The Brothers Network

Afrocentric Take on Manning Marable Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

by Molefi Kete Asante

I wanted to make sure that I had time to fully digest Manning Marable’s “study” of Malcolm X before I commented, although I must confess that I wanted to speak immediately when I heard the praises the book was receiving from the Left and the Right. Furthermore, I knew something was amiss when the white mainstream began to push the work as a monumental analysis of the life of Malcolm X. I wondered, “When has the white mainstream press pushed works that were favorable to Nat Turner, Du Bois Marcus Garvey, Assata Shakur, Robert Mugabe, Amiri Baraka, or Maulana Karenga?” Isn’t the politics, particularly, revolutionary politics that chastises oppression, racism, sexism, and nationally sanctioned attacks on freedom fighters normally considered anathema to the white mainstream press? What could bring Marable’s Malcolm X, A Life of Reinvention, so much positive reaction? Obviously, there was something in Marable’s work that tweaked the consciousness of the white media toward this portrait of Malcolm X. I think the initial reaction of the white Left was based on the perceived tarnishing of Malcolm’s black nationalist and Pan African dimensions. No, I do not believe for one minute that the Left was looking to praise Malcolm, but to find favor in dishonoring him. The idea that someone could tarnish the image of Malcolm X was enough to make the living praise the dead. Yet for those others of us in the society who have seen, all this time, that Malcolm was our burning spear, a prince of time, nothing said about him would diminish his authenticity as a revolutionary icon.

After reading the book, actually after locating it as is the method of Afrocentricity, I determined that the flaws in Marable’s work were not simply errors of references, innuendoes, and narrow flights off into squeaky sexual matters, but rather that the writer, despite his notoriety was deeply dislocated politically. Consequently his analysis of Malcolm X was fundamentally off-center. Every space where Malcolm X could have been viewed as having taken agency was locked down, filled with unsanitary speculation, and hurriedly dismissed as being something other than the powerful assertion of African will. This is the style of the deconstructionists and post modernists who see cracks in every wall where power is amassed by blacks and who believe that to humanize a figure, especially a favored personality esteemed by blacks, one must kill the iconic image in a way that destroys it forever.

There is a lot to respect in Marable’s body of work and one should not measure his career’s success or failure by one book, a work that he may have revised had it been read by some critical readers prior to the rush to publication. My last conversation with him took place at the University of Illinois where we were both speakers for the evening on theoretical and political issues in Africology. I found that evening the same thing I found in his work on Malcolm X and that is a tremendous reliance on class formation with less and less regard for operable racism, based on long years of brainwashing, in American society. While it is impossible to show all oppression as racial the existence of racism does pose special problems for black people. Consequently, Malcolm X represents for black people the great objection to place, problem, burden, and other terms of confinement in the American prison of race.

Now it is possible to ask, “So, why must Malcolm X be murdered twice?” Perhaps because he understood, as he said, we needed him. “I am the man you want to be, I am the one you wish you were,” he once said. To deny Africans in America and elsewhere the standard bearer who carries the sword against the oppressor is to rob Africans of models who count their lives dear only if the collective wins. Here is a man who opposed in language and action the attitudes that had held us back for decades. He was the spirit of resistance and the persona of assertion.

I often tell my students that I can read the first five pages of a text and tell you precisely where the author is going. I can know the writer’s location by the language she chooses. Thus, Marable’s Malcolm defies the reinvention launched by the scholar. To say, however, that he succumbed to the temptation to woo the progressives is not exactly my reading. Marable was a journalist seeking to uncover the clay feet of an iconic figure and he found evidences in what he sees as Malcolm’s sexual exploits, the crevices in Malcolm’s attitude toward women, and Malcolm’s love-hate relationship with Elijah Muhammad. The book shook the ground where African Americans stood their Malcolm X.

But one thing is clear: we are a resilient people, toughened by adversity and inspired by possibility. We do forget our heroes and we cannot be deterred by misunderstandings, petty jealousies, and class warfare. Malcolm X remains heroic despite the post modern turn presented by Marable’s socialist orientation. I am neither socialist nor capitalist, neither Christian nor Muslim; my allegiance is only to the liberation of African spaces intellectually, politically, and culturally. Narrow and provincial arguments over religion, class, and color can only bring confusion, distrust, and insanity.

