Could you explain to the readers of this special issue (of Religion and Literature) how you are using the figure of Malcolm X in your book Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X?
What I’m trying to do with Malcolm is not a straightforward biography. I view him as a culturally significant figure whose striking achievements during a wonderful and complex career continue to generate interest. Malcolm’s life has been shaped by myth and used by people for a variety of conflicting purposes. My book attempts to figure out how that myth is related to resonant intellectual and social traditions in African American culture. It also reflects on the fascination of Americans with radical figures who rebel against numerous forms of authority. Next, I examine how Malcolm is being used in African American popular culture, especially by hip-hop artists and black filmmakers, to extend their own obsessions with masculinity. In addition, I investigate how Malcolm has been used by cultural politicians to set themselves up as authorities within African American culture. That is, to be identified with Malcolm is to derive some sort of legitimacy within radical black politics to articulate the claims and concerns of black people.
Finally, I look at Malcolm’s intellectual legacy. I examine the categories of interpretation that have been used to explain Malcolm’s life. I aim to understand as clearly as possible what contributions Malcolm made to the intellectual life of the black movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I also discuss how his legacy has been interpreted, in turn, by intellectuals and scholars who have assessed his racial worth and cultural merit. So these varieties of interests were very much on my mind as I examined how Malcolm’s myth was being shaped and remade. I argue that his past indeed has a future, and that we must continue wrestling with him as a cultural figure.
In your book, you try to complicate Malcolm’s current reception within a general black, mostly male audience and extend Malcolm to a larger, more ethnically diverse population.
My ambition to complicate Malcolm X was driven by a desire to challenge perceptions that many folk have about who Malcolm X was. For instance, if you believe that he was merely a prophet of anger and rage, you’ve got to confront the enormous significance of Malcolm’s latter-day humanistic philosophy, which allowed him to reach across the chasm of race and color to embrace all people as his spiritual kin. Had he lived longer, I can only hope that Malcolm would have reached out to those who were different by virtue of their gender and sexual preference as well.
One of my aspirations was to find a way to communicate a vision of the broadly humanitarian Malcolm who often gets lost when we celebrate his black revolutionary importance. I also wanted to communicate a complex vision of Malcolm to those who saw in him strictly an icon of black self-esteem and culture. I wanted to show that Malcolm was interested in traveling beyond the boundaries of African American life to interact with all sorts of people around the globe.
Much has been made about your own background: you began your career as a teenage father, a welfare recipient, a factory laborer in the ghettos of Detroit, and then you became an ordained Baptist minister and a Ph.D. with teaching positions in highly respected seminaries and universities. Do you see a parallel shift of your own from moving from the ghetto to interacting with a broader, more diverse audience?
I think that’s an astute observation. Yes, in many ways I think that is true. My own odyssey began in the inner city of Detroit. I became a teen father and received food stamps. My wife was enrolled in the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) program, and I had to stand in line to receive powdered eggs and milk to feed my son. I worked two jobs full time, barely making a sustainable wage. The enormous obstacles I faced certainly challenged my self-definition and identity as a black man.
On a personal level, I began to think about what I would do to reshape my life so that I could achieve a certain moral status within my own community. Having access to that tremendous narrative of uplift that is threaded throughout African American culture—from Martin Delaney and Alexander Crummel, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and down to W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Fannie Lou Hamer, Pauli Murray, and James Baldwin— helped me respond to those challenges.
Also, I was encouraged through my participation in the black church. The church I belonged to was named Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church. My pastor, Dr. Frederick Sampson, is an extraordinary intellectual and spiritual figure, and he lent me tremendous support. I was fortunate to have many remarkable people, so-called ordinary people, to provide me the impetus to make that shift from ghetto life to a life where I might become an example of the ingenuity of black survival.
The unfortunate part of the ghetto experience, of course, is that material misery and economic deprivation bring psychic harm and spiritual hurt to so many black folk. For every person who gets out of the worst of ghetto situations, there are many more people who remain trapped in its punishing grip. I certainly don’t romanticize poverty or the ghetto, although I understand how they have come to be mythologized in many black narratives of survival.
