From: zursch@whizkid.wpd.sgi.com (Jeffrey B. Zurschmeide)
Subject: Re: What does Malcolm X mean to you
Reply-To: zursch@whizkid.wpd.sgi.com (Jeffrey B. Zurschmeide)
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 21:48:41 GMT

I've been following this discussion for a while and I recently went to see the 
movie. I read portions of Malcolm X's autobiography in college, and then reread
the entire book before going to see the movie. 

My thoughts and impressions were as follows... 

The bit at the end with all the people speaking about Malcolm X, the schoolchildren,
Nelson Mandela, and the reading of Malcolm's eulogy made complete sense to me. 
The movie was about what Malcolm has come to mean to people, not necessarily
about who he really was in the nitty-gritty day-to-day sense. In that respect,
Spike Lee lionized him. And why not? Every culture, every people, every nation
idolizes their heroes and past leaders. I see no reason to except Malcolm X from 
this tradition, and I see a bit too much of people wanting to tear him down in a 
campaign to discredit his message. I don't think too many people will believe that
he had no faults. Certainly, a large part of his autobiography is dedicated to telling
us about how his life was a series of phases and how he came out of each phase 
clearly able to identify his mistakes and misdeeds. That's a brutal honesty we
don't often see in people. They say that it takes a big man to admit that he was
wrong, and if that's true, then Malcolm X was among the biggest men of this 
century. Right up to his death, he was re-evaluating what he had done and said
in his past and owning up to everything he had done. 

Those children who got up to say "I am Malcolm X" weren't saying "I am or want 
to be a guy who sinks into crime and vice and then joins a religious cult that 
hates other people and then leaves the group and gets murdered" - in fact it's
amazing that anyone would be shallow enough to get that message out of it. I 
think that what they were saying is "I can be and intend to be the kind of person 
who draws their dignity from within themselves, who can come to respect themselves
and others no matter what happens to them, who can and will speak the truth as 
they see it regardless of the cost."  If every gang member in every ghetto could stand
up and believe himself or herself when he or she said "I am Malcolm X" - this country
would shake to its foundations. 

There was talk about whether Malcolm X was a conservative.  It seems to me that one 
of the ways we identify radicals is that they propose uncommon solutions to common
problems. That certainly holds true for Malcolm X.  It is uncommon for someone to
preach elements of economic philosophy that might be embraced by Jack Kemp while
at the same time railing against the white establishment.  One of the things in the
movie that I noticed were the banners hung in the NOI meetings exhorting the
membership to work hard, stay clean, be good husbands, wives, and parents, and 
the like.  Not really radical stuff in the ordinary way of things, but they made it a 
radical notion and they pursued those goals with radical fervor. So I think Malcolm
X was a radical and part of his radical plan involved ideas that are/were also held by
Conservatives. (Although with markedly different goals. I think Conservatives want 
to keep people pacified and working hard while Malcolm saw hard work as the path 
to liberation from the power structure of Conservative America.) 

The thing about radicals is that their programs don't work well for all people, or they
only work in a utopian society, or they end up with a lot of baggage. I think that the
NOI program carried with it a lot of baggage, and that Malcolm was shedding that
baggage towards the end of his life. As a white person, I'm not particularly thrilled
to be thought of as a devil incarnate, but I got what they were saying about integration. 
The sum of it all seemed to me to be that you can't go and make friends with someone
unless you can do so on an equal footing. If you do not do so on an equal footing, 
you are doomed to forever being secondary or dependent on that person. 

I am left to hope that the best legacies of Malcolm X will be the ones that catch in 
people today. The idea of working for yourself because no one else will ever do it
for you, of staying clean and getting educated not just in spite of the odds, but 
in defiance of the system that tries to keep you dirty and uneducated, and of speaking
the truth to those in power every day. There are those who will try to drag down 
the message by saying "well, he wasn't morally perfect" or "his message contains
flaws" - those things may well be true, but I don't think there's much to be gained 
from disputing them because the detractors are saying them to try to keep the
real issues from being discussed.  Do like Malcolm and keep hitting the truth. 

I think Denzel Washington will receive the Academy award for best actor this year,
and I think he deserves it. His performance was great. His performances have been
great every time I've seen him in a movie. He was great in The Mighty Quinn, in 
Glory, and now in Malcolm X.  I really enjoyed the movie as a movie, but Spike Lee
still has some work to do to sharpen up his skills. Being a great director is a tough
job, and there were awkward places in the cinematography. I didn't have any 
complaint with the order of the action, the script, or much of anything except the
editing, which was at times a little choppy. The way he went from black and white to
color and did the flashbacks I thought was brilliant, as was the way the camera eye
would move through walls and doors and such to follow the action. Others I spoke
to thought at times that it was a little heavy-handed, but I love that stuff. So I think
Spike Lee will be nominated, but may not win the best director award.  I will add that 
I would have happily sat through two more hours of this film to get more detail and to
add more scenes from the autobiography. I thought they could have fleshed out his
criminal life more....that was one of the most fascinating parts of the book-The first
hand glimpse into life in Harlem in the 40s.

So that's what Malcolm X means to me...

JZ  

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