Malcolm X died today

(If you’re going to read this, take the time to briefly touch the videos and links- it’s the only way things will make sense, I promise.)

Malcolm X was killed today – 49 years ago at 3:30 p.m. on 165th Street, New York City. He was shot, in front of his family, in front of his friends, in front of over 600 earnest listeners at the Audubon Ballroom. He knew it was going to happen that day, he really did, but he went with it anyway. He was prepared to die.

Malcolm died calling for a “black revolution”.  He distinguished this from a “Negro revolution”, which represented civil rights in the United States. He prophesied a Marx-esque global overturn in society. He wanted “Negroes” to join in on the global revolution that “is world-wide in scope and in nature. The black revolution is sweeping Asia, sweeping Africa, is rearing its head in Latin America. The Cuban Revolution…. They overturned the system”. He foresaw a world of egalitarianism for all people, white, “black, brown, red, or yellow”. At the time of his death, he didn’t see whites as evil at all – he met people “whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white” that he could call brothers (Malcolm X, “A Message to the Grassroots”). And as he called for his global revolution in 1965, for his new vision of equality, he was shot and killed. Don’t listen to any media that tells you otherwise – “read the books” (Maya Angelou, recalling Malcolm).

“It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of Black against White, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.” – Malcolm X

Of course, that’s not the whole story. Malcolm was never a mainstream civil rights leader, and never wanted to be and chose not to be. The most mainstream he got was on his deathbed, still calling for a global revolution. He was not a Martin Luther King, who he called a member of the black bourgeoisie. He didn’t have a white picket fence and didn’t work with white liberals on a daily basis. He was a field negroe, a common man.  He was a radical compared to the other great civil rights leaders of his time (this is not to say he didn’t work with the mainstream; he personally knew James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, Maya Angelou, Sydney Poitier, Adam Clayton Powell, and Shirley Du Bois).

What differentiated Malcolm X from the others was his conception of African Americans. He never saw himself as an American, he saw himself and other blacks as Afro-Americans; namely, people robbed from their ancestral past in Africa, forced to live in America. He called on others to remember that past, to remember that legacy. Because of this honorary sense of African Americans, he “was the only leader out there that taught black people to be proud of being black” (Robert Haggins, Malcolm’s photographer.)

“So we are all black people, so-called Negroes, second-class citizens, ex-slaves. You are nothing but a [sic] ex-slave. You don’t like to be told that. But what else are you? You are ex-slaves. You didn’t come here on the “Mayflower.” You came here on a slave ship — in chains, like a horse, or a cow, or a chicken. And you were brought here by the people who came here on the “Mayflower.” You were brought here by the so-called Pilgrims, or Founding Fathers. They were the ones who brought you here.” – Malcolm X, “A Message to the Grassroots”

A friend asked me once, “What did Malcolm X actually DO?” The simple answer is nothing; he didn’t organize unions like Phillip Randolph, marches like Bayard Rustin, or sit-ins like Martin Luther King. Malcolm X didn’t deal with unjust laws or racial separation per se. He dealt with changing minds and perceptions. In the black South, whether it was Birmingham or Atlanta, the largest issue was Jim Crow: bus segregation, school segregation, church segregation. Malcolm X didn’t have to deal with laws in Detroit, New York City, or Omaha. He dealt with urban ghettos and cyclical poverty. He dealt with people who were lost as to their purpose of living, as to their identity, as to their future. He taught his listeners to love themselves, to love their heritage, to love the world around them. He taught them to identify with oppression everywhere, and to fight for justice anywhere. He didn’t teach full integration – he saw that as whitewash. Instead, he taught embracement, nationalism, self-confidence.

Most civil rights leaders didn’t identify with the urban North. In Boston, Lansing, and Baltimore, it wasn’t about being at the back of the bus, but about being at the bottom of society. It was about institutional racism.

“Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals, which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded by television cameras; it can frequently be observed in the process of commission. The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life. The second type originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type. When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city – Birmingham, Alabama – five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism. When a black family moves into a home in a white neighborhood and is stoned, burned or routed out, they are victims of an overt act of individual racism which many people will condemn – at least in words. But it is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.” —Stokely Carmichael, Honorary Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party.

Institutional racism consisted but runs far deeper than Jim Crow. It penetrated the hearts and minds of those in power – whites. It affected Malcolm’s people in the ghetto and on the bus and everywhere in between. Laws don’t change minds, words change minds. Malcolm dealt with minds, perceptions, and identity. That needs to be clear.

“But as racism leads America up the suicide path, I do believe, from the experiences that I have had with them, that the whites of the younger generation, in the colleges and universities, will see the handwriting on the walls and many of them will turn to the spiritual path of truth – the only way left to America to ward off the disaster that racism inevitably must lead to.” – Malcolm X, “Letter from Mecca”

He did this as a performer. Whether it was as a porter on trains that ran in and out of Detroit or on the podium at Oxford University, he was the same Detroit Red, wooing and playing to the audience. He was there to change minds and to get others to act. He wasn’t there for laws, he was there for minds. He wasn’t there to desegregate schools or buses; he was there to remove the mentality of racism and to create the identity of black conscious. He saw politics as a tool for the benefit the black community, not politics as a tool in itself. His speeches reflected just that. He didn’t DO anything, because he didn’t see DOING as enough. Putting black people in white schools won’t end racism, only changing the minds of whites would. And that was only the first step – because there was a revolution coming for a new global order (let’s be clear, time tells us he was dead wrong on this prophecy).