There is a parallel between my own existential situation—a move from one set of difficult conditions in the ghetto to another set of obstacles in my present life that are just as challenging in their own way—and Malcolm’s constant reconstruction and self-reinvention. I think the paradigm of self-reinvention is so central to black autobiography because there’s a powerful move toward transformation in black life. Those parallel moves between life and literature, between personal story and racial story, are quite essential in light of the narrative quality of black existence. We shape our lives through story, and through it we also reshape our self-understanding. Although our self-understanding is surely rooted in the facts of our real lives, those facts take on new meaning when seen in light of the moral possibilities opened up by telling the story of our lives in different ways, with different accents.
When we allow ourselves to see our lives in a different light, we are empowered to either bear the extraordinary consequences of our misfortunes or reinterpret them.
In my case, a religious narrative motivated me to reinterpret my suffering and transform it into something that spurred me on to greater achievement. My suffering was no longer an albatross weighing me down. I see a parallel movement in my own life and in Malcolm’s shifts and transformations, as he moved from a ghettoizing to a catholic vision of life.
You speak of both self-reinvention and a move not to romanticize poverty. How can you link that to Malcolm’s conversion to Islam and to his angry rhetoric?
I think that Malcolm’s self-reinvention was greatly enabled by his conversion to Islam. One form of self-reinvention is conversion, the remaking of the ego and the ideal spiritual self in light of the religious narratives that are crucial to sustaining one’s sanity and helping one to confront the evils of the world. Religious transformation helps us deal with those forces that have so much to do with determining the quality of our lives.
In looking at Malcolm’s conversion, we should view the narrative of self-reinvention in tandem with the rhetoric of anger that he expressed. He could only have the kind of anger he unleashed against white racism because he went beyond the hustling ethic that had informed his earlier life. The move from street hustler to a minister for the Nation of Islam allowed him to be conscientious about fighting white racism.
Prior to his ministry, Malcolm did not have the requisite skills and tools to acknowledge or adequately analyze how white racism undermined the ability of many black folk to even understand how they were being abused. Some orthodox Marxists might call it false consciousness: there had been a distortion of Malcolm’s self-understanding and therefore a denial of the reality of oppression that was right before his face.
In one sense, Malcolm’s conversion to the Nation of Islam gave him both the consciousness and the capacity to confront white racist oppression. His conversion elicited in Malcolm the appropriate anger that wasn’t available to him before his religious rebirth. Malcolm’s reinvention allowed him to access that anger in a way that had been denied to him previously because of his hustling life. On the other hand, Malcolm’s move beyond narrow forms of black nationalist rhetoric and his embrace of broader humanitarian values that he proclaimed near the end of his life was aided by a subsequent religious conversion, this time to orthodox Islam. It was another milestone in Malcolm’s quest for self-reinvention.
Ironically, the second movement in the suite of reinventions in Malcolm’s life emphasized a broad Islamic perspective that accented people’s humanity and their capacity to overcome bias in asserting the brotherhood and sisterhood of all people. That second movement allowed Malcolm to reinvent himself according to a religious narrative that did not deify narrow racial divisions. However, Malcolm provided a historical context for that affirmation. His trip to Mecca permitted him to see many lighter-skinned and white Arabs who treated him as if he were a brother and fellow citizen. This experience gave Malcolm a vision of the possibility of existing beyond the narrow rule of race that prevailed in America.
However, when he returned to America, even after having written letters that testified to his tremendous transformation, he continued to insist that America was not Mecca. He understood that our nation perpetuated the political, cultural, and social expression of racism. However, I think his trip to Mecca had a radical effect on him. It transformed his self-understanding and strengthened his desire to relate to people of color who differed from him ideologically. It also positively affected his relation to white Americans, whom he now believed could at least go into their own communities— where Malcolm and other blacks might never be allowed to go—to take the message of racial salvation. So the relationship between Malcolm’s self-invention and his rhetoric of anger had different functions in his life depending on what stage he was experiencing at the time.
