The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (52 page)

But if they display an avidity, and aptitude, for portraying Malcolm’s moral dimensions and the forces that made his vision necessary, Malcolm’s public-moralist interpreters have not as convincingly depicted the forces that make public morality possible. The public-moralist approach is almost by definition limited to explaining Malcolm in terms of the broad shifts and realignment of contours created within the logic of American morality itself, rarely asking whether public-moralist proclamation and action are the best means of effecting social revolution. This approach largely ignores the hints of rebellion against capitalist domination contained in Malcolm’s later speeches, blurring as well a focus on King’s mature beliefs that American society was “sick” and in need of a “reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”
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This approach also fails to place Malcolm in the intricate nexus of social and political forces that shaped his career as a religious militant and a revolutionary black nationalist. It does not adequately convey the mammoth scope of economic and cultural forces that converged during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, not only shaping the expression of racial domination, but influencing as well patterns of class antagonism and gender oppression. As Clayborne Carson argues in his splendid introduction to the FBI files on Malcolm X, most writings have failed to “study him within the context of American racial politics during the 1950s and 1960s.”
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According to Carson, the files track Malcolm’s growth from the “narrowly religious perspective of the Nation of Islam toward a broader Pan-Africanist worldview,” shed light on his religious and political views and the degree to which they “threatened the American state,” and “clarif[y] his role in modern African-American politics.”
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Moreover, the story of Malcolm X and the black revolution he sought to effect is also the story of how such social aspirations were shaped by the advent of nuclear holocaust in the mid-1940s (altering American ideals of social stability and communal life expectation), the repression of dissident speech in the 1950s under the banner of McCarthyism, and the economic boom of the mid-1960s that contrasted starkly to shrinking resources for the black poor. A refined social history not only accents such features, but provides as well a complex portrait of Malcolm’s philosophical and political goals, and the myriad factors that drove or denied their achievement.

Malcolm’s most radical and original contribution rested in reconceiving the possibility of being a worthful black human being in what he deemed a wicked white world. He saw black racial debasement as the core of an alternative moral
sphere that was justified for no other reason than its abuse and attack by white Americans. To understand and explain Malcolm, however, we must wedge beneath the influences that determined his career in learning how his public-moralist vocation was both necessary and possible.

If the task of biography is to help readers understand human action, the purpose of psychobiography is to probe the relationship between psychic motivation, personal behavior, and social activity in explaining human achievement and failure. The project to connect psychology and biography grows out of a well-established quest to merge various schools of psychological theory with other intellectual disciplines, resulting in ethnopsychiatry, psychohistory, social psychology, and psychoanalytic approaches to philosophy.
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Behind the turn toward psychology and social theory by biographers is a desire to take advantage of the insight yielded from attempts to correlate or synthesize the largely incompatible worlds of psychoanalysis and Marxism carved out by Freud and Marx and their unwieldy legion of advocates and interpreters. If one argues, however, as Richard Lichtman does, that “the structure of the two theories makes them ultimate rivals,” then, as he concedes, “priorities must be established.”
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In his analysis of the integration of psychoanalysis into Marxist theory, Lichtman argues that “working through the limitations of Freud’s view makes its very significant insights available for incorporation into an expanded Marxist theory.”
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Psychobiographers have acknowledged the intellectual difficulties to which Lichtman points while using Marxist or Freudian theory (and sometimes both) to locate and illumine gnarled areas of human experience. For instance, Erik Erikson’s
Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence
, one of psychobiography’s foundational works, weds critical analysis of its subject’s cultural and intellectual roots to imaginative reflections on the sources of Gandhi’s motivation, sacrifice, and spiritual achievement.
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As they bring together social and psychological theory in their research, psychobiographers often rupture the rules that separate academic disciplines. Then again, if the psychobiographer is ruled by rigid presuppositions and is insensitive to the subject of study, nothing can prevent the results from being fatally flat. Two recent psychobiographies of Malcolm X reveal that genre’s virtues and vices.

Eugene Victor Wolfenstein’s
The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black
Revolution
is a work of considerable intellectual imagination and rigorous theoretical insight.
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It takes measure of the energies that created Malcolm and the demons that drove him. Wolfenstein assesses Malcolm’s accomplishments through a theoretical lens as noteworthy for its startling clarity about Malcolm the individual as for its wide-angled view of the field of forces with which Malcolm contended during his childhood and mature career.

Wolfenstein uses an elaborate conceptual machinery to examine how racism falsifies “the consciousness of the racially oppressed,” and how racially oppressed individuals struggle to “free themselves from both the falsification of their consciousness and the racist domination of their practical activity.”
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For Wolfenstein’s purpose, neither a psychoanalytic nor a Marxist theory alone could yield adequate insight because Freudianism “provides no foundation for the analysis of interests, be they individual or collective,” and Marxism “provides no foundation for the analysis of desires.” Therefore, a “unifying concept of human nature was required.”
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Wolfenstein’s psychobiography is especially helpful because it combines several compelling features: a historical analysis of the black (nationalist) revolutionary struggle, an insightful biographical analysis of Malcolm X’s life, and an imaginative social theory that explains how a figure like Malcolm X could emerge from the womb of black struggle against American apartheid. Wolfenstein accounts for how Malcolm’s childhood was affected by violent, conflicting domestic forces and describes how black culture’s quest for identity at the margins of American society—especially when viewed from the even more marginal perspective of the black poor—shaped Malcolm’s adolescence and young adulthood.

