Books, Arts & Manners: Bad Rap for Malcolm X

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 King’s 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.

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Carol Iannone

Carol Iannone writes on literature and culture.

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Martin Luther King Jr

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 King’s 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.