I’m wondering about the role of violence in his rhetoric, too. Could this broader appeal, then, help eliminate some of the violent tensions that were arising over Malcolm and his ministry?
Yes, that’s a very interesting point. On the one hand, much has been made about Malcolm’s rhetoric of violence, which, for the most part, has been misunderstood or misrepresented. Malcolm’s main point was that black people should be prepared to defend themselves in the face of white hostility. In Malcolm’s view, America came into being because a group of citizens refused to be oppressed and exploited and violently defended their interests in war. Malcolm contended that the same logic must be applied to internal domestic disputes. Malcolm believed that violence was as American as apple pie, that it was central to the definition of American society.
Therefore, he felt it was hypocritical for whites to demand that black folk deny themselves their birthright as American citizens by not employing violence to defend themselves against those whites who were physically attacking us. On one view, Malcolm, like Martin Luther King, was appealing to the specific character of American identity to justify his beliefs. Of course the emphases, and results, were different. By using the rhetoric of Christian charity, Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to the conscience of white Americans to change their ways. He also articulated his religious and humanitarian concerns by partially grounding them in the documents that are central to American political self-definition: the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
On the other hand, Malcolm reminded us of the ugly, gritty history of how ideas of freedom and equality were implemented in real life. He emphasized resistance to oppression through war. Malcolm was saying that if what it means to be an American is to participate in democracy, then we have to talk about the consequences of blacks being denied democracy and how black Americans should defend themselves in the face of that denial. The rhetoric of violence for Malcolm X became a way of playing on a trope of American self-definition and identity. What Malcolm wanted to do was to remind Americans in a clever way of that dark side of democracy, that side that it didn’t want to face up to.
Second, what’s important to understand about Malcolm’s rhetoric of violence is how he was not talking about going out and attacking white folk. His point was that when white people were lynching black folk, when they were shooting them, when the bicuspids and incisors of German shepherds were tearing into the flesh of black people in Birmingham, that we should have fought back, we should have defended ourselves. It was not proactive violence visited on white people. It was self-defense in the face of white hostility and evil. For Malcolm, violence was a reaction to a previously existing condition of spiritual and physical violence that threatened the selfhood and, literally, the safety of black people.
Third, however, there’s no denying that Malcolm often rhetorically attacked white Americans and black leaders with whom he disagreed. The supreme irony, of course, is that the Nation of Islam mostly expressed violence within its own ranks. It didn’t get violent with the white people it had verbally targeted. The famous picture of Malcolm peeping out of a window holding the curtain open with a gun in his hand has been mistakenly seen as evidence of his willingness to be violent with whites. It truth, it portrayed Malcolm lying in wait for the black men who, after his departure from the Nation of Islam and his criticism of the honorable Elijah Muhammad, were threatening to kill him.
The very rage that Malcolm’s rhetoric helped unleash was prevented political expression because the Nation of Islam was forbidden from being involved in politics by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Not until Malcolm escaped Elijah Muhammad’s grip could he express a broader vision of political insurgence and resistance by blacks. In sum, though, I think the more humane Malcolm can be used to attack the narrow bigotries that were expressed by the early Malcolm.
I’d like to compare the ethic of the Islamic puritanical, rigid assertion of racial difference and black identity against the ethic of Christian compassion that might be more universal and might have fit in better with the prevailing Christian ethic in the United States.
Well, it is true that the black moral Puritanism advocated by the Nation of Islam accorded with some principles of fundamentalist Islamic practice, despite the fact that the Nation of Islam was repudiated by many orthodox Muslims when it was at its height in the 1960s. Followers of orthodox Islam made it a point to distinguish themselves from the Nation’s rigid racial beliefs.
Let me say right off the bat that we have to fight the enormous prejudice against Islamic belief that prevails in a nation like ours, where Islamic faith is associated with extremists. Islamic peoples are wrongly deemed incapable of coping with difference, and of being unable to adjudicate disputes in peaceful ways. This is simply not true. It is a caricature of Islamic belief. We have to be quite cautious in making blanket statements.