“We must understand the politics of our community…we must know what role politics play in our lives” — Malcolm X, “Ballot or the Bullet”

Malcolm performed to all sorts of audiences across the world. He met with kings, dictators, and presidents across Africa, with communists in South America, with leaders in Europe, and with lay blacks back home. It was for this reason among others that he is so difficult to understand – at one speech he’d call for integration and capitalism, on the other for segregation and communism. On one stage he’s a Muslim whose faith guides his actions, on another stage he’s a Muslim who has no intention of letting people know. The factor of time causes just as much confusion – he began in Black supremacy and died almost mainstream. To discuss all of that requires a whole book. Here, I am trying to highlight the most powerful continuities of Ossie Davis‘s “black shining prince”.

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When looking at this man in his totality, agreeing with him or not, we find a powerful lesson. We see the story of someone who thought big – civil rights wasn’t just about America. We see the story of someone who never compromised his values, yet was always willing to compromise his style. We find someone who thought deep, to the real issues of the time. And we find someone who taught me to be myself and to love myself and try to be no other than myself. Manning Marable tells it best: “Of the figures who tower over twentieth century American history, perhaps none is more complex, more multifaceted and controversial, than Malcolm X” (Malcolm X: A life of reinvention).

The Extinction Dilemma

The Western Black Rhino went extinct today. Poachers, they say. Of course, we forget of the many other species that went extinct today. And that’s from a panda saving website. It’s a dilemma people don’t bother pondering about – extinction. Darwinian evolution, right? Herbert Spencer’s survival of the fittest, Charles Darwin’s natural selection, the Lion King’s circle of life. It’s all natural, isn’t it?  The rhino didn’t adapt for the new era we’re in. To bad for the rhino.

What’s it to us, anyway? We try to save pandas, koalas, polar bears. Why? They’re cute and furry and bear-y. Forget the rest. It’s all about us. We want the world to look pretty, so we save the pretty looking animals. Sounds like playing God to me. But then again, who’s to stop us?

It’s sad this rhino went extinct. It really is. I liked rhinos. Same way I like humans, so I’ll save a fellow homo-sapien when I need to. Some of them look pretty, too. But they’re not furry….

In other words, they are winners and losers. The cutest and the rest. Humans, pandas, koalas, we’re all pretty darn cute. The Pyrenean Ibex? Eh, not as interesting. So I guess it’s still survival of the fittest, except being cute means being fit. I just wish we realized the contradiction. It’s the circle of life. But the rhino broke the cycle. Liberation, right? Not everything can be saved. I hope I didn’t burst your idealism bubble. If I did, you better hurry up with adaptation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest

Cry Freedom!

I do not know much about South Africa, except that my most favorite friend is from there (you know who you are!). I talked to an older lady, white, once, in Paris at a café. She was born in Zambia but lived most of her life in South Africa. Her biggest concerns were the rising political tensions: threatening the democratic stability that has never lasted long in Africa. Some might say that there are exceptions, such as Ghana. My critique of the argument is that we said the same of Kenya seven years ago. But their safety bubble burst, too.

The history of modern South Africa, though, has little comparison with the rest of Sub Sahara, making its case quite different. I hope I need not explain it, but the country has been dominated by the minority white population up until the last twenty years. Before that, the 9% Afrikaner minority, descendants of European colonists, owned all the wealth, political power, and social control. The forced segregation and discrimination is known as apartheid, the word referring uniquely to South Africa. This ended entirely in 1994, with the election of Nelson Mandela as the first black president of the nation in the first free elections. Things are still pretty nasty there from what I hear, but I could be hearing wrong.

That is a horrible summary of South African racial relations, but this is a movie review, and you should know the rest anyway.

One thing that makes this movie so profound is that it was released in 1987, years before the end of apartheid. The protagonist of the movie is a proud “liberal” white newspaper editor. He has a family and a number of kids. He isn’t all that racist, and his family is pretty liberal for the time and place too. He sooner or later meets a man named Steve Biko, an anti-apartheid activist that really did exist. Being the liberal intellectual he was, Donald Woods was against racism on any color of skin. He wanted to fix the apartheid problem and bring equality to everyone, but such a transition had to happen “smoothly”. An idealist with no real experience of his country, he has never really seen the treatment of blacks outside of the place he works, and he’s never seen or experienced the conditions the majority of them live in. Living in his rich white liberal Afrikaner shell, he assumed that the blacks were just as racist, just as supremacist, and even more violent.

He starts to grow out of his shell; I’ll spare you the details. Biko shows him the townships most blacks live in, and the horrid conditions of that lifestyle. Woods becomes more and more comfortable with Biko, as he realizes he’s not all that bad and not all that violent as most Afrikaners assume he is. Apparently, hardly any of the blacks in South Africa are violent or racist. They want “to build a South Africa worth living in – a South Africa for equals, black or white, a South Africa as beautiful as this land is, as beautiful as we are”, to quote Biko.

