Reclaiming Malcolm X

This weekend marks the 50^th Anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination. Malcolm has always had a deep influence on my writing, beliefs, and intellectual life. His unflinching commitment to justice and dignity are the hallmarks of his legacy.

Oh, and scaring the hell out of white people.

But seriously, there’s nothing I’ve ever read or seen attributed to Malcolm that would put him anywhere near the Progressive Left, who tend to embrace him. The late author of his most recent major biography, professor Manning Marable, attempted to rationalize his placement in the Progressive pantheon. But there was no real link in his well-researched and well-written biography. At best, he mentioned some “anti-capitalist” rhetoric  in speeches to colleges (text by Damon Root):

In a 1992 speech at Colorado's Metro State College, Columbia University historian Manning Marable praised the black minister and activist Malcolm X for pushing an "uncompromising program which was both antiracist and anticapitalist." As Marable favorably quoted from the former Nation of Islam leader: "You can't have racism without capitalism. If you find antiracists, usually they're socialists or their political philosophy is that of socialism."

In historical context, Malcolm was living in the Cold War political dichotomy. The Soviet Union and other communist nations were pitted squarely against the United States and the capitalist countries. If United States capitalism permitted Jim Crow, backed assassinations in Africa, and supported South African Apartheid, I’d be against it too. But where politics and economics converged to the detriment of American minorities, the culprits were the American government and its tolerance and furtherance of American racism, not a system of free exchange and entrepreneurship.

Indeed, many of Malcolm’s most famous and impassioned speeches dealt with American hypocrisy and the national inability to respect the laws of the Constitution that supposedly guaranteed equal rights. He wasn’t judging America for its ideals or its promise of freedom, rather than its utter and undeniable failure to secure rights for black people.  

I write this not to claim Malcolm for libertarians or, least of all, the American Right. His legacy belongs to black people and America writ large, if they bother to embrace it.

People should remember Malcolm for what he was and what he stood for, not just as a symbol of scaring white people. He believed in the absolute right to self-defense and personal responsibility. He believed in small business and black empowerment.  He wanted jobs and dignity for black people, and he didn’t believe the government as instituted in the United States could provide it.

Similar to what I wrote in my lengthy response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ remarkable article on reparations, the fundamental divide in civil rights today shouldn’t be about desert or what America should do. Rather, the argument should be about what America could reasonably be expected to do. Just because we elected a black president does not mean the government has gotten remarkably better at delivering on the failed promises of the past two and a half centuries.

We’re still trying to get past the very same phenomenon Malcolm was talking about in this short speech excerpt:

More than 50 years later, so much has not changed.

I don’t know what Malcolm’s macroeconomic prescriptions would be if he were alive today, and I don’t care. But Malcolm was right to be skeptical of government action. Active government aimed at bettering black lives gave us the ’94 Crime Bill,  the 100:1 crack to powder sentencing disparity, Broken Windows, and Stop-and-Frisk. It will take years to repair the damage they caused in black communities, on top of the preexisting problems of poverty, ghettoization, and crumbling infrastructure.

And we simply cannot undo the catastrophe they’ve inflicted on countless black lives. 

Before we ask the government to do anything else, it must recognize the fundamental civil rights of black Americans. Just as Malcolm recognized, whatever the laws say doesn't mean anything if the police can abuse black people and get away with it. And it is undeniable that the police violence against blacks and others continues today through hostile day-to-day interactions, militarization, and wanton brutality.

As Ossie Davis eulogized him, Malcolm was our champion, and we should continue to honor him. We do this by fighting police brutality. We do this by demanding equal rights and human dignity now. And we should do this by any means necessary.

Malcolm X, RIP

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**I don’t know the source for this video, and it has clearly been edited.  But the segments seem to all come from the same speech and thus retain their relevance as individual parts or taken together.

Contra the "Individual Responsibility Trumps Racism" Shibboleth

I'm not a Redditor. I think I'm a tad too old or, at least, too old fashioned to utilize the medium as it is intended. However, I wanted to share a comment on a Reddit thread about poverty, racism, and individual responsibility that I think hits all the right notes. (I know the author but the comment was flagged for me by a mutual friend.)

An excerpt:

If you were to design a situation where I maximized my true utility of choices to leave poverty, I often made bad ones. But I was given two gifts without any effort: I have a high, high, high capability for analytic intelligence and my mother was a wonderfully stable human being. 

