Research Project on Malcolm X
Malcolm X, both beloved and feared was often called, “the angriest black man in America” murdered in 1965 he spent years wanting “to change the world”, and can be considered one of the brightest revolutionary thinkers of the twentieth century, a political leader of world stature and a charismatic.
Once a drug addicted criminal living in the ghetto, after being “fallen touching the fund of the society of the American white”, Malcolm became a critical spirit, a great orator, and with his political ideologies gained international fame.
It is difficult to say once and for all who Malcolm X was, all we can say is he was an extremely complex character. He has lived and suffered transformation of his own vision of the world, and has grown toward an increasingly more mature political conscience. In all the phases of his life, from the hate to the reconciliation, every time he was convinced and sincere, only in the last two years of life was he able to reason in an autonomous way and to go out of the boundaries of the mind that had made him.
The matter of the identity
During the years of slavery the spirit of the African American was broken, their “pride of race”, their dignity and self respect were destroyed; the consequence was that they started to behave in a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts and were seen by whites: as inferior and immoral, being “less than human.” One of the consequences of this state of things was the loss of the true identity of Africans Americans, without an earth of origin, a history, a culture. The false identity of so-called “Negroes” and the identification with a society that excluded damned them.
According to Elijah Muhammad, spiritual head of the Nation of Islam - the sect inside which Malcolm X served in the military for twelve years, preached “to put again standing this mighty race”, the blacks would have to take conscience of their poverty, abandon the immoral life that they conducted and, above all, identify the responsibility of their conditions. The white man was to blame and considered “the devil”. To raise physical, moral, social and political conditions of the Afro-Americans, the Nation of Islam proposed a solution that was articulated in two moments to destroy the false definitions of identity and to build an authentic identity.
Through the hate, it was intended to destroy the false identity of the blacks. To push them to react to the oppression transforming them from subdued, passive subjects into fearless warriors. Through the antagonism and the conflict with a hostile group, in fact, it also increases the sense of solidarity, of cohesion and above all it increases the identification with ones own group.
In a second movement he would have been able to reconstruct, and in the void, formed an authentic identity. Identity and identification they are trials that are implicated to circumstance. Identity is given neither subjective nor objective without the reference to some form of identification. The question is which strong ideology should one choose to believe? The Islam, “the natural religion of the blacks” considered today from some as “the last ideology” a religion that nourishes enough position of hate toward the unfair ones and the oppressors, was the answer to their necessities.
Through the identification with a religion, the Nation of Islam offered an identity suitable to the aspirations of the oppressed, the identity of Muslim. Muslims found association of their historical memory and their roots in the native earth, Africa. During the years when he was spokesman of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X influenced the minds of the blacks through a strong antagonistic opposition with the whites. He preached extremist positions, religious fanaticism and ideal separation. In this sense the hate was a tool to refuse the definitions of the reality given by the whites.
“The natural religion of the blacks”: the Islam
The apparition of the Islam was again something for America. In the complex and variegated black and white religious tradition of the United States you can trace. In 1913 it was Noble Drew Wings, founder of the social-religious movement of the Moors.
Islam, was not the religion of their Fathers, it entered all of a sudden making numerous enlightenments in the community of the Afro-American because of its fundamental principle, responded to their more urgent appeals in that particular historical moment. More than the others Islam was suited for the situation of the Afro-Americans.
An exclusive and antagonistic religion, Islam spiritually made the blacks feel free from the whites; anti-bourgeois and revolutionary; the purpose of its religious structure was to make better, social, economic and political standings for themselves in the United States of America. Islam, one of the most diffused religions on the continent Africa and in the countries of the South of the world, it spiritually reunified the Afro-Americans with their brothers in Africa, Asia and Latin America in name of a demand of liberation from the same imperialistic oppression. Islam was the religion of the brotherhood among the oppressed and for their struggle, Islam encouraged its believers to the struggle rather than to the subjugation.
Mohammed was the example to imitate. He had chosen to affirm him with human means, resorting to violence if necessary, while Jesus Christ, who had chosen to die as man, to sacrifice and to suffer, was the example to abandon. With the Islam in the heart they would have fought one Jihad or holy war, a war set against the American society for the ransom of the black people. In the due confusion to the loss of identity, Islam was not only a shelter but a cry of battle.
Islam was the religion of the true brotherhood, of the social justice, of the solidarity among the believers, of the equality and of the human parity of the differences of nationality, color of the skin and culture. Everything was contrasted to the reality of injustice and discrimination that characterized the American society.
It announces to all the men of the world that they come down from the same progenitors and that therefore they are brothers and they have peer dignity as human beings. If there is a royal difference between man and man, it cannot be a biological difference, epidermal, geographical and linguistics but a difference of ideas, of faiths, of principles.
The conception of the religion as tool of emancipation is in contradiction with the thought of Marx that considered it “the people's opium”, the superstructure that reflects and it maintains a state of dominion. But the Marxist inheritance has also developed a different analysis of the religion. Ernst Bloch has affirmed that in Marx it is present also an idea of the religion as it protests against the condition of alienation of the existence, distinguishing a phase of it “heretical” and one “theoretical” that it is destroyed opening toward the new one.