There is, I think, something at work in the fundamentalist Islamic ethic of self-assertion that, like its fundamentalist Christian counterpart, reveals a rigid understanding of the relationship between religious experience and texts, and personal behavior. The fundamentalist conception of this relationship is much more rigid than that found in a progressive Islamic or Christian ethic that asserts a less punitive relationship between belief and behavior. I think there’s something at work in fundamentalist Christian and Islamic belief that challenges secular arrangements by which religion must cooperate with the state in order to survive at all in order to express itself. The division between church and state allows for the proliferation of religions and makes it possible for Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists to coexist in a secular arena that protects the religious liberties that all religions must observe in order to survive.
On the other hand, I think that the ethic of self-assertion at work in fundamentalist belief expresses the desire of its advocates to shape the state according to rigid religious ideas. Those religious ideas, when enacted in sectarian ways, often have disastrous political consequences. We see this in countries where the practice of fundamentalist religion is so closely identified with the state that we cannot discern the difference between the two because religion is officially sanctioned. The consequences to those who exist outside the logic and moral parameters of that religion are quite severe.
We would see an American version of this problem if the aspirations of people like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson were to be realized. Falwell and Robertson want to remake the American state according to a sectarian, Christian fundamentalist viewpoint. When we look at Malcolm and see how that ethic of self-assertion manifests itself in the rhetorical violence of his early stage, I think we get a different glimpse of how the state would be related to religious belief. Since Malcolm spurned the political arena early on, his notion of existing in but not of the state implicitly endorsed a protectionism provided within the logic and laws of liberal democracy. To not get involved in politics so that you can maintain your own religious liberty is a ringing endorsement of the political arrangement that permits such pursuits to occur.
This is where Malcolm’s difference to King is sharply illustrated. King sought to transform American culture by appeals to a broadly shared set of beliefs that in some ways held national citizenship and identity together. But he neither sought to enshrine his religious beliefs as law (as Falwell and Robertson do), nor did he seek to avoid the necessary political engagement to reform American culture (early Malcolm). The ethic of self-assertion and narrow identity found in fundamentalist belief contrasts boldly to an ethic of compassion and universalism found in progressive Christian and Islamic beliefs.
I think that the severe ethical prescriptions and rigid beliefs promoted within fundamentalist communities works against the sort of humanitarianism that accepts difference, and that allows us to live with those differences in ways that are not violent or harmful. That’s true for Christians and Muslims. Intolerance for those who are different because of gender, sex, or race must be opposed. Religious belief should help us combat the vicious bigotries which harm and hurt human beings. Instead, narrow Christian and Islamic communities reinforce such bigotries and undermine the affirmation of difference even within religious faiths.
It is true that the rigidity of the Nation of Islam was an attractive feature to people whose lives had descended into a chaos of immorality. For those who had led the hustling life or a life of prostitution, or who had been pimps, dope dealers, drug addicts, fallouts from society, the ethical demand of the Nation of Islam indeed worked to their advantage in terms of cleaning them up.
The problem, of course, is that once the ethic transformed their lives— converted them from hustlers to healers, from pimps to preachers—they were not as open to the possibility that human identity is a complex amalgam of failure and success, of ideal and reality. The complex interaction of ideal and reality often produces apparently hypocritical and sometimes contradictory behaviors that in a ramshackle way move human beings toward relative perfection. The rigid ethic of the Nation of Islam was quite literal and prevented a complex understanding of the human negotiations people must pass through in order to achieve any sense of solid ego identity or self-respect.
However, I think that the Nation of Islam was far superior to Christianity in terms of reconstructing people’s lives who were on the periphery of society. The civil rights movement often overlooked, until its latter period, the urban strata of the ghetto poor. The Nation of Islam’s ingenuity was that its ideology intuited the ethical needs of the poor black urbanite. The Nation understood the need that the poor and working poor had for a moral circumspection and reconstruction that was rigid and clear because sometimes their own moral lives were chaotic and dissembled.