Things go on, the movie progresses. Without telling you what happens, Donald Woods takes on an important role in the anti-Apartheid movement. The government hates him, and he hates them too. He has a number of friends that are willing to help his cause, but there also some who are taking advantage of the relationship to maintain white power and privilege. His family, though, is entirely supportive. Woods eventually decides to write a book about a certain something that happens, and he resolves to escape the country to do so (South Africa won’t have it).

The movie is great and sheds a lot of the problems of the nation. It had some fantastic quotes, which I’ll share at the bottom. I enjoyed Donald Woods’ transformation from Afrikaner liberal to a real, good ‘ol western liberal. Biko was interesting, and so were his many black associates and friends. The movie was basically fantastic.

I have a few withdrawals, though. The movie quite  honestly gave a picture that almost all of the blacks, especially all of Biko’s friends, were fun loving guys that just wanted some good for everybody. They didn’t judge no white man nowhere, and they always seemed happy. I don’t think I need to check the facts, that simply can’t be realistic. I am certain there’s more to it: certain that there was a good number of black people that hated the Afrikaner just as much as vice versa. If not more, I daresay.

Judge: Why do you people call yourselves black? You look more brown than black.

Steve Biko: Why do you call yourselves white? You look more pink than white.

 

State Prosecutor: But your own words demand for DIRECT CONFRONTATION!

Steve Biko: That’s right, we demand confrontation.

State Prosecutor: Isn’t that a demand for violence?

Steve Biko: Well, you and I are now in confrontation, but I see no violence.

Miscellaneous quotes from Biko in the movie. For some reason, he’s the only person who has good quotes:

What we’ve got to decide is the best way to do that. And as angry as we have the right to be, let us remember that we are in the struggle to kill the idea that one kind of man is superior to another kind of man.

You can beat or jail me or even kill me, but I am not going to be what you want me to be!

I just expect to be treated like you expect to be treated. Come on, what are you so afraid of? Once you try you see there’s nothing to fear. We’re just as weak and human as you are.

My favorite:

My lord, blacks are not unaware of the hardships they endure or what the government is doing to them. we want them to stop accepting these hardships – to confront them. People must not just give in to the hardship of life, they must find a way, even in these environments, to – to develop hope – hope for themselves, hope for this country. Now I think that is what black consciousness is all about. Not without any reference to the white man. To try to build up a sense of our own humanity – our legitimate place in the world.

The Power of Cartographers

Who on Earth gave a few people the power to tell us about the Earth? Think of it – historically speaking – cartographers had the power to draw you off the map. They could name you whatever they felt like naming you, they could size you how much they thought you were worth. They could redistrict you in 2 dimensions, generalize whichever way they pleased! And who’s to say they did it wrong, who’s to challenge the authority? Only another cartographer of course. Get it?

Granted, we wouldn’t be around without them. They did after all help to “discover” half the world, right? Nevertheless, global trade, commerce, and British imperialism all relied on their drawing skills.

I won’t get into the specifics of cartography, but it’s complicated. Don’t learn it. The basic principle is that a cartographer must be able to transfer a 3 dimensional globe onto a 2 dimensional map. The proportions just don’t work right. There are other complications, when it comes to navigation: do you align the map by latitude and longitude, by relative land size, by territory shape? Or do you do it however the hell you want?

Cartographers through the ages did one of those, or a mix. Nowadays, all but the last are usually the ones most applicable.  You need latitude and longitude for sea trade, but territory shape looks best in a textbook…or does it?

Way back when when they had ships and stuff, navigators started to use latitude and longitude grids for navigation. They needed maps to do this, and thus the Mercator map was born in 1569. This map was great for its time, it was necessary and still is for sea navigation. But it makes the world look terribly inaccurate. But that’s convenient, I guess, since Europe gets to be a whole lot bigger. This is the map you all should be familiar with. It’s the map in the textbooks, the walls, the table mats:

There are others like this with different purposes, aesthetic or practical. But the truth, plain and simple, is that the United States doesn’t fit in Greenland. Eurasia is a bit bigger than Antarctica. So you see other projections that look a bit more believable. Try this, the Robinson Projection:

This one, by testimony of the author, is distorted on the tops and bottoms, but gets more and more accurate as you move towards the middle. We see this map all the time because it looks a bit like Mercator and fits our arcane view of the world. But to modern cartographers, it just doesn’t satisfy.

Check out Winkel tripel, Robinson’s successor:

But those are all Euro-centric scams. Ladies and gentleman, this is the way the real world looks like:

Or was it this one?

This one?

Just kidding, I don’t know. Who knows. No one, really. Lots of debate among scholars, no consensus. It’s not so Eurocentric as it ones, anyway (except for the part where Europe is in the middle). Just remember, Mercator is terrible. All the others have some sort of distortion, one way or the other. Don’t forget. Oh, and Africa really isn’t that small: