The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (53 page)

But Perry’s framework of interpretation cannot assimilate the information his research has unearthed. Although the masculinist psychology that chokes much of black leadership culture needs to be forcefully criticized, Perry’s observations do not suffice. Because he displays neither sensitivity to nor knowledge about complex black cultural beliefs regarding gender and sexual difference, Perry’s portrait of Malcolm’s sex life forms a rhetorical low blow, simply reinforcing a line of attack against an already sexually demonized black leadership culture.

The power of psychobiography in discussing black leaders is its potential to shed light on its subjects in a manner that traditional biography fails to achieve. African-American cultural studies, which has traditionally made little use of psychoanalytic theory, has sacrificed the insights such an undertaking might offer while avoiding the pitfalls of psychological explanations of human motivation. After all, psychobiography is also prone to overreach its capacity to explain.

In some ways, the psychobiographer’s quest for (in this case) the “real Malcolm” presumes that human experience is objective and that truth is produced by explaining the relation between human action and psychic motivation. Such an approach may seduce psychobiographers into believing that they are gaining access to the static, internal psychic reality of a historical figure. Often such access is wrongly believed to be separate from the methods of investigation psychobiographers
employ, and from the aims and presumptions, as well as the biases and intellectual limitations, that influence their work.

Because both Wolfenstein and Perry (like Goldman) are white, their psychobiographies in particular raise suspicion about the ability of white intellectuals to interpret black experience. Although such speculation is rarely systematically examined, it surfaces as both healthy skepticism and debilitating paranoia in the informal debates that abound in a variety of black intellectual circles. Such debates reflect two crucial tensions generated by psychobiographical explanations of black leaders by white authors: that such explanations reflect insensitivity to black culture, and that white proponents of psychobiographical analysis are incompetent to assess black life adequately. Several factors are at the base of such conclusions.

First is the racist history that has affected every tradition of American scholarship and that has obscured, erased, or distorted accounts of the culture and history of African Americans.
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Given this history (and the strong currents of antiintellectualism that flood most segments of American culture), suspicion of certain forms of critical intellectual activity survive in many segments of black culture. Also, black intellectuals have experienced enormous difficulty in securing adequate cultural and financial support to develop self-sustaining traditions of scholarly investigation and communities of intellectual inquiry.
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For example, from its birth in the womb of political protest during the late 1960s and early 1970s, black studies has been largely stigmatized and usually underfunded. Perhaps the principal reasons for this are the beliefs held by many whites (and some blacks) that, first, black scholars should master nonblack subjects, and second, that black studies is intellectually worthless. Ironically, once the more than 200 black studies programs in American colleges and universities became established, many white academics became convinced that blacks are capable of studying only “black” subjects.

At the same time, black studies experienced a new “invasion” by white intellectuals. This new invasion—mimicking earlier patterns of white scholarship on black life even as most black scholars were prevented from being published—provoked resentment from black scholars.”
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The resentment hinged on the difficulty black scholars experienced in securing appointments in most academic fields beyond black studies. Black scholars were also skeptical of the intellectual assumptions and political agendas of white scholars, especially because there was strong precedence for many white scholars to distort black culture in their work by either exoticizing or demonizing its expression. Black intellectual skeptics opposed to white interpretations of black culture and figures employ a variety of arguments in their defense.

Many black intellectuals contend that black experience is unique and can be understood, described, and explained only by blacks. Unquestionably, AfricanAmerican history produces cultural and personal experiences that are distinct, even singular. But the
historical
character of such experiences makes them theoretically accessible to any interpreter who has a broad knowledge of African-American
intellectual traditions, a balanced and sensible approach to black culture, and the same skills of rational argumentation and scholarly inquiry required in other fields of study.

There is no special status of being that derives from black cultural or historical experience that grants black interpreters an automatically superior understanding of black cultural meanings. This same principle allows black scholars to interpret Shakespeare, study Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and master Marxist social theory. In sum, black cultural and historical experiences do not produce ideas and practices that are incapable of interpretation when the most critically judicious and culturally sensitive methods of intellectual inquiry are applied.

Many intellectuals also believe that black culture is unified and relatively homogeneous. But this contention is as misleading as the first, especially in light of black culture’s wonderful complexity and radical diversity. The complexity and diversity of black culture means that a bewildering variety of opinions, beliefs, ideologies, traditions, and practices coexist, even if in a provisional sort of way. Black conservatives, scuba divers, socialists, and rock musicians come easily to mind. All these tendencies and traditions constitute and help define black culture. Given these realities, it is pointless to dismiss studies of black cultural figures simply because their authors are white. One must judge any work on AfricanAmerican culture by standards of rigorous critical investigation while attending to both the presuppositions that ground scholarly perspectives and the biases that influence intellectual arguments.

Psychobiographies of Malcolm X’s life and career represent an important advance in Malcolm studies. The crucial issue is not color, but consciousness about African-American culture, sensitivity to trends and developments in black society, knowledge of the growing literature about various dimensions of black American life, and a theoretical sophistication that artfully blends a variety of disciplinary approaches in yielding insight about a complex historic figure like Malcolm X. When psychobiography is employed in this manner, it can go a long way toward breaking new ground in understanding and explaining the life of important black figures. When it is incompetently wielded, psychobiographical analysis ends up simply projecting the psychobiographer’s intellectual biases and limitations of perspective onto the historical screen of a black figure’s career.

