Viewing Malcom X

This is Facebook post on recently watching the 1992 Spike Lee film Malcolm X (interestingly on July 4, 2020).

Finally got around to watching Malcom X. Very powerful. I want to address the comments on the JFK assassination, particularly that it was “justice,” because while he changed his approach a lot after that statement, I don’t think it should be missed that there is a sense in which it is true, and it is the sense in which I think he meant it ... and it is an important sense that is still true. I put “justice” in quotes because I think that, sadly, a great deal of the sense in what he said about the assassination being “justice” will be missed by most modern people who hear that statement, particularly from the right, because they have no clue how to take it properly and are, frankly, in too much of an unintelligent stupor to process it. Justice is really balance, hence the image of the lady with the scales. And in cause and effect, there is balance: for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. The definition of justice that makes sense of Malcom X’s statement is one that I believe is *absolutely* fitting in this situation, but one that I think most on the right are completely unable to process. Those from that camp generally, in my experience, suffer from two maladies: (1) an inability to think in terms other than a reading of virtue that is heavily influenced by individualism and (2) an inability to conceive of two different things being the case at the same time, two dimensions, such that, in their mind, if there is an understanding of an event like this that it other than simple individual, occasional (meaning a single occasion, rather than systemic pattern) viscous action, that understanding cannot be true at the same time as an occasional understanding of it. If you want to believe that the assassination was an individual case in which JFK suffered an injustice perpetrated by whoever, singular or plural, singular or plural, pulled whatever trigger or triggers in whatever building or on whatever grassy knoll, driven by whatever insanity or directed by whatever sinister government agent, that is fine and I agree with you. BUT there is another level, which is the systemic level, on which what happened is simply a balancing of forces, of cause and effect. A system is simply sequential and consequential events of serial cause and effect, and “justice” in that system is simply the material balance. If JFK was a victim, he was a victim of not only Oswald or whomever on the individual occasional level; he was ALSO a victim of the system of racism perpetuated in this country. Individually, in the realm of the occasional justice, he was a victim of injustice, but on the systemic level, the fact that a white American died at the hands of white Americans is simply the justice of balance of cause and effects. When whiteness in America has been so defined by violence, it is inevitable that it will kill its own. In a sense, the intensity of the real violence of racial injustice is greater than the actual number of black bodies available to suffer it, and that excess has to go somewhere. There is not only the violence done to the black bodies like the actual beatings and murders; there is also the violence terror and other psychological violence, including that done to the minds of young whites. Whatever happened to JFK, it was done by whites who moved in a direct line of cause and effect flowing from the broad range of impact of racial violence, and the balance and equality of force in that chain of reaction is a form of justice, a material justice. Malcolm X was also a victim of it, but through the path of (if the film is accurate) Elijah Muhammad being seduced by the very same lust for power and “greatness” the characterizes the “advancement” of white America (the claims may be true that the FBI had people in the Nation of Islam materially pushing the assassination, but whatever the truth of that is or isn't, it IS the case that white American contributed to X's killing in the form of Muhammad being addicted to the same kind of control of power).

Whatever the story of the assassination of JFK is on the level of individual persons committing crimes, on the collective level, like the assassination of Lincoln, it is the story of how America sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7).

Follow Up:
On the film Malcolm X on the narrative level, especially in light of push back prior to the film against Lee doing the film and and the idea that he might focus too much on the early life. I thought there was an intentional parallelism between the relationship with Archie and the relationship with Elijah Muhammad. Two things are significant in this. The first is that doing a piece on the years of involvement with/against the Nation if Islam leading up to the assassination does not mean not including earlier material, and that it indeed must do so. Nothing happens in isolation from what led up to it, and the naivete and betrayal by somebody very much viewed as a mentor and danger to life from Archie is a first instance in a pattern of needing such mentors (it even begins the film, with shorty showing him how to wear the suit) that defines one of the things that it meant for X to really break free after his Hajj; and breaking free was a big part of his message, and one that underwent development in the shift out of the Nation of Islam, and so looking at a pattern that defined a thing from which to break free for him is part of the fuller picture of what that meant, especially since, while the phenomenon has a distinct white shape to it in America, such psychological manipulation is a universal problem, and the shift in X's thought (as best as I can understand it) was to move from thinking about the race issue in America solely in its own context to thinking about it in the context of a humanity shared among all ethnicities. The second is that historical accuracy and narrative accentuation of certain aspects are not mutually exclusive. The idea that they are diametrically opposed, that the more historically accurate an account is, the less it can have any trace of narrative crafting, is a myth (in the pejorative sense of the term, used here ironically) put forth by the erroneous belief that science can be completely objective.