Wolfenstein also explores Malcolm’s career as a zealous young prophet and public mouthpiece for Elijah Muhammad, revealing the psychic and social needs that Malcolm’s commitments served. Wolfenstein’s imaginative remapping of Malcolm’s intellectual and emotional landscape marks a significant contribution as well to the history of African-American ideas, offering new ways of understanding one of the most complex figures in our nation’s history.

Undoubtedly, Wolfenstein’s book would have benefited from a discussion of how black religious groups provided social and moral cohesion in northern urban black communities, and from a description of their impact on Earl Little’s ministry. Although Wolfenstein perceptively probes the appeal of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association to blacks—and the social, psychological, and economic ground it partly shared with the Ku Klux Klan and white proletarian workers—his psychoanalytic Marxist interpretation of Earl Little and Malcolm would have been substantially enhanced by an engagement with black Protestant beliefs about the relationship between work, morality, and self-regard.
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Wolfenstein is often keenly insightful about black liberation movements and the forces that precipitated their eruption, but his dependence on biological definitions of race weakens his arguments.
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The value of more complex readings of race is that they not only show how the varied meanings of racism are created in society; but prove as well that the idea of race has a cultural history.
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More complex theories of race would permit Wolfenstein to illumine the changing intellectual and social terrain of struggle by groups that oppose the vicious meanings attributed to African-American identity by cultural racists.

In the end, Wolfenstein is too dependent on the revelations and reconstructions of self-identity that Malcolm (with Haley’s assistance) achieved in his autobiography.
In answering his own rhetorical questions about whether Malcolm and Haley represented Malcolm accurately, Wolfenstein says that from a “purely empirical standpoint, I believe the answer to both questions is generally affirmative.”
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The problem, of course, is that Malcolm’s recollections are not without distortions. These distortions, when taken together with the book’s interpretive framework, not only reveal his attempts to record his life history, but reflect as well his need to control how his life was viewed during the ideological frenzy that marked his last year. By itself, self-description is an unreliable basis for reconstructing the meaning of Malcolm’s life and career. Still, Wolfenstein’s work is the most sophisticated treatment to date of Malcolm’s intellectual and psychological roots.

But Bruce Perry’s uneven psychobiographical study,
Malcolm: The Life of a Man
Who Changed Black America
, which reaches exhaustively beyond Malcolm’s selfrepresentation in his autobiography, possesses little of the psychoanalytic rigor and insight of Wolfenstein’s work.
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Although Perry unearths new information about Malcolm, he does not skillfully clarify the impact that such information should have on our understanding of Malcolm. The volume renders Malcolm smaller than life.

In Perry’s estimation, Malcolm’s childhood holds the interpretive key to understanding his mature career as a black leader: Malcolm’s “war against the white power structure evolved from the same inner needs that had spawned earlier rebellions against his teachers, the law, established religion, and other symbols of authority.”
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Perry’s picture of Malcolm’s family is one of unremitting violence, criminality, and pathology. The mature Malcolm is equally tragic: a man of looming greatness whose self-destruction “contributed to his premature death.”
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It is precisely here that Perry’s psychobiography folds in on itself, its rough edges puncturing the center of its explanatory purpose. It is not that psychobiography cannot remark on the unraveling of domestic relations that weave together important threads of personal identity, threads that are also woven into adolescent and adult behavior. But Perry has a penchant for explaining complex psychic forces—and the social conditions that influence their makeup—in simplistic terms and tabloid-like arguments.

Still, Perry’s new information about Malcolm is occasionally revealing, though some of the claims he extracts from this information are more dubious than others. When, for instance, Perry addresses areas of Malcolm’s life that can be factually verified, he is on solid ground. By simply checking Malcolm’s school records Perry proves that, contrary to his autobiography, Malcolm was not expelled from West Junior High School but actually completed the seventh grade in 1939. And by interviewing several family members, Perry establishes that neither Malcolm’s half-sister Ella nor his father Earl were, as Malcolm contended, “jet black,” a claim Perry views as Malcolm’s way of equating “blackness and the strength his lightskinned mother had lacked.”
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Despite Malcolm X’s assertion of close friendships with Lionel Hampton, Sonny Greer, and Cootie Williams during his hustling days, Perry’s interviews show that the “closeness Malcolm described was as fictitious as the closeness he said he had shared with the members of his own family.”
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But when Perry addresses aspects of Malcolm’s experience that invite close argument and analytical interpretation, he is on shakier ground. At this juncture, Perry displays an insensitivity to African-American life and an ignorance about black intellectual traditions that weaken his book. For instance, Perry depicts Malcolm’s travels to Africa—partially in an attempt to expand his organization’s political and financial base, but also to express his increasingly international social vision—as intended solely to fund his fledgling organization. Perry also draws questionable parallels between the cloudy events surrounding a fire at Malcolm’s family farm during his early childhood in 1929 (which Perry concludes points to arson by Earl Little) and the fire at Malcolm’s New York house after his dispute with Nation of Islam officials over ownership rights.

A major example of the limitation of Perry’s psychobiographical approach is his treatment of Malcolm’s alleged homosexual activity, both as an experimenting adolescent and as a hustling, income-seeking young adult. Perry’s remarks are more striking for the narrow assumptions that underlie his interpretations than for their potential to dismantle the quintessential symbol of African-American manhood. If Malcolm did have homosexual relations, they might serve Perry as a powerful tool of interpretation to expose the tangled cultural roots of black machismo, and to help him explain the cruel varieties of homophobia that afflict black communities. A complex understanding of black sexual politics challenges a psychology of masculinity that views “male” as a homogeneous, natural, and universally understood identity. A complex understanding of masculinity maintains that male identity is also significantly affected by ethnic, racial, economic, and sexual differences.