By Max Lane
A recent Newsweek poll found that 84% of African-Americans between the ages of 15 and 24 consider Malcolm X a hero. Spike Lee's film is obviously meant to reinforce this view. In too many ways, however, it fails.
Most radical criticism of the film concentrates on its rapid slide over the last period of Malcolm's life — after his break with the Nation of Islam, when he began resolving the contradictions of his previous life and politics.
Malcolm had rejected white society, but adopted the most reactionary form of white morality, the pseudo-Islamic (actually fundamentalist Christian) code of the Nation of Islam. He defied white power, spurned the white establishment's political parties and held high black pride and the demand for black independence, but ceded to the white establishment the right to rule and dominate America.
It was probably inevitable that at some stage he would be challenged to resolve this tension. He did so by moving towards a revolutionary perspective: the realisation of the need to dismantle the whole system, the need for political alliances, the need to change the US rather than separate from it, the need for an international perspective.
Spike Lee's film completely lacks any sense of this contradiction and any understanding, therefore, of the dynamics in Malcolm X's life.
Why did the street-wise hood join a sect in the first place? The film's depiction lacks all credibility. Malcolm is convinced by a few banalities fellow prisoner and by being exposed to the racist definitions of black and white in a dictionary. It is no good trying to explain Malcolm's conversion simply by his suffering of racist oppression: there have been a million different responses to that experience.
This is a crucial weakness because it leaves unexplained why a man who became such a militant and uncompromising anti-racist began his journey with so much sectarian and puritanical baggage. It leaves unexplained the origins of Malcolm's contradictory politics and life.
I don't know the whole answer, but the film and autobiography's references to his abandoned early girlfriend ending up a street prostitute may point to one factor: guilt about his previous life. He would not be the first person to
undergo a religious conversion motivated by such feelings.
Malcolm's defiant rejection of white supremacy is the one clear message that comes out of the coverage of his period with the Nation of Islam. But that is all. What did the Nation of Islam actually do? Who joined it? What did Malcolm do during these 12 years, apart from deliver his speeches?
The answer to these questions is also crucial because it must have played a part in preparing the ground for his break with the Nation of Islam. Here too the depiction is less than fully credible.
The break is explained partly by the jealousy of an increasingly fat-cat ministry around Elijah Muhammad and partly by Malcolm's disillusion with Elijah's sexual activities. This is the same as saying that there were no politics in the break.
The logic of this explanation would point to Malcolm establishing a more pure or reformed version of the Nation. But he didn't: he set off in a different direction altogether.
Instead of explaining this new direction, the film obscures it. Malcolm's defiance of racist power is maintained by Spike Lee, but the essence of Malcolm's new politics is misrepresented as liberalism — black pride and black success separated from the struggle for political change.
Totally absent is any sense of Malcolm's decision to build a new political movement and his separation of religion and politics. Also missing is any sense of what his establishment enemies feared most of all: his potential to bring his militancy and defiance to the black movement as a whole.
The film ends with Nelson Mandela passing on some of Malcolm's humanist message to a classroom of children. In some ways, this scene encapsulates the contradiction of the movie. Mandela and the famous statement "by any means necessary" are an echo of Malcolm's defiance and militancy — what makes him popular today among oppressed people. The classroom symbolises the form of struggle that the film maker apparently prefers: self-improvement and individual success rather than mobilisation on the streets for fundamental political change.