There is much to admire in Marable’s work, but it is not radical. I would never call Marable a radical although he liked being referred to as a Radical Democrat, much like my friends Cornel West and Michael Dyson, but I am not sure they are radical democrats either. Marable’s notion of radical was to be Left because he did not properly appreciate the history of African nationalism or Pan Africanism; he was essentially an African Americanist with a strong sense of racial justice. One could just as well be a white liberal and come to the same conclusions. I do not disparage this position, but it was not Malcolm’s position; it is not my position. In many ways I find Malcolm’s response to the denial of space and place for Africans in this society the most logical answer to white racial nationalism. We are stuck perhaps with the term nationalism or Black Nationalism but in the end Malcolm X sought to undo the construction of race and racism in America; this was a revolutionary objective. However, if you can only think of revolution in a class sense you will miss the fundamental role of Malcolm in our struggle. He never denied class contradictions; he responded to all oppressions concentrating primarily on racial oppression because that was the key to our historical experiences.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention unfortunately becomes the work most closely identified with Manning Marable. Born in Dayton, Ohio. Marable attended Earlham and the University of Maryland and in some ways was never able to get the institutions or their training out of his mind. I am only able to say this after reading the full extent of his treatment of Malcolm X, including his ability to differentiate the significance of a white controlled and black controlled social and political groups, e.g., Nation of Islam and Socialist groups.

I always see texts in the context of struggle; I am a child of the Sixties where the purpose of struggle was always to make the world better. To us, as members of the SNCC, Us Organization, Black Panthers, and other student activists, this meant to assert ourselves in the way that Malcolm asserted himself. He was the fiery example of our best hope, our most courageous symbol, and it is out of this cauldron that we understood what to make of Cabral, Fanon, and Fannie Lou Hamer. I could care less about the sexual proclivities of Cabral, Fanon, or Fannie Lou Hamer; I am interested, keenly so, in what they experienced and were able to say to change our objective locations. We believed that it would be university students with a sense of purpose tied to activism that would become the new hope of our generation. I mention this only to suggest that when younger people came along, such as Marable, the force of the movement had been dissipated by the COINTELPRO and other system machinations and they had to discover newer ways to maintain semblance of protest and activism and they often did this by seeking to discredit those who had established the models in the Sixties. Manning Marable was a mere child when blacks were in the streets for Black Studies and consequently he did not see the true character of Malcolm X. Learning it from the books is useful but nothing takes the place of actuality.

Here is what I think Marable missed in his portrait: Malcolm X was pre-emi¬nently a cultural spokesperson, an analyst and theorist of culture, and a revolutionary cultural scientist. Thus, when he is examined within the context of his own community and within the framework of the African-American situation, he emerges as a concrete example of the cultural hero. Furthermore, Malcolm’s identity as an intellectual, not a public intellectual, and an organizer must be seen in the light of his emphasis on people in transformation. He wanted to see Africans in America transformed, changed, and perfected in resistance to oppression. He expressed this in his concept of the radically different African person seeking to create a new type of African American who was not afraid to speak up and stand up for legitimate rights. This was the key to what Harold Cruse would see as the responsibility of the mature, independent thinking African American’s response to the crisis in culture and leadership.

In my view Reinvention will only confuse those who did not see that Malcolm X radically changed the political discourse in the nation around African American rights in that he was not speaking merely a discourse of integration into the white society but rather demanding human rights as an African person. This was un-King like, unique, creative and yet so fundamentally authentic that the masses found his rhetoric compelling. Yet Malcolm was never a public intellectual in the sense that he was available to speak on every issue without participating in the resistance to oppression. His public stance was inevitably a very real demonstration of his passionate commitment to freedom. Thus, Malcolm’s oratory was comprehensive, tight, sharp, unrehearsed, from the brain of an intellectual genius who felt one with his people in that his experiences had made him understand the self hatred, docility, and self degrading activities of many Africans. He rejected the condition of servitude and expressed himself as a conscious, historical being committed to the ultimate liberation of African people by any means necessary. This was a new status, in sharp contrast to the previous approaches of negotiation, petition, and prayer. Perhaps Marable’s own location, stance, posture, was more Martin Luther King, Jr., than Malcolm X. There was always something frightening to careerists about Malcolm; he refused to sell out his people for material gain.