One of the matters on which Malcolm X raged more often during his discourses were the Sacred Writings, the ideological weapon of which the white man was historically served for mentally making enslaved millions of human beings of color; he wanted to estrange the blacks from the religion of the whites, that promised them Heaven. The religion of the pardon, of the blacks toward the whites naturally, “If you don't forgive to the men their lacks, even you your Father in the skies will forgive” [Matthew 6, 15] and of the subjugation, that had persuaded the “so-called black” to always hand the other cheek, to obey and not to rebel.
Following the pilgrimage to the Mecca, the hajj, partly because of the influence of the orthodox Islam that underlines the fundamental unity of all the human beings of forehead to an only God, partly to also have come to contact with revolutionary of white skin, Malcolm X repudiated racism in all of his forms and since then judged men and women in base to the actions and the attitudes and not more for the color of the skin.
Following the breakup with Elijah Muhammad and his sect, Malcolm X stuck to the orthodox Islamic doctrine, but the struggle of the blacks was a matter that had to be faced and resolved on the political plan. June 28th 1964 the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), a movement of secular character which constituted the purpose of establishing a relationship of communication and mutual help between the Afro-Americans and their African brothers on the base of a program the conquest human rights “by any means necessary” was founded.
Malcolm X in the search for a synthesis between black nationalism and revolutionary socialism: its new political, economic and social philosophy was revolutionary black nationalism.
While the political objective of the integration, politically reformed and incapable to look at what happened in the surrounding world, it was the recognition of the civil rights of the blacks, the integration and that of the nationalists it was the complete separation between whites and blacks and of fact this attitude it politically made the conservative and static nationalistic movement, revolutionary black nationalism wished the overthrow of the status quo and the revolutionary reorganization of the whole society through a radical change of the economy, of the political structure, of the laws, of the educational system and the substitution of the dominant class with a new government founded on the strengths that are opposed to the racism.
The revolutionary ones were not felt part of the black minority in America; they were identified with the humanity of color, with the dark people that, on the world scene, they were the majority and they were starting to make to hear their voice in defense of the human rights.
Whatever revolt had burst in the United States, would not have been owed to isolation but part of a revolution to be considered on the world level that was advancing in those years anywhere on the earth. “Revolution” in the sense that means “complete overthrow.” The bastions of the imperialism and the “white supremacy” would inevitably be crushed by the “invincible historical tide of the oppressed humanity.” The racial injustice, carrying column of the operation of the capitalistic car, would have never been able to be resolved inside the system in the United States of America.
Human rights and internationalization of Black Movement
With Malcolm X the black movement made two important breakthroughs in comparison to the other leaders of the black movement, one of the principle appointments of Malcolm X was to bring the struggle for the civil rights to a taller level, that of the human rights.
In 1948 the General meeting of the U.N. had adopted the “Universal Declaration of the human rights” that it proclaimed civil rights, political, economic, social and cultural of “all the members of the human family”; Malcolm X intended to lift the case of the systematic violation of the human rights of twenty-two million Afro-Americans in front of the United Nations and to denounce the negation of their civil rights, the genocide, the discrimination, the economic exploitation and the political conspiracy; he intended to drag the American government to the presence of the world court where he would have had to explain in a free so-called country, the blacks were not seen as human beings.
Malcolm X made the black movement international. He insisted on the importance and on the necessity to assume a widened perspective and to think on international staircase the politics of the black Americans and their struggle against the racism, the segregation, the oppression. Racism was the same, to the center and the outskirts of the dominion imperialist. “Congo is as Mississipi. The same man that kills us in Congo, kills us in the Mississipi” (Malcolm X).
In an interview of January 1965, one month before being killed, Malcolm declared: “the twenty-two million black Americans come to understand to be oppressed equally (of others) people ...has faced the matter as a majority that is able to demand, and not as a minority that is forced to ask the alms. Let's not forget that the oppressed people of this earth are the majority!”
Malcolm X invited the Afro-Americans to widen their own perspective creating a connection with the struggles of liberation of the African and Asian people. To international level the African nations, Asians and Arabs formed a block that was almost impossible to combat.
It was this block to begin the movement of independence among the oppressed people of the whole world. The first meeting was held in 1955. In 1961 the birth of what was an officially enacted “Movement of the lined not up ones” that it supported all the struggles for the liberation and the independence and it contemplated to the reform of the international economic order.
The materialism of racism
The American society is burdened by what Myrdal defined “the strange anomaly of the presence of the blacks in America” that it constitutes the so-called one “black problem”, one of the so many dilemmas of the “racial matter.” It still consists in that complex of economic, political and social problems that torment the minority Afro - American. Poverty, discrimination and prejudices survive to all the levels of the American reality and they are to the origin of the social unbalances that periodically flow in serious racial so-called conflicts.
