6
Vocation—To Step into Your Own Shoes

Malcolm X (USA, 1992)

Directed by Spike Lee, written by Spike Lee and Arnold Perl

One of the most comprehensive and politically resonant biopics, charting the spiritual development of one of the most important and misunderstood figures of the twentieth century.

Gareth

Malcolm X begins as angry sermon and ends as exhortation, telling the story of a life more comprehensively, with more psychological nuance and spiritual credibility than any biopic should be expected to handle in three hours. It’s an astonishing portrayal of a time and a person, an honoring of a life and vision, and a challenge.

The opening oration is stark, charging “the white man” with the monstrosity of anti-Black racism. “We’re the living proof of those charges,” says Denzel Washington (in the masterpiece of his craft) as Malcolm over footage of the 1991 police beating of Rodney King. It’s an extraordinary beginning: big studio movies almost never start with an explicit political confrontation. Spike Lee neither dilutes Malcolm’s life for the mainstream (mostly white) audience nor preaches to the choir. The opening announces that this film is for everyone. Who you believe yourself to be will determine whether you are mirrored or provoked.

If you feel seen, that’s the point. If you’re uncomfortable, that’s the point too. Malcolm X reveals its protagonist as one who suffered beyond many imaginations, responded to trauma with rage and courage, and evolved into one of the most whole people, claiming equality, self-respect, and the dignity of all people, dying “unconquered still.” This does not imply we must pretend he was perfect. Aside from being absurd, this is not a helpful way to think about someone we may wish to emulate. Three decades after the film’s release, the historian Peniel E. Joseph wrote,

The . . . notion of identity as a fixed . . . quality is undergoing a profound reconsideration. . . . We are . . . better equipped to appreciate Malcolm X’s contradictions. . . . When we see Malcolm X’s humanity in all its contingencies, complexities, and vulnerabilities, only then can we relate to, and be inspired by, Malcolm’s story even when—especially when—he disappoints us. . . . Malcolm X is certainly a figure worthy of veneration. But we must never lose sight of the man.1

The life of Malcolm the man teaches that becoming our truest selves is inextricably linked to doing the most we can to build a safer, fairer, and more compassionate world.

Malcolm X traces the spiritual development of a real person—his childhood, suffering, mistakes, maturing, and confrontation with the questions of responsibility and the soul. We see his courage, grappling with ideas, conversion, and being mentored and betrayed. We see the terrors to which he was subjected and how he tried to live in service to love. Malcolm X glimpses the soul of a man beloved and admired, misunderstood and denounced. It wants the best for the world, even for those in the world who don’t. As Ossie Davis’s eulogy has it, “[He] didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so. When we honor him, we honor the best in ourselves.” Taking Malcolm X seriously means taking ourselves seriously.

Biopics rarely achieve what Malcolm X does; it’s about not only the protagonist but the world that shaped him and that he shaped in return. Malcolm X didn’t come out of nowhere. The world existed before he did and presented him with gifts and challenges; the world exists now after he has left us, but it would not be the same world had he never been.

This is true for every human being. For some of us the capacity to choose how we will respond to circumstances may be the only thing we feel empowered to do; for all of us, it may be the most important.

We are born into contexts of complicity and burden, of privilege and gift. We have a responsibility to discern what we are here for. But before we can do that, we need to know who we are. And we cannot answer the question of who we are without learning where we are. The questions Malcolm faces are the same that you and I must face, albeit at a different scale: What are my needs and burdens, and how should I live with them? Who are the safer, wiser people and spaces to help release them, and what medicine do I carry that will help nudge the world around me into more wholeness?

These questions do not apply only to the “great people” of history or those who found large platforms from which to speak. Each of us is a universe, and so if we affect the life of only one other person, that’s two universes—more than enough! And for that matter, public platforms come to people almost always as a matter of luck or tragedy, being the right (or wrong) person in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time. A life’s meaning is not best evaluated by how many heard your voice, read your books, or followed your lead. The only size that matters is the size of the openness of your heart to the inner call of where your gifts meet the needs of the world.