On the other hand, once its members moved from the gutter to the glory of religious affiliation, the Nation of Islam was not as open, in principle, to other varieties of moral behavior. Consequently, their rigidity sometimes turned to violence. It was not simple physical violence. It was also the mental and spiritual violence that occurs within any sectarian religious organization that derives its energy from forms of moral community that draw such sharp distinctions between itself and the larger society.
The irony, of course, is that the Nation of Islam was, in many senses, prototypically American. The Nation’s black moral Puritanism encouraged the group to contrast itself to the “degradation” of so much of the black community, a move often made by mainstream whites. The Nation of Islam’s beliefs accent the degree to which many people of color, especially African Americans, are culturally and religiously conservative even while being politically progressive. They adhere to standard, very traditional conceptions of moral community, which gives the lie to claims by certain critics and politicians that black folk in the main are dissolute and morally reprobate.
The reality is that black folk are often puritanical people who buy hook, line, and sinker the “Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.” Or they practice very conservative Islamic principles of moral community. They’ve used both Christian and Islamic faith to reconstruct their identities according to religious narratives that uplift and valorize hard work, self-discipline, and sacrifice for the future of one’s children. Unfortunately, ethical rigidity is often a concomitant. The social ethic of the best of black religious traditions accents personal liberty along with self-sacrifice and social participation toward the goal of transforming American culture.
You said that the Islamic religion has a larger belief in the authority of religious experience. I was wondering if that was a conversion experience or some other kind of experience. Also, you mentioned Islamic cosmology. Could you clarify some of those terms?
What I mean by the authority of religious narrative is how, for many people in countries where Islam is practiced, religion is collapsed into politics and politics is absorbed by religion. One’s moral principles are regulated and buttressed by state law. It’s not that American Christians don’t seek to link their own political behavior to their personal belief. It’s just that the state isn’t officially backed by religion. I think that’s the ingenuity of American political culture: theoretically, at least, democracy allows every religion to coexist.
Ironically, in American society the establishment of a secular state allows the proliferation of religious bodies and beliefs. The exclusive identification of law with religion doesn’t often provide an ethical stance from which to criticize the one by means of the other. For instance, one of the virtues of American society in the 1950s was that America was not a Christian nation. It was precisely because it was a secular society that the state could intervene on behalf of one set of citizens, black Christians, to defend them from a variety of evils—including lynchings, burnings, stabbings, and shootings— committed by another set of citizens, white Christians. In countries where there’s no distinction between law and religion that kind of possibility would not exist. To incur the wrath of the state is to incur the wrath of religion, which means that you are doubly undone. An Islamic cosmology asserts the authority of religious narratives and religious experience over secular ideas and society.
Given your critique of Malcolm and his reception in terms of his misogyny and the misogyny of black nationalism, I’m wondering why you focus so much on the reception of Malcolm by black men and the construction of black masculinity. Could you have extended his appeal to black women, in particular, through the figure of Malcolm’s mother, a Garveyite and political activist, and his wife, Betty Shabazz?
Yes, unquestionably, and that’s a fair and just criticism of my own take on Malcolm in my book, where I focus on the politics of masculinity and the ways Malcolm both energized those politics and embodied some of their worst manifestations. I think, given my desire to criticize the misogyny and sexism of Malcolm X, one of the ways I might have structurally done that within my book is to have accented, as you say, the importance of Malcolm’s Grenadan mother. I might have more extensively discussed how her service as the recording secretary of the local UNIA exemplified a powerful instance of black women contesting the narrow gender politics that Malcolm subsequently adopted within the Nation of Islam.
Or I might have more broadly defined the role of Dr. Betty Shabazz, who left Malcolm after the birth of each of their first three children over disputes about the role that she should adopt as an autonomous moral agent and social activist apart from Malcolm. Even within the moral worldview that the Nation of Islam created, I think that there were already cracks in its cosmology with Dr. Shabazz’s independent attitudes and activities. I think that I might have more skillfully employed Malcolm’s mother and wife to criticize his own narrow gender politics.
