The conclusion of Ta-Nehisi Coates' piece on Malcolm X is really moving:
What animated Malcolm's rage was that for all his intellect, and all his ability, and all his reinventions, as a black man in America, he found his ambitions ultimately capped. The right of self-creation had its limits then. But not anymore. Obama became a lawyer, and created himself as president, out of a single-parent home and illicit drug use.
And so it is for the more modest of us. I am, at my heart, a college dropout, twice kicked out of high school. Born out of wedlock, I, in turn, had my own son out of wedlock. But my parents do not find me blasphemous, and my mother is the first image of beauty I ever knew. Now no one questions my dark partner's right to her natural hair. No one questions our right to self-creation. It takes a particular arrogance to fail to honor that, and instead to hold, as his most pertinent feature, the prejudices of a man whose earliest memories were of being terrorized by white supremacists, whose ambitions were dashed by actual racists, who was called “nigger” as a child so often that he thought it was his name.
As TNC suggests, historians are far more forgiving of Abraham Lincoln or U.S. Grant's racism, weighing their prejudices against their monumental accomplishments. We tell ourselves at that time they couldn't have known any better, although William Lloyd Garrison puts the lie to that. Whether we choose to acknowledge context is, all too often, merely a function of our own tribal empathy.