Saying this, I want to acknowledge that I am a white man reflecting on a film about a Black man who was subject to torments such that my social identity and privileges mean I may not even be able to imagine them. There are people who can more legitimately identify with Malcolm X, and there are those who would—consciously or otherwise—appropriate or exploit his memory. But there are no legitimate barriers to seeking to learn from the life of any other human. As Charles Eisenstein says, the best question we can be asking of each other is, “What is it like to be you?”2

Malcolm X is a vision of what it might have been like to be Malcolm at four distinct stages of his life. The golden light of Malcolm Little’s early life crashing into the horror of his father’s murder; the vibrancy of Detroit Red’s young adulthood; the humor and the grace; the rapscallion nature and borderline menace of his criminal activities; the physical imprisonment leading to the acceleration of his journey toward freeing himself on the inside and becoming Malcolm X; the culmination and integration of the wound, the compassion, the charisma, the leadership, and the humanitarian vision embodied in Brother el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.

The movie begins with a litany of sorrow and torment mingling with boogie-woogie dancing and light (and fantastic costumes!). The Klan terrorizes Malcolm’s family, riding off into an enormous moon, a moon larger than it ever actually looks but exactly the size it might appear in a child’s traumatized memory. That scene, so early in the film, is so breathtaking, so horrifying, so cinematic: it seeks to erase D. W. Griffith’s despicably racist and massively influential The Birth of a Nation (1915). That film is often justified due to its pioneering cinematic techniques, but Malcolm X shows that you can of course announce new cinematic techniques and serve the common good at the same time. This is a truly great movie. Like Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece, Andrei Rublev, it seems to touch on every available genre—from musical to horror, comedy to history. It’s not just a story about the man himself but also a vision of what America has been, is, and could be.

Malcolm’s conversion in prison feels like an invitation to an entire nation, and Malcolm X recognizes that conversion to a spiritual path is a lifelong process. It shouldn’t surprise us that Malcolm’s earlier views were more exclusionary: he had every reason to want to hold white people at bay, and it’s typical of the first step after a religious conversion to be overzealous. Malcolm’s Middle East journey deepened his experience of the unity of all people. In all traditions, it is the contemplatives and mystics who are always most open to the light in others, but this doesn’t happen overnight.

The shocking gunshot sound effect scattered throughout the movie telegraphs what Malcolm may always have known and perhaps helped him face his own death before it happened. These are mighty notions—life and death, the things we can and cannot control, the possibility of change. And this is where Malcolm X is most unusually helpful as a cinematic mentor. This man suffered intensely, and made mistakes, and mistreated people, and this man changed. He didn’t amputate his various selves but sought to live into the best version of all the different Malcolms—not perfect, but willing to be perfected. (One of the most moving moments is one of the simplest, when Malcolm apologizes to a woman for being testy with her. Even amid the unbearable tension of knowing his life to be at imminent risk, he still surrenders to the movement of love and character.)

The magnificent Delroy Lindo, who plays West Indian Archie, has said this of Malcolm: “[He] was able to make a U-turn . . . and re-apply himself so fervently to this other endeavor. . . . If Malcolm Little can become Malcolm X, there is hope that . . . I can redeem my life.”3

Vocation is often misunderstood as if there were a kind of predetermined metaphysical subway route. I think, rather, that vocation includes what we do, but how we do it matters more. The person I talk with most often, the writer and spiritual director Brian Ammons, says it all the time. Brian pierces the damaging assumption that vocation is a flowchart for the “what” of life rather than a deep calling to deep regarding a “way” of life, and he repudiates the notion that only “professionally holy people” have vocations rather than every human who bears the image of love whether they know it or not. Plenty of people are gifted with a compelling public speaking style but lack the heart of a servant leader; plenty misdirect their gift for organizing into the mere “making” of money; and plenty have been told that because their voices are quieter, and their enthusiasms less public, their lives matter less than the loudest ones. Many of us have been taught to confuse the substance of calling with its structure—such as when someone conflates a calling to pastoral ministry with being employed by a particular institution.