But lots of people didn't have those: people that worked harder, people that were kinder, people that made better choices. The gravity of the situation pulled them back, given all those attributes. I will always remember a coworker of mine a McDonalds: nice girl, kind, harder working than I ever was in school. She studied every day at after-school tutorials for two years to pass a Science TAKS test - she never did. I showed up hungover, I got perfect score. 

I have earned many things in life - my analytic intelligence was not one of those.

It's best taken in its entirety so please, go read it here.

The excerpt above reminds me of another one, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, that is one of my favorites:

But the game *is* rigged. Let me tell you how I came here. I write for a major magazine and this is a privilege. I would say that it is earned, except that many people earn many things which they never receive. So I shall say that it was earned and I was lucky.(via The Atlantic)

Yes, individual responsibility is important for people to escape unfortunate circumstances. But that doesn't mean that those who failed to get out lacked it, nor that those who did were living up to the noble ideal that fits your public policy worldview.

Mia Love and others of the economic right would have you believe that the structurally protected racial inequalities that have been baked into the American system since jump are best defeated by hard work and determination in lieu of systemic analysis and reform.

Such is a recipe for a different kind of American exceptionalism--that the exceptional and lucky people who succeed in spite of the myriad obstacles placed before them are the aspirational normal. Further, the continued unfairness that makes life harder for millions of marginalized Americans should be dismissed and ignored because Jim Crow is dead therefore everything is fair (enough) now.

I don't know if this nonsense comes from resentment, naivete, or general ignorance, but it's nonsense nevertheless.

Entrenched poverty comes from a lot of sources: the effect of broader society and preexisting public policy being two prominent among them. That neither of these typically appear in right-of-center solutions to ongoing socio-economic problems (save antipathy to demonized social welfare programs) is a big reason why the right's base is primarily old, white, and increasingly out of touch. The GOP's short-term electoral success masks a shrinking social relevance and resonance that is a demographic nightmare in the longer term.

Since the days of slavery, there have been exceptions to the crushing social and economic power of the dominant American order. That didn't make any of those societies just or "good enough." That circumstances have improved over those years is not evidence that American society is fixed or has recovered from hundreds of years of prejudice, racism, and inequality.

Individual responsibility is a necessary but not nearly sufficient condition for widespread social betterment. The arguments about socio-economic progress cannot continue to be simply about individual responsibility OR institutional racism, because such arguments are valid only in a world divorced from current American reality.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

PS--in case you didn't click through before, read all of the Reddit post here.

My TL;DR on Ta-Nehisi Coates' Reparations Article

Despite many policy disagreements, there is not a writer of social commentary in America I respect and admire more than Ta-Nehisi Coates. I cannot recommend strongly enough that you read his article on reparations in the Atlantic.

That said, I disagree with seeking reparations for black Americans and slave descendants, but not because I disagree with Coates's argument of desert. In fact, I agree that America owes black Americans far more than it has given to date:

Historical, anecdotal, and statistical evidence strongly suggest that blacks, particularly poor blacks, have and continue to disproportionately suffer from police brutality and aggressive (and often, illegal) tactics. In recent years, primarily through the drug war, these behaviors—once primarily limited to inner cities and black neighborhoods—have bled into white enclaves and onto college campuses.

Given the statistical correlation between first contact with the court system and future socio-economic outcomes, particularly among people of color, a serious rethink of our current law enforcement regimes—from laws to funding to procedures governing police contact with the general public—is among the most pressing issues facing young black men in America today. To me, this is of far more pressing importance to American blacks than whether Coates and I each receive a check from the government for the past disadvantages inflicted upon our families.

My response is long, but that's because I think Coates is absolutely correct to say that America's lack of understanding of how it has treated its black citizens--and thus, its fundamental misunderstanding of itself--plagues our present and future. That must change, but I don't think a political and social movement to remedy that is the best way to fix the problems it has caused.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Some Thoughts on Ta-Nehisi's 'Reparations' Essay

I read TNC's reparations essay  in The Atlantic last night. The following is a slightly edited and modified version of my thoughts on first reading. I plan to read it again one or more times.

