(Cross posted on My Left Wing,)
My Left Wing contributor shanikka recently posted a cri de coeur diary called El Hajj Malik el Shabazz, Race & Politics that is one of the best, right on point pieces that I have ever read on any of the blogs.
It was about the general lack of understanding regarding Malcolm X and his positions and ideas even 40+ years after his death.
I am a white man who works in a multi-racial art…American music, to put a very broad term on it…and I have lived inside of a truly multi-racial subculture (One of the only ones extant in America, really.) since I was about 15 years of age.
(Grachan Moncur III, Roswell Rudd and Archie Shepp. 1967. Shepp’s piece “Malcolm, Malcolm-Semper Malcolm” on his record “Fire Music” says all that EVER needs to be said about the place of Malcolm X in American history.)
That position in society allows me the rare privilege of being able to pass almost undetected through the societal membranes that separate the cultures and races here in America and see both sides with eyes that are well informed by what is happening on both sides of that separation.
Malcolm X was one of my earliest heroes. I read his autobiography when I a 20 year old music student living in Roxbury, the black section of Boston, and his amazingly evocative and loving portrait of his time working in the largest black dance hall in Boston during the big band dance era along plus Thomas Pynchon’s even more beautifully crafted scene in “Gravity’s Rainbow” covering the same time and place still remain among my all time favorite “jazz” writing.
Malcolm did not live long enough to continue on his great path. He was on the way to transcending race, and as far as I am concerned that potential for transcendence is the main reason why both he and Martin Luther King Jr. were murdered. It is also the real reason that Fidel Castro was so thoroughly demonized both in the U. S. and among the middle class of his own country. As long as there is separation of the races…any and all races, and any and all forms of separation…then the users can play them against one another. It is when the realization begins to dawn that we are ALL being played for fools that things get…interesting.
And so I wrote a comment on shanikka’s wonderful diary..
Which itself turned into a diary.
And here it is.
THIS white man will tell you that Malcolm X did not go far enough.
He did not have the time. They killed him first.
THIS white man will tell you that the things Malcolm X said pertain equally to ALL races in America, and to all races on earth.
What things?
Which things?
Here’s one.
The white media…even the most LEFT WING of extant major media such as Air America and dKos…does not dare go so far as to say that the so-called terrorists are correct, that they fight this system in absolute justice, that the economic imperialism of the corporate entities that control America is as bad or worse than that which allowed slavery and such things as the “White Man’s Burden”-driven British Empire to thrive. It’s always “Oh those terrorists. We have to get a better, fairer government in here so we can fight them more efficiently.”
Bullshit.
Americans have acceded to the Corps’ vision of a world from which America steals so that the rich can get richer and the middle class can be bought off as their house niggers. With NICER slave quarters and BETTER slops. America deserves whatever hell it receives. And more. As Malcolm said, the chickens ALWAYS come home to roost.
People get testy when I say that the DemocRats and Ratpublicans are one party. The DemocRatpublican party.
Here’s what Malcolm said 40 years ago, with the word “black” excised from the statement. (Like I said…he didn’t live long enough to go further. Not stated publicly, anyway.)
I’m one of the millions of victims of the Democrats. One of the millions of victims of the Republicans. And one of the millions of victims of Americanism. And when I speak, I don’t speak as a Democrat. Or a Republican. Nor an American. I speak as a victim of America’s so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy – all we’ve seen is hypocrisy.
When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who has enjoyed the fruits of Americanism. We see America through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism. We don’t see any American dream. We’ve experienced only the American nightmare. We haven’t benefited from America’s democracy. We’ve only suffered from America’s hypocrisy.
Do you hear this, O great liberal unwashed?
Check it out.
Check YOURSELVES out.
And THEN see if you can still go and vote for halfway house DINO DemocRats because “At least they are better than those Ratpublicans.”
THIS white man calls BULLSHIT just as loud and clear as he can.
BULLSHIT!!!
We are ALL of us their niggers, and have been so at LEAST since the industrial revolution and the rise of the corporate world.
They have simply used technology to become more efficient regarding the methods by which they pursue their tactics of slavery and oppression. Now they do not NEED guns and dogs.
They have TV.
Here.
In America, anyway.
They need still guns and dogs and torture and murder and little Lynddie English with her testicle wires in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but if they ever DO succeed in pacifying those countries…which I personally believe they cannot…they will attempt to install DisneyWorld in the heads of the people who live there as well.
Tinkerbelle is MUCH more dangerous than that little Lynndie English girl. Tinkerbelle will take you to NeverNeverland. Or a suburban facsimile of same, anyway.
The liberals say “But 3000 people died in those cowardly 9/11 attacks!!!”
Wake the fuck UP, people.
There are 10 million people in the NYC metropolitan area.
In ANY third world country, I will GUARANTEE you that 3000 lives and MORE are “ruined” yearly in any randomly chosen group of only 100,000 people by the ongoing economic imperialist policies of the United States. And have been for 100 years or more.
Bet on it.
Ruined as in ended prematurely.
Ruined as in starved.
Ruined as in uneducated.
Unclothed.
Unsheltered.
Unprotected.
Uncared for in a way that Americans would not impose upon their household pets.
But…that’s alright, they’re only brown people and we need their services and their natural resources to run our SUVs and our HiDef liquid crystal TV sets.
And you wonder why we have the government we do?
We have it because we DESERVE it.
Do the math.
Over that 100 years. (We will not count the genocide of the native peoples here or the horrors of officially sanctioned slavery. Why bother? The numbers are overwhelming WITHOUT those figures.)
How many lives wasted one way or another by America’s greed?
BILLIONS, goddamnit!!
Billions.
Shanikka is surprised that there are no diaries about Malcolm X on dKos. (Yes, that’s right. I’LL name the names.)
Do not be surprised.
It is a Democratic Party blog.
Dedicated to compromise with the Devil.
An activity which Islam, Christianity, Judaism and any OTHER valid socio-cultural moral artifact forbids.
“Satan, get thee behind me.” said Jesus Christ.
“Can we talk?” say the compromisers to the same forces. “Maybe we can….work something out. After all…EVERYTHING is open to negotiation. Right?”
And at that moment…they lose.
As we are gong to lose here in the GREAT Satan if we do not…
Wake the fuck UP.
And soon.
Great diary, shanikka.
Thank you.
Do you think it will do any good?
ENOUGH good?
If Malcolm X didn’t reach these fools…what the fuck’s the use?
I keep on trying out of habit and a sense of desperation.
Or perhaps as an attempt at some kind of public magic.
And yet the polls STILL say that well over a third of Americans think that George Bush is a human being.
Deep.
Later…
AG
Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.-Frederick Douglass
