Sometimes I enjoy what Stanley Crouch has to say, but rarely when it has anything to do with politics. His recent column attempts to remove Malcolm X from the context of the black rights movement, essentially acquiescing to Al Qaeda's interpretation of what he stood for:
Malcolm X was one of the naysayers to American possibility whose vision was permanently crushed beneath the heel of Obama's victory on Nov. 4. Though his ideas had nothing to do with the ultimate form of nonviolence - voting - those desperate to praise him will pretend now that he was actually a civil rights leader! This has been going on for an unforgivably long time, especially among black academics.
Malcolm X had nothing to do with Obama's accomplishment as did none of the other militants who preached their own version of separatism and gleefully attacked the civil rights movement as offering no more than pie in the sky and misleading black people.
Crouch's thoughts on Obama were once similarly obtuse, and it's quite clear that although his opinion on whether or not Obama is actually black has changed, it isn't because he took some time familiarizing himself with Obama and his story.
This is what President-Elect Barack Obama said about Malcolm X in his best-selling autobiography, via David Remnick:
In every page of every book, in Bigger Thomas and invisible men, I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even Du Bois’ learning and Baldwin’s love and Langston’s humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art’s redemptive power, each man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper into the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels. Only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me.
By Obama's own admission, Malcolm X was one of the biggest influences in his intellectual and cultural development. In other words, it would be quite impossible for Crouch to be more mistaken in his assessment of Malcolm X's influence on our next president than he currently is. You'd think Crouch, who has written about Obama extensively over the past year, would have at least taken a moment to avail himself of the man's bestselling autobiography. Imagine what the belligerent Mr. Crouch, a jazz critic, would say about someone who wrote column after column about John Coltrane without ever having heard A Love Supreme.
--A. Serwer