Malcolm taught that Africans in America had been badly educated. Most African Americans did not know their names and the names they wore were not their African names. Malcolm’s idea was that Africans had allowed the white man to dictate terms of existence. Indeed, it was impossible for Africans to express concerns for liberation except on terms that had been determined by whites. Here was an example of blacks seeking freedom from oppression but going to whites to ask them to approve the rules of discussion or even more, in some cases, to provide the rules. Malcolm rejected this procedure and advanced what became a model for Afrocentric scholars who understood the dimensions of the servility and sought to assert political, economic, cultural, and moral authority based on a clear reading of African history, past and present.

It is this tendency toward seeming like a junior brother or sister that Malcolm struggled against and demonstrated in his public and private discourses a way to articulate new visions and new agendas. It is this juncture that was so productive and generative in the launching of youth movements and passionately cultural and political institutions such as the Black Panthers and the Us Organization and new philosophies like Kawaida and Afrocentricity. Each proponent of transformation saw in Malcolm’s rhetoric and life a way to be; thus, it was his being boldness that alerted the white opposition that the reality of racism was doomed.

I am sure that Manning would have loved to have this conversation with me; he enjoyed differences of opinion, debate, and good argument, but in the end I believe that he would have to concur that while Malcolm was influenced by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and held to the nationalist positions of the Minister of the Nation of Islam he emerged as a seminal thinker himself. The Malcolmian project, however, was never about human perfection or the idea that any human could be without blemish or sin; this is no mere Christian myth. So what is the point of Marable’s deconstruction?

I sense in the Reinvention an attempt to claim, and this is without adequate proof because we are confronted with a preponderance of uncritically assessed references, that Malcolm’s manliness and cultural nationalism were problematic given Malcolm’s own digressions. Culture has the ability to assemble behaviors, symbols, customs, motifs, moods, and icons into a single comprehensive affirming presence. It is Malcolm’s stance toward self-hatred, culturicide, and menticide that governs his political ideology. In fact, Malcolm could see that this new type of African rejected the white man’s Christian religion, the notion of inferiority, and the imitation of whites. He recognized that the real enemy of the African in America is white racism and its attendant manifestations in the society’s institutions. Malcolm explained it this way: when you are confused you can think that your friends are your enemies and your enemies are your friend.

If I could have wished for something more in Manning Marable’s book it would have been an expose of Malcolm’s political ideals. There seemed to be three overarching ideas that do not make the Reinvention but would have given the readers a much stronger idea of Malcolm’s significance. Of course, I understand that this was not Marable’s purpose. Nevertheless, Malcolm X suggested that there were three overarching political lessons that the African had to understand about America (1) American society could not be redeemed on the basis of its present institutions, (2) Whites would not agree to share power with Africans committed to social justice, and (3) Africans had to accept their Africanity as a basis for political, economic, and moral actions.

If Manning had concentrated on bringing to us the fundamental thought processes of Malcolm we would have gained immensely by this book, but alas, it is too late for Marable and a genuine study of Malcolm await to be done.

Marable was a keen observer but was probably a better observer than he was an analyst because to understand something you must have a consistent theoretical instrument as well as know what it is that you are evaluating. One could, as Marable did, take a Marxist approach to Malcolm but what is clear is that this approach in the hands of Marable was neither consistent nor did if allow him the opportunity to make good analysis of the entire Malcolmian Project. Actually one must be careful when listening to critics say that the book is highly referenced because there is always a difference between citations and analysis of the citations. To thoroughly document a book means that the writer must understand, and convey to the reader, the prejudices of the sources. For me, we have a feast of references but I am not able to see the broad outline of Marable’s argument.

What would have been useful is for Marable to advance the idea that with the Age of Malcolm a new epoch began in the conception of a national culture causing a far-reaching revolu¬tion in the traditional views held by members of African-American insti¬tutions. Malcolm was not merely the African American’s manhood, but the keeper of the ancestral flames of a proactive response to the human condition. His own life represented the rebirth of the extensive African commitments to cultural reconstruction which would be seen in the extensive philosophical contours that came after him. You cannot write a biography of Malcolm X and not appreciate the revolutionary context of his work.

