heaven,
freedom without roofs to cover [our] heads.”
In venturing into the terrain of political economy and attempting to
treat Martin and Malcolm as thinkers of comparable stature, however,
Joseph runs into some difficulty. It is hard to reconstruct, with
clarity and consistency, Malcolm’s views in the last year of his life.
Still, Joseph is probably too congenial to Malcolm’s late
self-description, in which he went so far as to say that “my objective
is the same as King’s,” while calling for a “black united front” of
various racial justice organizations. As Joseph details, emissaries from
King’s camp, including the lawyer Clarence Jones, met with Malcolm, and
no less than Coretta Scott King seemed to appreciate his description of
his militant rhetoric as an attempt to aid the civil rights movement. In
an impromptu appearance in Selma in 1965, while Martin was jailed,
Malcolm suggested to Coretta that showing white people “the alternative”
might make them more willing to listen to King.
But King’s view of the world that he hoped mass protest would bring into
being went far beyond Malcolm’s populist appeals to the “downtrodden
masses” left behind by civil rights legislation. For King, equal civic
standing, at least in an ostensible democracy, also means that each of
us participates in decision-making, determining the contours of our
common life together through deliberation. Indeed, one of his principal
arguments concerning the evil of segregation was its assault on freedom.
Segregation, King said, imposes undue “restraint on my deliberation as
to what I shall do, where I shall live, how much I shall earn, the kind
of tasks I shall pursue.” Segregation destroys the vital human capacity
to authentically “deliberate, decide, and respond” by imposing
restrictions on when and where we may enter.
If democratic citizenship is to be free and equal, it must uproot
habits, power arrangements, and resource distributions that leave us
subject to the arbitrary impositions of others in the most vital domains
of life. As Joseph notes, such demands extended to capitalism itself and
partly explain King’s skepticism toward its basis in “cut-throat
competition and selfish ambition.” In 1967, for instance, he wrote that
“if democracy is to have breadth of meaning,” we must overcome the
“contemporary tendency in our society” to “compress our abundance into
the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with
superfluity.”
Malcolm, however, spent most of his career defending the NOI’s narrow
vision of Black capitalism as “self-reliance” and portraying welfare as
a white liberal ploy that created “laziness” while turning “ghettoes
into steadily worse places for humans to live.” Even after breaking with
Muhammad, he derided African-Americans’ lack of productive capital and
business ownership in The Autobiography of Malcolm X as “the perfect
parasite image—the black tick under the delusion that he is progressing
because he rides on the udder of the fat, three-stomached cow that is
white America.” Admittedly, Malcolm—explicitly citing King’s discussions
of social democracy in Scandinavia—began by late 1964 to attack
capitalism as a “vulturistic” system, but he never got far beyond such
scattered broadsides. Meanwhile, King’s writings continue to inspire
some of the best philosophical work on socioeconomic justice, including
Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos (2016), a strident defense of King’s call
to abolish these zones of racial segregation and concentrated poverty.
Perhaps more tragically, Malcolm’s criticisms of so-called
integrationism never adequately grappled with the leftist tenor of
King’s views, which could be better described as “reconstructionist”
rather than “integrationist.” For King, authentic integration was
“meaningless without the mutual sharing of power.” Kingian integration
would involve the widespread redistribution of assets and real
democratic participation in economic and political decision-making
instead of allowing municipal borders, the dictates of private profit,
and existing measures of “merit” to unfairly disadvantage the life
chances of so many Americans.
If Malcolm had concentrated less on diagnosing such views as rooted in
psychic abjection and took more seriously the experimentalism and
egalitarianism in left integrationists’ rethinking of American
institutions and norms, he could have helped move the debate beyond what
Stokely Carmichael later mocked as tokenistic, “one-way street”
integration. The cost of this missed conversation lingers today. In the
2020 Democratic presidential debates, Kamala Harris assailed her future
running mate, Joe Biden, for his opposition in the 1970s to federally
mandated “busing” plans, but the conversation dissipated when Harris
(and the broader public) evinced little enthusiasm for a debate about
federal interventions to achieve school integration in the twenty-first
century.
Even in the face of Donald Trump’s fearmongering calls to “protect the
suburbs” from integrationist invasion, liberals focused on charges of
GOP racism rather than explicitly defending the Obama-era Affirmatively
Furthering Fair Housing rule that occasioned this conservative gambit.
While the left undertakes a sustained reassessment of Black intellectual
history and King in particular, it has nevertheless failed to make much
headway on a workable public philosophy that combines King’s “ethical
demand for integration,” the “revolution in values” he called for in
political economy, and the concern to promote, as King partially learned
from Malcolm, the social foundations of Black dignity.
King’s question, given renewed urgency by the collapse of American
education in the pandemic, is whether a tighter knitting of our “shared
garment of destiny” can generate a spirit of solidarity and civic
experimentation capable of resisting the opportunity-hoarding, fiscal
absurdities, and simple discrimination that subject vulnerable Black
children to “injustice and waste.” Malcolm’s equally significant retort
is whether such programs might avoid Black humiliation and achieve
participatory parity in decision-making.
The Sword and the Shield helps us find our way to such questions by
transcending the exhausted divisions and glib formulations that prevent
us from seizing Malcolm’s and Martin’s thought as part of our usable
past. In the last year alone, American politics has been riven by a
partisan nihilism that indulges the grotesque mobilization of racial
paranoia about Black crime and antiracist protest, the cynical
repression of Black voters, and a barbarous indifference toward the
death and suffering of poor and working-class Blacks from Covid-19. The
catastrophic irrationality underlying these practices raises deserved
anxiety over whether there is, any longer, a path for American
democratic renewal out of decadence, disease, and despair.
If there is an answer, perhaps some part of it lies along what Joseph
calls the “revolutionary path” of Martin and Malcolm. They did not
arrive at their destination—likely no one worth following does—but their
rich archive of reflection on justice, citizenship, dignity, and dissent
is a surer guide to what ails us than the poll-tested, self-satisfied
advice of America’s precarious liberal elite. Revisiting these Black
radical voices of the twentieth century, we retrain ourselves to glean,
in the calamitous and contentious discord of the present, both the
profound scale of the long-deferred reconstruction ahead and the
“audacious faith,” in King’s words, that ordinary people like us would
be up to the task.
—This is the second part of a two-part article
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#6520): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/6520
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/80757548/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
