Dragging Malcolm X to Obamaland

[From Black Agenda Report, a very critical review of Manning Marable’s social-reformist distortion of the life of Malcolm X.  Glen Ford begins the struggle to return the weapon of history to the hands of those who struggle for an end to national oppression, capitalist exploitation, and imperialism.  — Frontlines ed.]

April 27, 2011

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
http://www.blackagendareport.com/print/content/dragging-malcolm-x-obamaland

Malcolm X's revolutionary spirit, thinking, and teachings continue to inspire and educate new generations, despite the efforts of social reformists like Manning Marable to turn Malcolm into a useless icon and tool for the renunciation of revolution

Manning Marable’s rendition of Malcolm X’s life should be read very carefully, so as not to confuse Malcolm’s evolving worldview with the late Columbia University professor’s left-reformist politics. “Marable tries to convince us that Malcolm must have contemplated a reformist political path in his mind, if not in practice.” The author’s mission is to discredit revolutionary Black nationalism as outdated and primitive. Black Democratic Party activism and support for President Obama are hyped as the new Black Power.

Dragging Malcolm X to Obamaland

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“ Marable grows so bold in pushing his back-to-the-future reformist fantasies, by page 333 he describes a Malcolm X who has become ‘race-neutral.’”

In packaging the life of Malcolm X for a wide audience, the late Dr. Manning Marable has presented us with an opportunity to reignite the debate over the meaning of Black self-determination, a discussion-through-struggle that effectively ended when the Black Freedom Movement became no longer worthy of the name. Unfortunately, it appears this was not Dr. Marable’s intention, since Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is largely an attempt to render useless the vocabulary of Black struggle. Essential terms such as “self-determination,” “Black nationalism,” “revolutionary” and “empowerment” lose their meaning, abused and misused in order to portray the great Black nationalist leader as inexorably evolving into a “race-neutral” reformer on the road to Obamaland.