Remembering Malcolm

National Review, Dec 14, 1992 by Carol Iannone

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM, often heard in the months leading up to the release of Spike Lee's movie, has paired Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in a kind of good cop/bad cop formulation. King, it's said, preached love, integration, and nonviolence; Malcolm X preached hate, separatism, and violence. If the country doesn't wise up and achieve equality as-King proposed, the wisdom goes, then blacks will follow Malcolm X's directive and do it "by any means necessary." Sometimes, especially more recently, the convention is altered to hold that the country has already failed to take Kinds way and that Malcolm X's is in the ascendancy, witnessed in such phenomena as the angry, swaggering style of ghetto youth; the popularity of rap music, replete with threatening, often murderous lyrics; the intimidating mode of black politics practiced in many large cities; and, of course, South-Central Los Angeles.

In either version the formulation is inaccurate on some important points. True, Malcolm X can in some ways be seen as the progenitor of the whole model of black activist behavior that we see today, marked by provocation, confrontation, Afrocentrism, and the excoriation of the white race. Furthermore, Malcolm X often characterized as "Uncle Toms" those blacks who sought a road of moderation and accommodation, setting the stage for the situation today in which any black who doesn't agree with the militant line can be denounced as a traitor to the race.

But what we now have is the worst of Malcolm X, while the best of him has been conveniently discarded or overlooked. He always insisted, for example, that black people had to realize that along with equal rights there had to be "the bearing of equal responsibilities." According to Remembering Malcolm (Carroll & Graf, 208 pp., $21), a moving memoir by Benjamin Karim, who was one of Malcolm X's assistant ministers at New York's Black Muslim Mosque Number Seven, Malcolm X felt that blacks "had to bear some of the blame for their own unenlightenment. You can blame a person for knocking you down, Malcolm often said, but you can't blame that person if you refuse to get back up .... However much slave history taught us about the injustice and misery we as a people had suffered, it did not excuse us from assuming responsibility for ourselves and each other by altering its course."

Malcolm X's own struggle out of the humiliations, deprivations, and various hellish detours of the-underclass--welfare, reform school, hustling, pimping, alcohol, drugs, crime, and finally prison--taught him the paramount necessity of self-respect and mutual respect among blacks. Moreover, Malcolm X understood how blacks preyed on each other like "animals and vultures" in the ugly black underworld. His autobiography tells of his poignant amazement at witnessing the respect with which black people had learned to treat each other in the Muslim movement. Karim's summary of Malcolm X's message to his followers is this: "Be honest. Harm no one, and take nothing that is not yours. Treat others as you would be treated by them. Practice charity. Exercise self-control. Avoid extremes, keep a middle path. Pay your taxes. Obey the law." With such teachings, Karim says, Malcolm X "rescued us from the myth of our moral inferiority."

And whatever his contribution in creating it, ours is not a world Malcolm X would have been at home in. Twelve years celibate before his marriage, he would have been dismayed at the distribution of condoms to children. The faithful husband and devoted father would be horrified at black men making babies and leaving them to the care of the white man's state.

The slovenly and disordered appearance of youth today, black and white, would have appalled him, as would their language, and the language of rap; he abhorred profanity and even the use of slang words like "kid." Malcolm X, who always dressed impeccably in the grownup masculine style of the 1950s and early 1960s, and couldn't stand to see a Muslim brother with his collar and tie loosened, would have disdained running shoes, baseball caps, and oversized T-shirts with Xs on them.

And Malcolm X loved learning. Affirmative action and curricula based on "self-esteem" might well have broken his heart. In prison, he copied out the entire dictionary, word for word, including punctuation, and read so much in bad fight that he had to begin wearing glasses. ("Any college library would have been lucky to get that collection," he later said of his prison's library.) His excitement at reading, at learning, at taking possession of ideas, is something you can almost taste in his autobiography. Karim reports that Malcolm X once mused ruefully, "How many dictionaries and reference books do you suppose we would collect if we went through a black housing project in New York? Enough to fill a car trunk or van? Or maybe a suitcase?" Karim continues in Malcolm X's voice, '"We can't blame the white man for the dictionaries black children don't have. Poverty, said Malcolm, provides no excuse for ignorance any more than history does. Ignorance breeds poverty, he said, it's not the other way around." For their classes at the mosque, Malcolm X's Muslim students were expected to have a notebook, a dictionary, a thesaurus, a book of synonyms and antonyms, an etymology text, and a library card. They were given extensive study assignments. In addition, Malcolm X encouraged the Muslims to use their spare time creatively, to go to museums, for example, instead of sporting events. In fact, as some have noted, his whole post-prison disposition was rather puritanical,. deliberately repudiating the looseness and ease that had come to be associated with some segments of black life in America.