None of these are helpful or accurate ideas about vocation. A calling to serve the common good from the place where our compassion (which derives partly from our wounds) and our gifts meet is not the same thing as a GPS route, with every possible turn mapped out in advance. What we do and how we do it cannot be disentangled. Things change. Vocation properly understood and in the context of interdependent community and accountable mentorship does not remain static; it will transform us throughout life.

So when I watch Malcolm X, I think about how to take my life as seriously as he did. I think about the stages I have passed through and am holding loosely, and I anticipate (even more loosely) the stages to come. I consider my wounds and how they might be transformed beyond the myth of redemptive violence (the idea that we can bring order out of chaos through killing our “enemies”) without falling into the myth of redemptive suffering (the idea that some people should unjustly bear the pain of the rest of us). I’m grateful to the extraordinary teacher Melvin Bray for introducing me to the concept of the myth of redemptive suffering and for encouraging me to take Malcolm X seriously. I reflect on my complicity in wounds caused to others; am I one of the “good white Christians [who] would not stand for his troublemaking”? I ask myself what it would mean to become the best version of myself. I ask who wants the best for me, like Betty Shabazz, who in Angela Bassett’s indelible performance is the kind of queen who calls forth the regal-divine in her husband and in anyone who would witness their relationship.

Likely none of us will have a life as influential as Malcolm X. But I get the sense that he would challenge the comparison. What matters is not what you do compared to what he did but what you do compared to the resources, the learning, the mentoring, the needs in the world you inhabit. Malcolm X (and Malcolm X) envisages being most fully human as indivisible from self-giving action on behalf of the vulnerable. You cannot fully be a person without caring for the needs of others. You do not need to be famous or world-influencing to do that. Malcolm is, as the writer Barry Michael Cooper says, “calling us to live up to something,”4 but that something is not to step into his shoes. It is to step into our own.

Kathleen

Spike Lee’s brilliant and challenging Malcolm X brings Psalm 137 to mind. It is a psalm of exile, a lament written after the people of ancient Israel had been forcibly taken from their homes in Jerusalem and enslaved in far-off Babylon. The psalmist writes that a new and terrible demand is being made of them, “For it was there that they asked us, our captors, for songs, our oppressors, for joy” (v. 3).5 The Babylonians regarded these slaves and their culture as exotic and their traditional songs as good entertainment.

When Psalm 137 is used in Christian worship, its ending verses are usually omitted. They read, “O Babylon, destroyer, they are happy who repay you the ills you brought on us. They shall seize and shall dash your children on the rock!” (vv. 8–9).6 I find this a useful passage for spiritual reflection. It does not endorse the murder of innocent children but acknowledges it as a horror that the Israelites had witnessed happening to their own children, and it also compels me to admit that such atrocities happen in our world today.

The wish for one’s enemies to be repaid in the most brutal way for the evils they have committed is exactly what you might expect from a people who have been exiled, abused, and enslaved. And when I consider Malcolm X’s hard-to-hear words about all white people being devils and irredeemably evil, Psalm 137 makes me reflect: of course. When the Ku Klux Klan has murdered your father and burned your house down, you can feel that you have seen the devil. When you have been continually disrespected and demeaned by white bosses, it is easy to generalize about the race of those abusing you.

We must never mistake the angry words the younger Malcolm uses to describe white people with the “hate speech” we so often hear today. He is addressing actual injustices inflicted on Black people in America throughout its history, not, as so many politicians do today, inventing an “other” onto which they project their fears. One danger for us is that their fearmongering for political advantage has desensitized us to despicable language and made it more difficult for us to discern the truth in what Malcolm X is trying to tell us, truths we need to hear.