The dominant interpretations of the “black problem” had always moved from the undisputed presupposition that America was a social system founded upon the elevated democratic principles of the justice, of the equality and of the liberty; racism was exclusively set by these analyses on the plan of the values, understood as partner-psychological resistance from the white majority to the integration of the black minority as a pathological mental phenomenon, a moral aberration.
The formulation more famous than the “black problem” as “moral dilemma” is that of Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist capsizing the responsibilities of this problematic situation and introducing the “the blacks' problem” as a moral problem of the Americans that didn't coherently live with their principles.
Despite this, Myrdal kept on considering racism as a matter of individual conscience, the fruit of the systematic violation of the contained values in the Constitution, the result of the discrepancy among the “noble” democratic values and Christians of the “I believe American” and the real behavior of the individuals that is predominantly discriminating, selfish, dominated by the personal affairs.
Malcolm X has the worth to have “internationalized” the “black problem”, to have seen it in all of his Royal extension and course, to have framed it in an international dimension: “there is not any black problem, there is the problem of the society white racist and exploiter” [Malcolm X]. The “black problem” it was not only the problem of the black minority that lived in the United States of America but the problem of all the dark men of the earth, oppressed and exploited by the same white man.
Malcolm X was able of to see, beyond the mask of the racism, his materialistic nature and to individualize the deep economic motivations that determine it: “you cannot be us capitalism without racism, these they are two phenomena indissolubly tied the one to the other.”
After having traveled and having seen different reality from the American, he realized that racism is not at all a natural feeling of the human being, a present phenomenon in every society and in every culture, but contrarily it is a “invention” that has historically legitimated the human overcoming.
As Frantz Fanon has said, racism is integral part of the shameless exploitation of a group of men from another group that has reached a stadium of more advanced technological development.
The racism therefore is not thinkable as “illness of the human imagination” - as Frederick Douglass it defined it in 1855 - neither the fruit of “a moral crisis” - as Kennedy defined it in 1963 in a grieved appeal to the nation - neither a casual phenomenon, neither a natural feeling of the human being, neither a necessary evil; it is contrarily a component of the capitalistic way of production and the imperialistic politics, it is its own ideological superstructure, on which it then is produced and it is reproduced “culture of the racism.”
You consider the fundamental motivations of economic order that racism could be useful to analyze making to reference to the theory of the historical materialism elaborated by Marx and Engels. It moved from the thesis according to which the spiritual productions of the men are determined “in last appeal” from the economic structure of a society, her “base reality” on which a correspondent is raised ideological superstructure that justifies the existing social order. Every ideological form is never autonomous, but the reflex and the justification of the economic base. According to this perspective, racism is the ideology of the economy capitalistic.
The existing conflict in America is not therefore only a conflict between whites and blacks, among colonialist and colonized, but above all a struggle of class between capitalists and proletarians. Until this correspondence it won't be clear, we will be of forehead to a fundamental aspect of the problem. Considering the alone conflict as racial conflict, the true meaning of the struggle of the oppressed humanity it is lost against the injustice. Malcolm X sustained that:
“It is not correct to simply classify the black revolt as a racial conflict of the black against the white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, today we are of forehead to a rebellion of the oppressed one against the oppressor, of the exploited against the exploiter”.
In the United States of America the stratification of the society according to income, prestige and education (Lloyd Warner, 1941) is complicated by a further element of subdivision that transversally cuts the social classes according to lines of color. The ethnic and cultural affiliation, counted element, resolves social status of the individuals and works as a visible borderline and impassable border between groups.
In spite of the myth of the melting pot, according to which the North American society would have become with the time a harmonious world, among the varied ethnic groups they almost always prevail relationships conflictual and antagonistic, based on stereotypes, racial prejudices and discrimination.
Racism is used, besides, to prevent the formation of a conscience of unitary class beyond the ethnic differences among all the subordinate groups. The class to the power has to hinder the coalition of the workers that could flow in rebellions and disorders putting in danger its dominant position.
In this mechanism the blacks are the only group that remains anchored at the base of the social stratification and their position is used as reference that the feeling of social mobility of the other groups increases.
The racial conflicts also have another function, they carry the aggressiveness of the workers exploited toward hostile substitutive of those real, dissuading so the attention on the true causes of the frustration.
Despite many problems such as unemployment, exploitation, has always united the white poverty and the black poverty, there has not been in America, except that in rare cases, unity in the struggle to independently defend the common affairs from the differences of color, that were perceived instead as an insurmountable barrier.
Because of the centrality of the presence of the blacks in the society it is clear that the “black problem” is insoluble to society, as Tocqueville had realized one and a half centuries before, and their emancipation would ask for a radical transformation of the whole society.
For Marx the dialectical materialism, the law of the development of the historical reality, is structured in such way that “every historical moment produces in its breast the contradictions that are the rubber band of the historical development.” The blacks as the minority are more than the others the contradiction of the capitalistic society. They would be able constitute the potential avant-garde of the American revolutionary movement, representing the interest of all the oppressed groups.
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