To comprehend the full sweep of a figure’s life and thought, it is necessary to place that figure’s career in its cultural and historical context and view the trends and twists of thought that mark significant periods of change and development. Such an approach may be termed a trajectory analysis because it attempts to outline the evolution of belief and thought of historic figures by matching previously held
ideas to newer ones, seeking to grasp whatever continuities and departures can be discerned from such an enterprise. Trajectory analysis, then, may be a helpful way of viewing a figure such as Martin Luther King Jr., whose career may be divided into the early optimism of civil rights ideology to the latter-day aggressive nonviolence he advocated on the eve of his assassination. It may also be enlightening when grappling with the serpentine mysteries of Malcolm’s final days.

Malcolm’s turbulent severance from Elijah Muhammad’s psychic and worldmaking womb initiated yet another stage of his personal and political evolution, marking a conversion experience. On one level, Malcolm freed himself from Elijah’s destructive ideological grip, shattering molds of belief and practice that were no longer useful or enabling. On another level, Malcolm’s maturation and conversion were the result of his internal ideals of moral expectation, social behavior, and authentic religious belief. His conversion, though suddenly manifest, was most likely a gradual process involving both conscious acts of dissociation from the Nation of Islam and the “subconscious incubation and maturing of motives deposited by the experiences of life.”
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Many commentators have heavily debated the precise nature of Malcolm’s transformation. Indeed, his last fifty weeks on earth form a fertile intellectual field where the seeds of speculation readily blossom into conflicting interpretations of Malcolm’s meaning at the end of his life. Lomax says that Malcolm became a “lukewarm integrationist.”
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Goldman suggests that Malcolm was “improvising,” that he embraced and discarded ideological options as he went along.
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Cleage and T’shaka hold that he remained a revolutionary black nationalist. And Cone asserts that Malcolm became an internationalist with a humanist bent.

But the most prominent and vigorous interpreters of the meaning of Malcolm’s last year have been a group of intellectuals associated with the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist-Marxist group that took keen interest in Malcolm’s post-Mecca social criticism and sponsored some of his last speeches. For the most part, their views have been articulately promoted by George Breitman, author of
The Last
Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary
and editor of two volumes of Malcolm’s speeches, organizational statements, and interviews during his last years:
Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements
and
By Any Means Necessary: Speeches,
Interviews, and a Letter, by Malcolm X
. A third volume of Malcolm’s speeches
, Malcolm
X: The Last Speeches
, was edited by Bruce Perry, who claimed “ideological difference with the publisher.
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Breitman’s
The Last Year of Malcolm X
is a passionately argued book that maintains Malcolm’s split with Elijah took Malcolm by surprise, making it necessary for him to gain time and experience to reconstruct his ideological beliefs and redefine his organizational orientation. Breitman divides Malcolm’s independent phase into two parts: the transition period, lasting the few months between his split in March 1964 and his return from Africa at the end of May 1964; and the final period, lasting from June 1964 until his death in February 1965. Breitman maintains that in the final period, Malcolm “was on the way to a synthesis of
black nationalism and socialism that would be fitting for the American scene and acceptable to the masses in the black ghetto.”
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For Breitman’s argument to be persuasive, it had to address Malcolm’s continuing association with a black nationalism that effectively excluded white participation, or else show that he had developed a different understanding of black nationalism. Also, he had to prove that Malcolm’s anticapitalist statements and remarks about socialism represented a coherent and systematic exposition of his beliefs as a political strategist and social critic. Breitman contends that in the final period, Malcolm made distinctions between separatism (the belief that blacks should be socially, culturally, politically, and economically separate from white society) and nationalism (the belief that blacks should control their own culture).

Malcolm’s views of nationalism changed after his encounters with revolutionaries in Africa who were “white,” however, and in his “Young Socialist” interview in
By Any Means Necessary
, Malcolm confessed that he “had to do a lot of thinking and reappraising” of his definition of black nationalism.
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Breitman argues that though he “had virtually stopped calling himself and the OAAU black nationalist,” because others persisted in the practice, he accepted “its continued use in discussion and debate.”
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Malcolm said in the same interview, “I haven’t been using the expression for several months.”
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But how can Breitman then argue that Malcolm was attempting a synthesis of black nationalism and socialism if the basis for Malcolm’s continued use of the phrase “black nationalism” was apparently more convenience and habit than ideological conviction? What is apparent from my reading of Malcolm’s speeches is that his reconsideration of black nationalism occurred amid a radically shifting worldview that was being shaped by events unfolding on the international scene and by his broadened horizon of experience. His social and intellectual contact with activists and intellectuals from several African nations forced him to relinquish the narrow focus of his black nationalist practice and challenged him to consider restructuring his organizational base to reflect his broadened interests.

If, therefore, even Malcolm’s conceptions of black nationalist strategy were undergoing profound restructuring, it is possible to say only that his revised black nationalist ideology might have accommodated socialist strategy. It is equally plausible to suggest that his nationalist beliefs might have collapsed altogether under the weight of apparent ideological contradictions introduced by his growing appreciation of class and economic factors in forming the lives of the black masses.
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For the synthesis of black nationalism and socialism that Breitman asserts Malcolm was forging to have been plausible, several interrelated processes needed to be set in motion.