I focus on men so much because I am trying to join in the furious debates about masculinity within African American culture. I am trying to struggle with issues of black manhood in a way that respects the integrity of those debates, that is, the way in which they deal with the real crises of young and old black males. However, by articulating the political, cultural, economic, and domestic consequences of black male suffering, I am by no means suggesting that black women are not suffering as well.
What I am suggesting is that the immediate consequences of the devastation that black men face amounts to a palpable threat to the survival and flourishing of black communities. I am trying to address those crises in a way that employs Malcolm’s career as a metaphor for the possibility of moral reconstruction and social transformation. I also employ him as a prism through which we see the limitations of a narrow masculinist psychology. I see Malcolm as an example of how black men can be self-critical and constructively critical of others in order that black communities might truly flourish. I use Malcolm’s complex evolution as a critical wedge underneath the hypermasculinist impulses within black society that squeeze out the possibility of black women’s participation in the reconstruction of black life.
While you criticize black masculinity, you support black men by showing that some of their misogyny, the well-publicized condemnation of rap groups’ lyrics and behavior, comes from ideologies within church and state institutions. You put them into a wider perspective and attempt to stop the victimization of these men who are caught in a web of constant violence and criminal behaviors.
Right. I think we have to avoid victimizing the least politically protected group in America: young black people, in this case, young black men, some of whom are rappers. To pretend that they are the sources for the most nefarious expressions of misogyny, sexism, and patriarchy in our culture is ludicrous. That is not to suggest that they don’t need to be criticized. They certainly do. I think that when we look at the recent debacles of Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Dr. Dre, Slick Rick, and other prominent rappers— some of whom face murder charges, while others face sexual assault and drug charges—we can’t romanticize their music or careers. Given his moral Puritanism, Malcolm X would have much to criticize in hip-hop culture. He’d have a lot of negative things to say about gangsta rap’s moral infidelity to a more humane ethical community than that expressed within the narratives of many of its songs.
On the other hand, I think that it would be hypocritical for us to focus our moral outrage primarily on these young black people when we know that the synagogue, the mosque, and the church have promoted and preserved the social, religious, and cultural inferiority of women. Even more troubling, these institutions have generated narratives that legitimate women’s oppression. These religious bodies often seduce women into identifying with religious narratives that curtail their quest for liberation. I think that it’s wrong for us to deny that religious rhetoric and belief have justified and reinforced patriarchal and misogynistic tendencies much more effectively than hip-hop culture.
Can you talk a little about the tradition of the black church, its oratory, and the rhetorical resistance that is part of African American political tradition? How do you connect the role of the African American church and its oratorical strategies in the struggle for civil rights?
I think that during the civil rights movement the rhetorical strategies employed by a person like Martin Luther King Jr. were extraordinarily effective. One of the rhetorical strategies King and other church–based civil rights activists used was to accent the power of speech to transform human behavior. If you couldn’t physically harm people or retaliate against white racist domination— as King certainly preached—then you could motivate white folk to change their hateful ways by speaking powerful rhetoric that led to concrete action.
Black religious speech also had the capacity to hearten black folk in the face of oppression and even death. Such rhetoric was linked to religious narratives that advocated transformation through moral trial, reinvention through self-examination, conversion through confrontation with the good, and redemption through suffering. For King and other religious figures, their rhetoric rung with moral authority because its claims and performance were inspired by imminent contact with a transcendent God. King often spoke of civil rights devotees enjoying “cosmic companionship.” Thus their speech and social practices were never presumed to be theirs alone, but were motivated by a God who gave people the capacity to speak and act in the first place. The same God-given power that enabled King and others to speak and act could also change personal sentiments and thinking, and social structures. Religious rhetoric, and its translations in civil society, was an important vehicle and inspiration for such transformation.
This last part, in fact, is part of another rhetorical strategy employed by Martin Luther King Jr. and others: they fused the language, rhythms, and modes of black sacred rhetoric with civic rhetoric and civil religious symbols in American society. When Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, he did so with an eye to making religiously inspired uses of the secular documents that undergird civil society and that codify its basic beliefs about the character of American citizenship. He used those documents—along with the beliefs about democracy they encouraged and the rhetoric of equality they mobilized—as a vehicle to express his religious interpretations of justice, freedom, and equality.
