Emulation of the colonized by the colonizer is in many cases a response to racist oppression. Both Gandhi and Malcolm conform to this pattern of behavior as they strive to gain social recognition and self-respect by altering their appearances in ways that will emulate whites. Gandhi describes his entry into British society as a young student of law in London in 1888:
I undertook the all too impossible task of becoming an English gentleman. The clothes after the Bombay cut that I was wearing were, I thought, unsuitable for English society, and I got new ones …. I wasted ten pounds on an evening suit made in Bond Street, the center of fashionable life in London…. While in India, the mirror had been a luxury permitted on the days when the family barber gave me a shave. Here I wasted ten minutes every day before a huge mirror, watching myself arranging my tie and parting my hair in the correct fashion. My hair was by no means soft, and every day it meant a regular struggle with the brush to keep it in position.8
Malcolm inflicted on himself more painful measures to imitate whites; and he is more explicit than Gandhi about their implications. He explains how he administered his first “conk,” a process of lightening and straightening his hair by burning it with a solution of lye:
My first view in the mirror blotted out the hurting. I’d seen some pretty conks, but when it’s the first time, on your own head, the transformation, after the lifetime of kinks, is staggering …. on top of my head was this thick, smooth sheen of shining red hair—real red—as straight as any white man’s. How ridiculous I was! Stupid enough to stand there simply lost in admiration of my hair now looking “white,” … I vowed that I’d never again be without a conk, and I never was for many years. This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are “inferior” and white people “superior” that they will even mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look “pretty” by white standards … It makes you wonder if the Negro has completely lost his sense of identity, lost touch with himself.9
Unlike Gandhi, Malcolm in his emulative stage moved from being a “good Negro” to a “bad Negro,” a hustler and pimp. But whether good or bad, Malcolm was still performing a role or acting out an identity that white culture had assigned him: a “Negro,” doing what whites expected of him, even as they eventually sent him to prison. When the moment comes for both Gandhi and Malcolm to reject emulation, they do it from a conscious disillusionment with standards set by white culture: they renounce their assigned roles as false by negating white norms with ideologies of separatism.
In 1905, Gandhi urged his Indian community in South Africa that “We should not envy [Britain], but emulate its example.”10 By 1909, Gandhi had changed drastically: “If India copies England, it is my firm conviction that she will be ruined.”11 The causes of Gandhi’s volte-face begin with the racist persecution that the British inflicted on Africans during the Zulu Rebellion of 1906. Gandhi, who served as a medic in the British forces, had not anticipated such wholesale butchery of blacks in a conflict that soon appeared outrageously unjust because it was so one-sided. The result was that it changed his view of black-white relations. Erik Erikson observed that “the experience of witnessing [during the Zulu Rebellion] the outrages perpetrated on black bodies by white he-men aroused in Gandhi both a deeper identification with the maltreated, and a stronger aversion against all male sadism,” as represented now by British rule in South Africa.12 A half-century later, racist authority would be conclusively discredited for Malcolm X when he perceived, as Gandhi did, the moral bankruptcy at its base. In 1928, Gandhi wrote in his autobiography how he eventually realized as a result of the Amristar massacre, “to what lengths the British Government is capable of going, and what inhumanities and barbarities it is capable of perpetrating in order to maintain its power.”13 The words might have been Malcolm’s, except applied to government in the United States.
