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BOOK REVIEWS

WHITE LIBERAL VIEW OF MALCOLM

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF MALCOLM X. By Peter Goldman. Harper & Row, New York. 438 pages. $8.95.

PETER GOLDMAN'S THE DEATH AND LIFE OF MALCOLM X is appropriately titled because Malcolm, perhaps more than any other fallen black leader, acquired dimensions in death he did not have during his lifetime. By "dimensions" I don't mean the popular "acceptance" which he suddenly gained from both Blacks and whites after his assassination but recognition of the truly revolutionary significance of his influence upon black people. I remember quite well how Malcolm was despised and feared by both blacks and whites, and obviously for very different reasons. 

While white fears of Malcolm's unrelenting denunciations of American racism were logical and predictable--no people can possibly admit (neither to themselves nor publicly) they are unjust, bigoted, guilty of criminal social injustice to fellow human beings--black reaction to Brother Malcolm has far more complex implications, political as well as psychological. Individuals in a given society tend to behave within the context their culture defines for them. Thus a slave, for all kinds of reasons, tends to behave as a slave; workers in capitalist societies tend to behave in ways "peculiar" to working-class people. They scrupulously obey the laws, social and moral conventions, esteem their "betters" however unworthy, question little that is handed down from "above."

Despite three hundred years of slavery, another hundred years of socio-economic oppression, American Blacks, nearly as much as all other Americans, are strong traditionalists. Essentially they believe in the American system, its corporate ethos and Christian "bullshit."

Radicalism as a strategy and tactic for redressing social grievances has been historically, paradoxically, difficult for Blacks to embrace. As a consequence the strongest current in our protestations of injustice has been amazingly low-keyed and conservative. Marcus Garvey and his triumphal Black Nationalism is by no means an exception to this rule because Garvey's black nationalism, however "revolutionary" its racial implications, was based essentially on western socio-economic thought and institutions. Marcus Garvey was not a socialist.

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