Martin Luther King Jr. took his own religious convictions seriously. Time and again, he reminded us that he was a preacher first and foremost, and only then a civil rights leader. But that preacherly vocation was an extraordinary one because his congregation was American society, indeed the world. King’s religious beliefs were the impetus for his translation of an ethic of love as justice in public discourse and practice. He made his ideas comprehensible to a broad variety of Americans who didn’t necessarily share his religious beliefs. King linked his understanding of social transformation to the quest for the public good through the language of civic virtue and civil rights.
Their religious beliefs gave King and others the psychic, spiritual, and rhetorical armor to stand up to an American government that failed to practice the ideals of freedom and equality articulated in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. King made the tension between ideal and reality the opportunity to highlight, especially toward the end of his life, the sheer hypocrisy of American claims of justice for all its citizens.
That, too, is a rhetorical strategy honed in the black church: you signify on the limitations of the embodiment or practice of an ideal by proclaiming your dedication to the ideal as well. For King and many civil rights devotees in relation to the American government, it ran something like: “I believe in the ideal of freedom, justice, and equality that you’ve articulated, but you haven’t done such a good job in living up to it.” That’s essentially what King said in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. King’s rhetorical strategy was to compel Americans to concede that there was indeed, as T.S. Eliot wrote about another matter, a shadow between the ideal of democracy and its reality. In so doing, King proved again that the meanings of these important documents are not fixed. He showed that these documents can be reinterpreted in light of historical experience and in light of moral issues that drive political conflict.
Finally, King and other freedom fighters recognized that oppressed communities had to literally describe their visions of social transformation in ways that would not immediately cause white Americans or people in power to further oppress or kill them. They had to engage in what James Scott calls “everyday forms of resistance,” that is, to resist power in a manner that was small but significant, that was more cumulative than revolutionary.
Further, they had to use what Scott terms “hidden transcripts,” public performances of speech that veil its real meanings, that hide its coded messages. During slavery, of course, spirituals sometimes functioned in this way. The double meaning of such songs often signaled to slaves when and where and whom they were to meet to escape north to freedom. White masters were being entertained, but black slaves were being emancipated. And all through the same vehicle, a song.
For King and other participants in the civil rights movement, how issues of justice, freedom, and equality were framed played an important part in how they were perceived, and received, in white society. Many times, King and other leaders masked their goal of radical transformation by arguing, at least initially, for incremental change or by going for symbolic victories that meant a lot to the people they affected. (I don’t mean that black leaders always had radical goals that were masked in moderate rhetoric; initially, many of the goals of the civil rights movement were rather modest.)
The Montgomery bus boycott was such an example. It was a local case, and largely symbolic, but its symbolism ignited an entire freedom movement throughout the South that brought the giant of legalized segregation to its knees. But the ambitions of the civil rights movement were largely framed in a rhetorical context of passive resistance, of Christian love, of nonviolent protest, when in reality deeply racist ways of life and unjust laws were being undermined and destroyed. Such gestures of resistance—and the action they inspired—were rhetorically brilliant, philosophically cunning, and socially quite substantive at the same time.
To conclude, you end your book speaking about a “ministration of a daily political ethic of care for fractured black bodies and spirits.” Is there a way to translate a fractured identity, a fractured society, in a way that can start to heal some of these divisions?
That’s a powerful question. One of the ways we can do that is to constantly take up the kinds of issues that our deepest religious passions motivate us to be concerned about. For me, that means “the least of these,” the people who are poor, the people who don’t have access to institutions of higher education, those who are shut out of power or acceptance because of their gender or sexual preference. This daily ministration of a political ethic of care is about edifying expressions and public translations of Christian, Islamic, or Buddhist compassion. It is also about the expression of secular compassion.