Malcolm saw that the adaptation of our ideas, attitudes, language and history to the social and cultural imperatives of the African people was the first requirement for a comprehensive transformation. There could be no other interface with our historical destiny; we had to center ourselves in our African reality. However much we search out the personal idiosyncrasies of Malcolm X or the petty discussions about his personal life we will learn nothing from him without a deep appreciation of his inherent commitment to overcome the conditions imposed by the doctrine of white racial domination. Our score sheets, without this understanding will amount to naught.

What may have been difficult for Manning Marable, although he recounted the impact of Marcus Garvey on the Little family, is the fact that Malcolm, in his maturity, was in the direct chain from Delany, Blyden, Garvey, and Robeson. They were, alongside the Honorable Elijah Muhammad his intellectual progenitors. For the first time since Garvey and his express symbol of Africa as a powerful instrument in cul¬tural awakening, Malcolm’s rhetoric revived the cultural attitude. Here it came as a torrent, breaking the shackles of a genuflected people and announcing a new more aggressive approach to cultural reconstruction”. As we heard him and sat at his feet, it was inevitable that his knowledge and acceptance of duty would be reflected in numerous attempts to restructure our response to America. Thousands of urban Africans reached toward Malcolm’s vision and when it was comprehended we preached in Shangoan voices the hard reality of self determination.

I would loved to have seen a book by Manning that would have demonstrated how Malcolm brought discontent within the camp of the old order, creating by the power of his logic, schisms in the conservative body politic of African America. It is easy to understand the preeminent position of Malcolm as a cultural figure when in addition we con¬sider the intense reaction of the white American establishment to his call for black cultural nationalism. Malcolm was considered an extremist and a militant by most of the white press. Of course, the African-American press, itself often tied to the white corporate structure, was hardly better on Malcolm. In fact the Black Church which had at moments seemed interested in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Movement found Malcolm too strong for its liking.

I would have preferred to see Manning Marable appreciate the fact that Malcolm was an end to the apologia of the Negro. He became in his life a figure transformed in the actuality of his¬torical experiences, thus, to live Malcolm, is to see him as an orisha of power and purpose, a true aspect of Afrocentric culture. He is repre¬sented now by some with a string of solid black beads, an aleke of strength. Afrocentricity as an intellectual idea has the aim of fulfilling the Malcolmian project of removing African self-hatred and restoring African self confidence even in the world of intellectual production. You cannot write of Malcolm as if you are afraid that someone is looking over your shoulder.

Now here is the thing about Marable’s Reinvention. Manning seemed never to understand the nature of actual putting your career and your life on the line for the interest of oppressed people. This is what Malcolm did. While Marable may have become a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, even rising to become Vice Chairman of the organization, I am not aware of an African organization that Manning participated in as an active member. I am not making this a criterion of speaking, but it is an indication of how one postures career. Although some may criticize Marable for making his observations about the life of Malcolm from this or that political base, this has not been my objective. I simply believe that Malcolm’s biography cannot be adequately written; in fact, it is possible that no biography can be adequately written. Thus, the problem here is that so many of us had wanted a massive work that situated Malcolm in his times as a force, a presence to be reckoned with intellectually and politically, rather than the portrait of a petty thug that Marable finally gave us or them. Who is this Malcolm that Marable has portrayed?

Perhaps the answer is that he is all of us and if that is the case then we and Malcolm deserve to be seen in the light of our own time for the higher purposes that constitute our trajectory, not for the pettiness and triviality that accompany our daily lives. As you can see I have not dealt with the truth or falsehood of “he said” or “she said” when it comes to the death of Malcolm; I guarantee you, however, that someone knows the answer to whodunit and I do not believe that it is found in Marable’s book. What is found in Marable’s book is a Social Democracy portrait of Malcolm using a deconstructionist methodology. Okay, now let us have a truly Afrocentric portrait of Malcolm that elevates his discourse and demonstrates the agency of African people fighting against oppressive conditions.

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