But if the negative language in Malcolm X begins to get you down, it might help to recognize that there is not a single emotion expressed in the film that you can’t find in the Psalms.

The willingness of Malcolm X to change and grow is inspiring: he became someone who could say, after his conversion to Sunni Islam and a pilgrimage to Mecca, “I’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda. . . . I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”7 While he had once condemned all whites, he pledges to never “be guilty of that again. . . . The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against Blacks.”8

Those words, wrested from hard experience and fostered by a remarkable willingness to grow as a person, come from The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Its subtitle is “As Told to Alex Haley,” but the voice of its subject comes through loud and clear, and I’d recommend the book as an adjunct to viewing Spike Lee’s film. Growing up in Hawaii (a place that reflects the world as it is, mostly Asian), I’d read about the civil rights struggles on the US mainland, but they felt remote from me. I was horrified by photographs of “Whites Only” signs on restrooms and admired the work of people like Martin Luther King Jr. But I knew Malcolm X only as a firebrand speaker denouncing whites. He himself had predicted that most Americans would see him this way, saying to Haley, “When I am dead . . . the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with ‘hate.’ He will make use of me dead, as he has made use of me alive, as a convenient symbol, of ‘hatred.’” But Malcolm X insists that “all I have been doing is holding up a mirror to reflect, to show, the history of unspeakable crimes that his race has committed against my race.”9

I am indebted to a mentor who recommended that I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X in the early 1970s when I was in my early twenties. In the book I encountered a man who, though he was clearly bright, had been discouraged by his teachers from pursuing anything other than vocational education. (A chilling scene depicts that in the film.) It was no surprise that he had chosen the life of a street hustler and petty criminal rather than accept low-wage work. But I was amazed to find that when he was in prison and realized how limited his vocabulary was, he decided to change that by reading and studying the dictionary.

I still encounter people who resist the term systemic racism, but it’s been part of America since the founding of the nation, when the authors of the Constitution designated enslaved Black people as three-fifths of a human being. And in 1944, when the GI Bill boosted many American veterans into the middle class, Southern senators made sure that the bill accommodated Jim Crow laws so that Black veterans would not be eligible for its benefits. It was not until 2021 that the US Congress looked at remedying that.

I love so much of what Gareth has written about this film: noting that the impossibly enormous moon that appears on the night when young Malcolm Little’s family is being terrorized by the Klan is exactly what a frightened child would see. And I’m grateful for his calling out the hideous racist excesses of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, which presents Blacks—especially Black men—as subhuman predators. That unfortunately influential film spurred the growth of the Klan in America throughout the 1920s and no doubt emboldened Klan members to target and murder men like Malcolm Little’s father, an outspoken Baptist preacher. Spike Lee’s ambitious Malcolm X is, as Roger Ebert has stated, “one of the great screen biographies,” as it does a fine job of presenting a complex man in full but also presents a broad commentary on America in the twentieth century.10

I agree with Gareth that the way for viewers to appreciate Malcolm X is not to distance ourselves from a man we may think of as controversial or unworthy of consideration. Lee’s film makes it clear that the spiritual journey of Malcolm X is one that we all undertake. Who are we? What are we meant to do with our talents, gifts, and privileges? How do we face the obstacles others put in our way? How can we live so as to benefit our community and the human race?

Questions and Conversations

1. What have you believed about vocation—where it comes from, what it’s for, how it works?
2. What do you think your vocation is—in other words, what kind of world would you like to see, and what role can you play in that?
3. Knowing more about what you feel called to, discuss how you feel called to do it.
4. What pilgrimage might you need to take—an external one (like Malcolm takes to Mecca), an inner journey, or both?
5. Reflecting on the moment when Malcolm apologizes for being disrespectful and raising his voice, consider parts of how you show up in the world that you would like to change.
6. Where does your life intersect with that of Malcolm X—either as someone who feels seen by his story or provoked by it?