Zahra Gordon

Now, I have not read Marable’s book but I’ve been reading articles and listening to talk shows on the issue and I think that the fact of his homosexuality or homosexual encounters is a little irrelevant to his legacy as an activist. I guess we need to be clear whether we’re more concerned with Malcom’s personal life than his political life. If Malcolm was gay, it seems this would be relevant if he was discriminated against because of said homosexuality; sort of like Bayard Rustin, but that’s not exactly what’s happened/ing.

Besides that I think there is a lot of work to do redressing his image in general and analyzing the complexities of his politics. We need to understand why the things he did, said and advocated are still relevant. To me, its important because we still have white liberals refering to the Nation of Islam (NOI) as a “crackpot race cult,” and to Malcolm as an “awful, but charismatic figure” and a “racist.” This line of thinking is a serious problem as far “change” is concerned because it misinterprets and leaves out so much. I’m not saying that the NOI is the beacon of light for black politics, but you cannot overlook the good work that they have done or the fact that some of their ideas really aren’t that far fetched. When I was taking a colloqium on Black Power with Dr. Quito Swan, he posed a question to the class calling for a re-evaluation of the NOI. “People came down on the Nation when they said that the white man was the devil, but if its so outrageous to think of the white man as the devil, why is it so logical to think of him as god?”

This is the way the mainstream remembers Malcolm X: a separtist, racist from a black race cult who really knew how to pull a crowd. And there is so much more to say about his many transformations and changes in world view. The fact that the most popular ways people learn about Malcolm X still remain largely to be The Autobiography written with Alex Haley and Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X are also problematic. For one  thing, there are some curious, to put it lightly, connections between Alex Haley and the FBI concerning the publication of the book (see details here). Seeing that the FBI had a hand in Malcom’s death and lead a systematic onslaught against black activism this text really needs unpacking. Meanwhile, the film Malcolm X was based on five different scripts plus Spike Lee’s cinematic additives so even as good theater (this movie had me in awe at age 10 but I should probably watch again) its not a good source of critical information about Malcolm X (bell hooks speaks quite well about the lack of politicization of the film and the stereotypical portrayals of women contrary to Malcolm’s real life in the book Outlaw Culture).

Manning Marable with book cover.

And speaking of the FBI, conspiracy theories aside, I don’t think it’s that far fetched for the FBI to concoct or embellish a story about Malcolm X being gay in order to capitalize on false notions that African-Americans are more homophobic than other Americans. If he was gay, it does not change the potency of his manhood and well…if he was, he was (although according to Black Agenda Report Marable never actually says Malcolm was gay but just that he had sexual encounters, and not always actual sex, with men during his days as a hustler for pay).

In the Huffington Post article mentioned above, the author (like many others involved in this conversation) points opinions directly to the African-American community warning them not to miss this opportunity to “purge ourselves of homophobic attitudes” by rejecting the notion that Malcolm was involved in same-sex encounters/relationships. I wish commentators would stop making homophobia an African-American specific problem. African-Americans are equally as homophobic as the rest of America.

Plus, I’m not sure where the information in the article saying that gangster hip-hop used pre-NOI Malcolm as an icon comes from. Gangster rap, as far as I know, evolved at a time when hip-hop was making a shift from African-Amercan subculture to mainstream pop culture and it has now become the commercial hip-hop we have all been desensitized to. Rappers of note in this genre included Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, and the group NWA (Niggas with Attitude). I don’t know any songs of theirs referring to Malcolm before he converted and NWA’s “F*** The Police” is more in line with Malcolm after conversion than anything. So I dont think that ganster rap was built on “the most mysoginistic and homophobic strains of Black Nationalism and afrocentrism” as the article claims, especially as Malcolm wasn’t exactly “Afrocentric” pre-NOI.

So not everyone is happy or satisfied with the book – Dr. Todd Burroughs, Karl Evanzz, even Malcolm X’s daughters – but I’ll just have to add it to my readng list to really find out.