REMEMBERING MALCOLM X “I’M
FOR TRUTH, NO MATTER WHO TELLS IT. I’M FOR JUSTICE, NO MATTER WHO IT IS FOR
OR AGAINST. I’M A HUMAN BEING, FIRST AND FOREMOST, AND AS SUCH I’M FOR WHOEVER AND WHATEVER BENEFITS HUMANITY AS A WHOLE.” l-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz - Malcolm X. His name still electrifies us forty years after his assassination in Harlem, New York on 21 February 1965. It conjures up images of a tall, handsome man with reddish brown hair, fiery eyes, and a tongue that was more piercing than a sword. With the ferocity of a warrior and the intelligence of a scholar he fought injustice as he saw it. He sacrificed his life in the hope that we might be free to know the truth, and see reality as it is. We cannot underestimate the worth of the legacy of Malcolm X, God rest his soul, for he did not merely fight a social condition in his society by struggling against racism; he also consciously fought against arrogance, envy, greed, fear and hypocrisy - the spiritual conditions from which injustice grows. Like many Muslim thinkers before him, Malcolm recognised that one of the key attributes of the racist is arrogance in the heart. This kind of arrogance leads to a feeling of superiority merely on the basis of an artificial construction we have come to call “race.” In the Muslim mind, injustice is not just a socio-economic problem, it grows from spiritual diseases, and opposition to it must include a spiritual response. Let us then reflect on how Malcolm struggled against racism. How did he challenge an entire system that was based on injustice? There are at least two Malcolms we ought to consider:
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the “pre-Hajj Malcolm” and the “post-Hajj Malcolm.” During the time he spent spreading the teachings of Elijah Muhammad as a minister of the Nation of Islam in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Malcolm was a voice within a movement that was solely concerned with the spiritual, economic and social liberation of 22 million African-Americans; people who had lost their sense of identity, dignity, and nearly everything else that was precious to them as, generation after generation, they were seduced by the notion that God, identified as Jesus Christ, was a white man and that the white man’s civilisation was blessed with divine authority. Through distorted methods of schooling, religious rhetoric, immoral legislation, and violent subjugation that was falsely justified based on an interpretation of this theological notion, “White America” developed a system of control over time by which it could prosper by means of the exploitation of all who were not part of its limited power structure. As an inheritor of Garveyite thought, committed to selfdetermination, and a voice in the movement for civil rights in America, Malcolm was accused of reacting to racism with hate and trying to justify counter-racism as a legitimate approach to resistance. This, however, was an oversimplification of what Malcolm was doing. The son of an itinerant preacher who used to observe his father teach during his formative years, and later, prowling the streets of New York