From: barnhart@ddsw1.mcs.com (Mr. Aaron Barnhart)
Subject: Re: Ruling Class Tries to Co-Opt Malcol
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1992 04:45:25 GMT
Organization: Evanston, Illinois, U.S.A.

nyt@nyxfer.UUCP wrote:
:
:By Monica Moorehead
:
:Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" continues to spark lively debate and
:healthy curiosity around the country regarding the slain
:political activist's legacy as the movie retains its strong,
:consistent pull at the box office.
:
:A number of journalists are taking the opportunity to raise the
:same fundamental question. They ask: If Malcolm X had lived until
:now, which political direction would he have taken?
:
:It is so typical of the U.S. racist ruling class and its
:mouthpiece, the media, to try to turn the message of a figure
:like Malcolm X into its complete opposite now that he has been
:dead for almost 28 years. During his life, the same media used
:every means at their disposal to ruthlessly vilify Malcolm X.
:They and their ruling class masters wanted to isolate Malcolm X
:and discredit him among the southern Black masses and other
:working class sectors.


Gee, Monica, you stayed on a pretty even keel for two whole
paragraphs there.

Not that I think Shelby Steele is invincible because he can write
such cold blooded prose BUT here's his spin on the matter.  It's
the cover story to this week's edition (12/21) of THE NEW REPUBLIC.

excerpt from
"Malcolm Little"
by Shelby Steele

... I believe that the larger reason for his perdurability and 
popularity is one that is almost never mentioned: that Malcolm X
was a deeply conservative man.  In times when the collective identity
is besieged and confused, groups usually turn to their conservatives,
not to their liberals; to their extreme partisans, not to their
open-minded representatives.  The last 25 years have seen huge
class and cultural differences open up in black America.  The
current bromide is that we are not a monolith, and this is profoundly
true.  We now have a black governor and a black woman senator and
millions of black college graduates and so on, but also hundreds
of thousands of young blacks in prison.  Black identity no longer
has a centrifugal force in a racial sense.  And in the accompanying
confusion we look to the most conservative identity figure.

Malcolm was conservative through and through.  As a black nationalist,
he was a hard-line militarist who believed in the principle of self-
mastery through force.  His language and thinking in this regard were
oddly in line with Henry Kissinger's description of the world as
a brutal place in which safety and a balance of power is maintained
through realpolitik.  He was Reaganesque in his insistence on
negotiating with whites from a position of strength -- meaning the
threat of violence.  And his commitment (until the last year of his
life) to racial purity and separatism would have made him the natural
ally of David Duke.

In his personal life, moreover, Malcolm scrupulously followed all the
Islamic strictures against alcohol, tobacco, drugs, fornication, and
adultery, and his attitude toward women was decidedly patriarchal: as
a Black Muslim minister he counseled that women could never be
completely trusted because of their vanity, and he forbade dancing
in his mosque.  In his speeches he reserved a special contempt for
white liberals, and he once praised Barry Goldwater as a racial 
realist.  Believing entirely in black self-help, he had no use for
government programs to uplift blacks, and sneered at the 1964 Civil
Rights Bill as nothing more than white expedience.

Malcolm X was one of the most unabashed and unqualified conservatives
of his time.  And yet today he is forgiven his sexism by black
feminists, his political conservatism by black and white liberals, his
Islamic faith by black Christians, his violent rhetoric by non-violent
veterans of the civil rights struggle, his anti-Semitism by blacks
and whites who are repulsed by it, his separatism by blacks who live
integrated lives, and even the apparent fabrication of events in his
childhood by those who would bring his story to the screen.  Malcolm
enjoys one of the best Teflon coatings of all time.

... He was a father figure who distributed love and hate in our favor.
Reagan did something like this when he called the ZSoviet Union an
"evil empire," and he too was rewarded with Teflon.




Aaron