After the Zulu Rebellion, Gandhi immediately imposed on himself a strict code of moral discipline including a vow of brahmacharya (celibacy) as a personal preparation for the political campaign of civil disobedience that followed only a month later, in September 1906. This radical action of law breaking separated him irrevocably from the law abiding liberal style of politics he had faithfully followed in South Africa: he had become a satyagrahi, no longer a practicing English educated lawyer, and his destination was more often prison than the courts. As observed in chapter 1, Gandhi consolidated his separatism with an ideology of exclusiveness set forth in Hind Swaraj. The tract rejects the whole of modern Western civilization as fanatically as it defends the entire tradition of India: “I believe that the civilization India has evolved is not to be beaten in the world. Nothing can equal the seeds sown by our ancestors…. India, as so many writers have shown, has nothing to learn from anybody else, and this is as it should be.”14
The stark polarizations between modern Western civilization as irreligious, immoral, and “Satanic” and Indian culture as “unquestionably the best”15 pervade the book and present a quintessential statement of exclusivist thinking. Toward the end of the work, Gandhi concludes: “In order to restore India to its pristine condition, we have to return to it…. one effort is required, and that is to drive out Western civilization. All else will follow…. We hold the civilization that you support to be the reverse of civilization. We consider our civilization to be far superior to yours.”16 Gandhi never retracted these assertions. But his later ideas as translated into action make the case for his further journey into inclusivity that became the hallmark of his style.17 The point here, however, is that Hind Swaraj signifies the same sort of ideological leap from imitation to rejection of Western white culture that occurs in Malcolm’s autobiography.
Malcolm’s rite de passage from emulation to exclusiveness occurred in prison. There, after having “sunk to the very bottom of the American white man’s society,” Malcolm was reborn as a Black Muslim. “I found Allah and the religion of Islam and it completely transformed my life.”18 This story of prison conversion marks a vital moment in his search for self-definition. It signified nothing less than an intense fascination with the world of ideas. His discovery of the Nation of Islam empowered his mind. It whetted an appetite for learning that soon became insatiable. He relates how he devoured the prison library and totally immersed in “my reading books, months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in life.”19 And so Malcolm joined Thoreau and Gandhi, who had before him experienced as prisoners this certain kind of freedom, born from the power of knowledge. Like them, the empowerment had come directly and distinctly from books: specific books that they used to consolidate a new personal identity. The parallel between the young Mohandas and young Malcolm is especially close because Malcolm’s sense of freedom, too, does not at this stage lead to a liberalization of ideas but to exclusivity.
The Black Muslims’ Nation of Islam, founded in Detroit in the 1930’s by W. D. Fard and Elijah Poole (“The Honorable Elijah Muhammad”), had from its inception preached a racist dogma that branded all whites as “the human beast, the serpent, the dragon, the devil and Satan.”20 Malcolm left prison in 1952 as a convert to this doctrine; by the end of the decade he had organized Harlem and become a national leader of the Black Muslims. His oratorical and organizational skills gained him a place in the movement second only to Elijah Muhammad. For twelve years he crisscrossed America and electrified increasingly larger black audiences with the gospel of separatism:
My black brothers and sisters, we all have in common the greatest binding tie we could have, we are all black people!… Our enemy is the white man!…The white man, he has filled you with a fear of him from ever since you were little black babies. So over you is the greatest enemy a man can have and that is fear…I am going to preach to you the truth until y
ou are free of that fear. Your slavemaster, he brought you over here, and of your past everything was destroyed…You don’t know nothing about your true culture. You don’t know your family’s real name. You are wearing a white mans name! The white slavemaster, who hates you! … So let us, the black people, separate ourselves from this white man slavemaster, who despises us so much !… let us separate from this white man, and for the same reason he says in time to save ourselves from any more integration!21
