Karenga on Malcolm

& the Need for Struggle

Malcolm & Ethics 

Malcolm was an ethical thinker. His ethics, of course, were rooted in a theology called Islam, but also in African-American social-justice traditions. So he comes with a lot of preference for the poor, which he calls the masses. His main criticism of the middle class is its inability to commit class suicide and substitute mass interest for class interest. 

I sum this up in my book when I talk about three things he said that were most important: Wake up, clean up and stand up. The first speaks to intellectual development rooted in self-knowledge; what Malcolm wants us to do is to shake off our diminished conception of ourselves as ghetto dwellers and see ourselves as world-historical people. He believed that kind of consciousness would call us to a different kind of action.  

Absorbing the Best of Black Ethical Thought

What I try to do is take the best of our thinking -- Malcolm, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Douglass, Du Bois -- and extract from them what I see as being the best of what it means to be both African and human. And try to use that to engage other progressive people in the world. 

I evolved the kawaida position out of this. "Clean up" refers to ethics, which is the most important conversation we can have in the world today. Every major issue that comes up involves an engagement of ethics -- medical, business, political, scientific, whatever. Malcolm argues for "clean up," which means to get ethical grounding on issues to understand their moral meaning for us as a people. And not just people responsible to ourselves, but to the rest of the world. 

The final thing he argues is "stand up." That means engaging in the practice of social change to increase the good in the world. We have to struggle for that, for human freedom and human equality and human justice. So that's the kind of book I'm writing.  

The Dialectics of Struggle

As in every situation, there's a dialectic going on, with people rising and falling at the same time. Good things are coming into being while old things are going out. It's not a clear course, there are twists and turns in the road. 

In kawaida, we say that struggle is the most characteristic aspect of the human personality. We struggle to come into being ; that's called birth. We struggle to make the most out of being; that's called life. And we struggle to not go out of being; that's called the quest for immortality. What I see is that the struggle will increase in this country and in the world. 

Purveyors of Reaction & Changelessness

This actually flies in the face of theorists like Francis Fukuyama, who say that history is actually at its end, that the major struggles have been resolved, that capitalism and imperialism are triumphant, and their cultures are dominant. Even when they see struggles now -- in Chiapas, or Palestine -- they redefine them; they call freedom fighters "terrorists." They call guerrillas "gunmen." 

So what they have done simply with this concept of redefining reality is tried to stop history. That's like trying to stop time. It doesn't make sense. If you are the interpreter of history, you can actually call a halt to it. That's one of the greatest powers in the world, the power to define reality and make others accept it, even when it's to their disadvantage. 

The Battle of Hearts & Minds

That's why the real struggle -- we've said this since the '60s -- begins with the battle for the hearts and minds of the people: to show them their own capacity to create history and progress, and to pose new paradigms of how people ought to relate.  

But in spite of the declarations of the established order, there's no end of history. The oppressed still want freedom. The wrong and injured want justice. People want power over their destinies and daily lives, and the world wants peace. Freedom, justice, power for the people and peace -- these are the moving forces that now thrust themselves on the historical scene and become engines for history. 

An Internal & World Dialogue

What [black people] have to do is not only have an internal dialogue in our community, but we have to create and become part of a world dialogue that's part of a common framework. I argue that there is no future without us recognizing interdependence -- on the communal level, on the societal level and on the world level. 

"Globalization" has become such a buzzword, I don't think most people even understand what it is. Is it economic, is it world trade? It has several dimensions to it, but it's really capitalism with more technological capacity to impose its will. That's it. The problem with traditional Marxists is that they still just want to talk about economics. But we've always talked culture and race, about compliance, about how subordinated people are taught to hate themselves. 

So we must make a more critical analysis of how all this works -- on the political level, on the economic level and on the cultural level. I think the key struggles going on now are local. For example, the labor strikes. I think the immigrant workers have absolutely injected a new energy into the labor movement. 

The Black African-American Vanguard

I think we are still the vanguard. Everybody bought our moral vocabulary, our moral vision, sang our songs -- other ethnic groups, seniors, women, gays, the disabled. They did it internationally, too, in other countries. So what we have to do is recapture that sense of history, of being a moral vanguard. 

No matter what changes are made for other groups, because of the historical nature of African oppression in this country, until black people have equality, equality doesn't exist as an American reality. Any group can go through a door, but that doesn't necessarily mean blacks can. But if blacks can go through a door, everybody can.

Source: Interview by Erin Aubry Kaplan L.A. WEEKLY:. http://laweekly.com/ink/24/01/light-kaplan.php

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update 23 June 2008