I emphasize human compassion and the need to translate it into a broad politic that allows us to accent an ethic of care without being laughed at. The so-called politics of neocompassion are being scorned by the New Right and substituted by a brand of politics that deals with the so-called hard realities of life. The takeover of American politics by the hard right is unfortunate. It propels our society into a Hobbesian war of all against all that is indeed nasty and brutish, that pits the have-gots against the have-nots; and with the odds already stacked against the have-nots, we know in advance who’s favored to win. I think that the problem with such politics is that they not only discourage our country from living up to the highest expressions of our moral traditions, but they also suppress the flourishing of our American democratic tradition at its best. One way to translate compassion into politics is to acknowledge—and to build programs around that acknowledgment—that many people have been fractured through no fault of their own. For instance, we must confront how our society has contributed to the social suffering and economic misery of people of color. We must simply stop demonizing poor black women, whose financial vulnerabilities make them easy symbols of the blights of the welfare society. We should have the basic decency to admit that we live in a country that in numerous ways has undermined the ability of people of color, and other poor folk, to make a decent wage.
We can no longer blame such folk for not having jobs without making substantive analyses of economic policies and forces that prevent their stabilization. The structural transformation of the American political economy has disproportionately disadvantaged people of color. The shift from manufacturing to service industries that has been talked about from a variety of commentators means that there has been a hemorrhaging of economic resources in those postindustrial centers where many black people live: New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and so on.
The prospect of high-wage, low-skill jobs has all but evaporated. The prospects of poor and working poor people have been even further damaged by the technologization of American industries. Further, the black working class has been literally squeezed out of its living spaces by processes of gentrification in the inner city where structures are overtaken by individuals and businesses with the means to rehabilitate marginal housing. The political ethic of care I’m talking about is not a sappy kind of love or compassion that doesn’t pay attention to hard political realities. It is the demand for sophisticated social analysis, profound investigation of economic conditions, and strategic social intervention in American politics and social movements with an eye toward transforming American culture. It stresses the need to live up to a vision of radical democracy that embodies the best of our traditions of freedom and justice but also accents the possibilities of human beings to realize and preserve the rich meanings of their individual existence as well.
Another form of the political ethic of care I advocate is the translation of spirituality into American discourses about virtue. William Bennett’s and Newt Gingrich’s discussions of virtue often miss the political influences and social contingencies that nuance any conception of virtue, that permit and encourage virtue to thrive. We must take the best of recent virtue ethics (from Alasdair MacIntyre to Stanley Hauerwas or Jean Porter) and the best work in moral philosophy on “moral luck” (from Bernard Williams to the brilliant work of Martha Nussbaum) to understand the complex interplay of personal and social forces in determining how we view what’s good and virtuous.
To paraphrase Dorothy Day, “I want to work toward a world in which it is possible for people to behave decently.” Decent or virtuous behavior flourishes under those conditions where people’s livelihoods are sustained and where their lives are not constantly materially threatened. We need to analyze the relationship between public and private virtue and between personal considerations of ethical reconstruction and their public consequences. We need to reconstruct the public polity to reflect our compassion for people while encouraging excellent behavior from them as well. Finally, my version of a political ethic of care promotes the centrality of tolerance and diversity to a democratic culture. I don’t mean a weak ethic of tolerance that says, “whatever goes”; if you have weighty ethical considerations and serious moral principles, you’re going to have limits and, inevitably, conflicts. What I’m aiming at is the notion that vigorous multiculturalism, in substance and procedure, is not the worst thing to happen to American culture. To accent difference and diversity is not to surrender standards or merit. It is to criticize how we construct standards and to rigorously examine how we understand the notion of merit. Standards and merits are really contingent goods. They do not exist in a cultural vacuum or historical void. Merit expresses the relationship between an ideal of excellence and its possibility of achievement. Merit always exists in relation to relative standards that we generate.
Multiculturalism, polyethnicism, and diversity express what I have elsewhere termed the edifying impurity of American identity—the way Americans are culturally and intellectually creolized and hybridized, always interacting across a number of boundaries. Those hybridities and creolizations are examples of how the character of American identity is constituted by a robust variety of “impure” ingredients. Not only does such a reality work wonders for our educational system, but its full realization would add considerably to American political culture as well.
Interview by Laura Winkiel
Durham, North Carolina, 1995