Is Malcom X Winning?

Photo by Bettmann via Getty Images

(disclaimer: I refer to the ideas of Dr. King and Malcolm X throughout this blog post. I acknowledge that their views are complex and continued to evolve throughout their tragically short lives. My intention is not to narrow their beliefs. I purposefully use the term "legacies" because what I'm writing about is how they are most remembered today, what the most influential aspect of their beliefs are, what ideas of theirs are shaping today's discourse, even if those ideas represent a small part of their overall ideologies.)

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are probably the two biggest names from the Civil Rights era. They both wanted to end the system that treated African Americans as second-class citizens, but they had opposing visions of what a future America would look like for their children. 

For most of my life, it seemed that King's vision won, by which I mean captured the narrative and dominated the discourse. His face was the one most associated with Black History Month. Everyone in my elementary school could recite the first few lines from his "I have a dream" speech. Everyone in college read Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Over the last year, however, I've noticed that Malcom X's ideas are making a comeback. In fact, within certain groups, I think his ideas have won.

Although he later changed his views, his legacy is separatism, similar to a term today known as "spaces." From Wikipedia:

"While the civil rights movement fought against racial segregation, Malcolm X advocated the complete separation of blacks from whites. The Nation of Islam proposed the establishment of a separate country for African Americans in the southern or southwestern United States as an interim measure until African Americans could return to Africa."

So Malcolm envisioned a world apart from White America, a world in which they are free from White oppression. Dr. King, on the other hand, envisioned the Beloved Community.

"As early as 1956, Dr. King spoke of The Beloved Community as the end goal of nonviolent boycotts. As he said in a speech at a victory rally following the announcement of a favorable U.S. Supreme Court Decision desegregating the seats on Montgomery’s busses, “the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.”

This sounds more like integration. It's definitely not separatism or "segregation, but woke."

In a private community Facebook group, I asked if using pandemic pods that include students from marginalized backgrounds could help reduce the inevitable inequity that will arise through remote learning. I was directed to this blog post and admonished that pods are bad and you cannot even try to diversify them. 

The blog writer addresses the question "Would it be more socially just to invite families with fewer resources to join our pod?", saying, "this entire conversation is largely an exercise in privileged people trying to feel better about their own complicity in generations of inequality and injustice." Wow, bad faith much?

What struck me wasn't so much the poor reasoning as the aggressively shutting down of any notion of mixing. I think this is X's legacy bubbling up: Help Black Americans but do it from a distance.

It reminded me of this article by a Black writer who describes the COVID-19 lockdown like a dream come true because he doesn't have to interact with White people. Or Jamele Hill writing "It’s Time for Black Athletes to Leave White Colleges." Or the families that bought 97 acres of land in Georgia to create a city safe for Black people. These aren't people interested in a Beloved Community. These are people who want their own space.

Patents and Racism

One of the most interesting stories I've read is this research into the effects of racism on patents. Around the turn of the 20th century, African Americans filed patents at roughly the same rate as white inventors. They invented all kinds of stuff during this time—an elevator, rotary engines, a tapered golf tee, a dough kneader, a telephone system, a fertilizer distributor, and a bunch of other things.

Two things killed their progress: Plessy v. Ferguson and the Tulsa massacre. The former supports King's vision, the latter supports X's.

Tulsa was known as the Black Wall Street. It had become famous as a bustling, affluent community, a place where Black Americans could settle and live well. It had its own newspaper, hospitals, schools, banks, and a bus service. In other words, it was a Black space free from White oppression. That is, until a White mob massacred its residents and burned the place down.

Plessy v. Ferguson, on the other hand, led to segregation. African Americans became locked out of libraries and commercial districts. But they were also cut off from talking to other (White) inventors. In other words, they were denied the social capital and networking opportunities available in integrated communities.

Risk/Reward

I believe that if we pursue X's vision, there will never be equality. You can tax and redistribute money all you want, which will help some. But social capital is a source of the privileged that cannot be taxed and redistributed. The only way to tap into that is through integration, which cannot happen in Malcom X's world. 

The direction we take for civil rights is important to me because these visions are not compatible. And my ideas, like here and here, involve integration. If we choose Malcom X, I will be fighting a losing battle. 

My sense is that the direction people take will depend on their comfort with risk. Malcom X's vision is the safer route, but it has a lower ceiling and will never close the racial wealth gap. Dr. King's vision has the highest ceiling, but comes with the risk of microaggressions, racism, stereotype threat, and screwing up the Maxwell's Demon ratio so that Black students perform worse and/or seek riskier behavior (especially boys).

But I also recognize that it's not up to me. African Americans can and should be the ones deciding which type of world they want.