Malcolm X; A Life of Reinvention

So i just finished this fat biography of malcolm x. the acknowledgements at the end explain how this book got made because dozens of people catalogued literally every scrap of paper with x's name on it. for the last 2 years of his life they typically had more than one entry for almost every day. winning a pulitzer for this kind of thing is assembling the most intricate timeline the world has ever seen. marable doesn't make this look easy. the book's not at all elegant. but it is god damn thorough. and when your thesis is Malcolm X Changed A Lot, it gets to feeling awfully definitive.

but malcolm x! what a guy! something that it makes me think about is that if you were an mlk follower, an integrationist, an espouser of colorblindness, that that had to be kind of a downer. you turned the other cheek, and got shat on (apparently racists back then would actually chuck water balloons full of piss at people) all in order to say you were just the same as everybody else. african americans were heinously oppressed and everything was fucking terrible, and all non violence said was LET US BE NORMAL! BE EQUAL! but to what? the innumerable scumbag white people who've kept you down? it takes saintliness, maybe, to stop yourself at equal, at the same level, when you've been drowning for centuries. black nationalism, and some of the ludicrous myths like yacub's history about the evil black scientist who accidentally created all the white devils gave african americans a distinct origin and so a distinct pride, not one they'd have to share with all these fucking oppressive racists. where's the pride in being black with mlk? it's dissolved in universal humanity. maybe that's for the best, that nobody should have any stake, any emotional or intellectual investment in the color of their skin, but when that color's cost you so much, won you so much misery, it'd make sense for it to be worth being proud of. maybe, broadly, imprecisely speaking, preaching black nationalism's legit in the way solanas' SCUM manifesto is. but taken too literally, taken on a practical level, it means you end up negotiating with the klan. it means having the lowest expectations and demanding the worst of people, so that your expectations'll be fulfilled and your violence and separatism legitimated.

non violence is always kind of for the benefit of the violent, oppressive ones. not literally that the oppressors will benefit, but that you're taking the high ground, being so obviously better and more good and reasonable than them that they'll be forced to stop doing that. they're your target audience, the one's you're doing your non violence for. when you espouse self defense you're tangibly, obviously doing it for the people doing the self defense. the purpose is to nullify whatever's forcing you to defend yourself, not engaging with it. god, violence and self defense, etc, is SO MUCH EASIER than non violence. what an easy thing to buy a gun. non violence is like fucking public relations, it's convincing people how preposterously reasonable you are so that things will be different in a different realm of argument, of civics, politics. it's christ-like as hell. PR note: be a martyr, die for the oppressor's sins. look how popular christ is!

it's harder for mlk to appeal to "ghetto" african americans" because abjecting yourself by letting yourself be beaten or killed is a lot harder when your life, psychologically and physically, is already that without any of the ideological glory and purpose of a non violent movement for civil rights. it's a lot more complicated, a lot more to think about, than picking up a gun. non violence is a thing done for other people, not for oneself.

anyway. malcolm x had a tremendous idea trying to haul the US in front of a UN committee for human rights violations. wonderful. his life is a crazy good argument for travel: so long's he was in the US he could actually empirically believe that all white people were the devil. the book describes his prison inculcation by the NOI and how he was initially skeptical, but then thought of all the white people he knew and was like, yup, all white people are devils. then he went to africa and the middle east and that pretty much went out the window. stereotypes can be grounded in so much reality. but they're just diagnosing the symptoms of evil, not truth. stereotypes make stereotypes true.