1. The piece should be read without reference to the headline. I think the greatest power of the piece is in its history and its ability to frame public policy in a milieu that is seldom discussed or addressed in educational or policy settings. 

2. The history he recounts is only a fraction of the horrors the government and the American people inflicted upon black people for generations. The reason I think this is important is that ideologues, of all stripes, neglect what our government and our country looked like for the vast majority of its history. As I talk about in my upcoming essays for Libertarianism.org, there is a vast chasm between what we think should or will happen given our policy 'druthers and what experience and history tell us has happened. This is a lesson for conservatives, progressives, and libertarians alike.

3. Ultimately, I remain unpersuaded that anything resembling financial reparations would be feasible or effective in combating the damage done to blacks over the course of the past several centuries. Marginally, perhaps, but there is no "good" solution in reparative compensation within the American context. Our system just won't sustain any meaningful shift in that direction. I think, however, that this is a relatively minor point in the piece, headline notwithstanding. The greater message TNC suggests--a historical reckoning of what transpired in this Land of the Free--is, I think, very important to moving forward as a society. How we accomplish that is something I'm still trying to figure out, but a better understanding of American history is a prerequisite first step. A simple glance at the backlash on Twitter should confirm how reactionary and ignorant many people still are about the current state of black America.

4. Somewhat tangentially, when I read The Jungle for a history class on early 20th century America, I was not at all put off by the meatpacking stories or even the conditions of industrialization, horrible though they were. I was most struck by the practice of contract purchases of homes, and I was aghast at its cruelty and inherent unfairness. Ta-Nehisi's essay deals with this topic in a way that cannot help but anger and frustrate an empathetic reader.


For the foregoing reasons, I highly recommend reading the essay, in full, as well as the implicitly suggested reading list throughout the essay, particularly anything and everything by Eric Foner on the Reconstruction era.

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I will never get tired of reading Ta-Nehisi Coates

Growing up where I did, there was a different code you lived by; and a different way you handled yourself and those who challenged you. I didn't grow up in Baltimore, as Ta-Nehisi did, but the principle (though certainly not the level of violence) is the same. This later incident is reminiscent of how a confrontation might go down:

The gentleman kept after me, even following me out the tent, and by this point, taunting.

At the door of the tent, and I looked at him and said, "You really need to back off." 

He looked back and said, "Or what." 

I closed in on him, and quietly but seriously, responded, "You really want to find out?" 

 He walked back inside. 

I was recently recounting to someone how I threw a football player up against a concrete wall for cutting in front of me in the lunch line in high school. He could have easily beaten my ass, but my gambit worked. But the projection of violence was essential to that moment--that "don't fuck with me" moment--after I had finally, after so many years of being picked on, attained enough self-confidence to stand up for myself. I was proud of that moment, and would do it again--if I was back in my high school.


TNC's latest gem about the stupidity of his moment in 2008 screams Truth to me. "Civil" society, where fistfights aren't commonplace and projections of power are exhibited by displays of earned (or, just as often, inherited) professional and educational status, will not tolerate the behavior that separated the "men" from the "punks" back home. Now, though I have been away from that life for a decade and a half, the temptation remains. But wisdom and forethought win out, because they have to. Those of us without Ivy League credentials and trust funds to fall back on don't get to bounce back like they do. I can't take a swing at someone just because they deserve it--and trust me, they do--because I am living my one chance. I got out, and I'm not going back.

If you want to get into the mind of a kid made good, you have to read this.

Crash As Worst Movie of the Decade

Why I love Ta-Nehisi Coates:

With that said, I don't think there's a single human being in Crash. Instead you have arguments and propaganda violently bumping into each other, impressed with their own quirkiness. ("Hey look, I'm a black carjacker who resents being stereotyped.") But more than a bad film, Crash, which won an Oscar (!),  is the apotheosis of a kind of unthinking, incurious, nihilistic, multiculturalism. To be blunt, nothing tempers my extremism more than watching a fellow liberal exhort the virtues of Crash.

If you're angry about race, but not particularly interested in understanding why, you probably like Crash. If you're black and believe in the curative qualities of yet another "dialogue around race," you probably liked Crash. If you're white and voted for Barack Obama strictly because he was black, you probably liked Crash. If you've ever used the term "post-racial" or "post-black" in a serious conversation, without a hint of irony, you probably liked Crash.

Amen.