Margaret McNair reviews Malcolm X by Spike Lee<\/p>\n
In Malcolm X Spike Lee and his team have created a compelling \ufb01lm drama. It is released in Britain this month. Every reader should go to see it. It is a welcome opportunity to see a US \ufb01lm about a militant black activist made by a black \ufb01lm maker.<\/p>\n
At its best the \ufb01lm exposes the pervasive racism in the USA and conveys the horror as well as the daily humiliation confronted by Afro-Americans. Its use of the infamous video footage of Rodney King being battered by white cops in Los Angeles in 1991 is a sharp reminder that the racism Malcolm fought against has not gone away.<\/p>\n
In one of the \ufb01lm\u2019s most powerful moments we see Malcolm as a fearless leader giving direction to a spontaneous protest march on a New York police station and later to a march on a hospital demanding adequate medical care for a Muslim brother battered by the cops.<\/p>\n
Acting with superb discipline brothers from Malcolm\u2019s Temple provide a security shield to the mass of angry but inexperienced demonstrators. Unfortunately this is one of the few glimpses in the \ufb01lm of Malcolm as a political leader in the Harlem community.<\/p>\n
Lee is not primarily concerned with Malcolm\u2019s politics and their legacy. He concentrates on portraying Malcolm as a mythical \ufb01gure, magically transformed from a busted, coke-fuelled hood into a spellbinding orator and devout convert to Islam. Lee and his co-writer, Arnold Perl, seem bent on depicting Malcolm as a peculiar version of the American archetype of the \u201cself-made man\u201d.<\/p>\n
Malcolm himself warned of the dangers of misrepresenting the struggles of past revolutionaries in \ufb01lm. Referring to John Brown, the white anti-slavery campaigner in the USA prior to the civil war, he said:<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re trying to make it look like he was a nut, a fanatic. They made a movie on it. I saw the movie on the screen one night. Why, I would be afraid to get near John Brown if I go by what other white folks say about him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Revere<\/p>\n
Spike Lee\u2019s treatment of Malcolm risks having an opposite, but equally wrong effect\u2014of encouraging people to revere Malcolm rather than learn from him.<\/p>\n
Malcolm X, originally Malcolm Little, was a petty crook won over to the black nationalism of Elijah Muhammed\u2019s Nation of Islam while he was in prison. On his release in 1952 Malcolm became a key activist. By the end of the 1950s his powers of oratory and organisation had transformed him into one of the Nation\u2019s most famous leaders and an international symbol of revolutionary black nationalism.<\/p>\n
The mass struggle for civil rights in the early 1960s and the Muslims\u2019 practical abstention from that struggle eventually led to a split between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammed. Malcolm went on to found the Muslim Mosque Inc. and then the Organisation of Afro-American Unity prior to being murdered by black Muslim assassins in early 1965.<\/p>\n
Break<\/p>\n
Despite the claims of various socialists that Malcolm, towards the end of his life, became a Marxist, he never transcended revolutionary black nationalism, mixed up with a brand of utopian socialism. But the partial break that he made with black nationalism and his revolutionary commitment to black self-defence, \u201cby any means necessary\u201d were important points of departure for the black struggle.<\/p>\n
Malcolm was in the process of breaking from both the religious and nationalist separatism of the Nation of Islam and the reformist strategy of the Martin Luther King-led civil rights movement. The task facing those \ufb01ghting for black liberation after his death was to complete the break and make the transition to revolutionary Marxism.<\/p>\n
It would be a piece of cultural thuggery to demand that Spike Lee\u2019s \ufb01lm should have been a political tract explaining this un\ufb01nished evolution. But Lee\u2019s weakness is that in failing to grasp the political dynamics of Malcolm\u2019s evolution he can only offer us a spiritual interpretation of it.<\/p>\n
We see nothing of Malcolm\u2019s involvement, albeit limited, with organised labour in New York. In 1962 (while still a loyal member of the Nation) Malcolm lent his support to a strike by hospital ancillary workers struggling to gain recognition of their \ufb02edgling union in New York. He actually appeared at a rally after the jailing of one of the union\u2019s key organisers.<\/p>\n
We hear nothing of Malcolm\u2019s increasingly open anti-capitalist statements. In its account of his pilgrimage the \ufb01lm focuses almost entirely on the spiritual dimension of the journey to Mecca and all but ignores the development of a world view which solidarised with the period\u2019s ongoing anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles.<\/p>\n
A crucial weakness is the super\ufb01cial treatment of the social context of the 1960s, in particular the mass civil rights movement which rocked the political superstructure of the Jim Crow South.<\/p>\n
Relationship<\/p>\n
Here the \ufb01lm begs important questions: what was Malcolm\u2019s perception of the Martin Luther King-led de-segregation campaigns? After his decisive organisational and partial ideological break with the nation of Islam, what relationship did he seek with other black and multi-racial organisations? Instead there are shots of Malcolm clearly enraged but silent before \ufb02eeting, televised images of police brutality.<\/p>\n
Lee\u2019s version of the events of Malcolm\u2019s \ufb01nal year strongly hints at collaboration between leading members of the Nation of Islam and the FBI\/CIA in his assassination on 14 February 1965. There is no doubt that Malcolm and his family endured systematic state harassment in the last two years of his life and there is a good chance that the state was implicated in his murder.<\/p>\n
Oppression<\/p>\n
But the \ufb01lm rightly avoids turning itself into a JFK-style conspiracy thriller in favour of explaining why the US State Apparatus so feared the Minister from the Nation\u2019s New York Temple no. 7. He preached a militant message of resistance.<\/p>\n
For all its \ufb02aws the Malcolm who emerges from the \ufb01lm is not a sanitised Martin Luther King-like national hero to be hypocritically embraced by the US ruling class. The \ufb01lm burns with justi\ufb01ed rage against the oppression of Afro-Americans today.<\/p>\n
A number of \ufb01ne acting performances sustain constant interest in the \ufb01lm. Towering amongst these is Denzil Washington as Malcolm. His performance captures diverse aspects of Malcolm\u2019s character from the trapped, self-destructive youth to smouldering religious convert and \ufb01nally the principled, self-sacri\ufb01cing \ufb01ghter for black liberation.<\/p>\n
Malcolm X never claimed to be a political theoretician. He was neither given nor did he develop the tools to fully analyse racial oppression and its relationship to class exploitation in the US. Even so his un\ufb02inching hostility to the established order\u2014in word and deed\u2014make him a worthy source of inspiration to a new generation of Afro-American, Latino and white working class youth who hate oppression.n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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