In some respects, Gandhi’s separatism never went this far, for his emphasis on nonviolence rescued his ideology from Malcolm’s angry, bitter, racist denunciations. When Gandhi developed his inclusive style of leadership after 1919,22 he could achieve this in a more authentic and credible manner than Malcolm because Gandhi’s inclusiveness had been apparent before, especially in his close, easy associations with whites.23 Yet, in another sense, Gandhi and Malcolm were profoundly alike in their separatism: both emphasized freedom from fear, categorically rejected the assumed moral authority of white culture and its subsequent claims to political legitimacy, adopted strict moral codes of personal discipline enforced by religious vows, and in the course of their rejection of white culture they made the connection for themselves between “self-control and political potency.”24 Malcolm, like Gandhi, gained personal power through vows of abstinence25 that then empowered him politically. Against dominant, arrogant, white racism, they both consciously sought to restore a spirit of cultural identity to their people through psychological liberation. Gandhi declared that, “As long as there is in us fear of the Europeans and fondness for their institutions, swaraj is unattainable.”26. If, as Jawaharlal Nehru claimed, Gandhi gave back to India its “identity,”27 then Malcolm, even more explicitly than Gandhi, defined the purpose of the Black Muslims as “giving us a true identity, and a true position—the first time they have ever been known to the American black man!”28
In 1963, after almost twelve years of total allegiance to the Nation of Islam, Malcolm’s commitment disintegrated. Earlier, when he had discovered corruption in the lower levels of the organization that violated the Muslims’ strict moral codes, Malcolm tried to purge it, demanding of others in the movement the firm discipline that he had maintained. Now, however, in April 1963, he “discovered Muslims had been betrayed by Elijah Muhammad himself,”29 when rumors of Elijah’s flagrant sexual indiscretions were confirmed. “I actually had believed,” Malcolm said later, “that if Mr. Muhammad was not God, then he surely stood next to God.” “I loved the Nation, and Mr. Muhammad. I lived for the Nation and for Mr. Muhammad.” Now, with the revelations of Elijah’s hypocrisy, “my faith had been shaken in a way that I can never fully describe.” “I felt as though something in nature had failed, like the sun, or the stars. It was that incredible a phenomenon to me—something too stupendous to conceive.”30 On March 12,1964, Malcolm officially broke with the Nation of Islam.
Eleven months later, Malcolm would be killed by the Black Muslims for his heresies but he expressed during these final months immense relief at his freedom from Elijah. “I feel like a man who has been asleep somewhat and under someone else’s control. I feel what I’m thinking and saying now is for myself. Before, it was by the guidance of Elijah Muhammad. Now I think with my own mind…”31 Malcolm’s friend Maya Angelou expressed the transformation in precise Gandhian terms when she said that after he left the Nation of Islam, “he freed himself from being a totally ‘exclusive’ person and, instead, became ‘inclusive’—aware of and open to differences in the people around him.”32
Inclusivist perceptions abound in the last three chapters of Malcolm’s autobiography. In April, he left on a hajj to Mecca and wrote back to friends in America about the effects of the trip:
That morning [in Jedda] was when I first began to reappraise the ‘white man’. It was when I first began to perceive that ‘white man’ as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions … in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about ‘white’ men.33
For twelve long years, I lived within the narrow-minded confines of the ‘straitjacket world’ created by my strong belief that Elijah Muhammad was a messenger direct from God Himself and my faith in what I now see to be a pseudo-religious philosophy that he preaches …. My religion is Islam as it is believed and practiced by Muslims here in the Holy City of Mecca. This religion recognizes all men as brothers. It accepts all human beings as equals before God, and as equal members in the Human Family of Mankind. I totally reject Elijah Muhammad’s racist philosophy.34
This inclusive direction formed in Mecca was reinforced by his travels in Africa during July-November 1964. In Kenya, he had a long, searching discussion with William Attwood, the U.S. ambassador—a white man, Malcolm discovered, with an open mind:
We talked for an entire afternoon … he told me that as long as he was on the African continent, he never thought in terms of race, that he dealt with human beings, never noticing their color…. only when he returned to America would he become aware of color differences. I told him, ‘What you are telling me is that it isn’t the American white man who is a racist, but it’s the American political, economic and social atmosphere that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man …. And we both agreed that if racism could be removed, America could offer a society where rich and poor could truly live like human beings. That discussion with the ambassador gave me a new insight—one which I like: that the white man is not inherently evil, but America’s racist society influences him to act evilly. The society has produced and nourishes a psychology which brings out the lowest, most base part of human beings.35
With this insight, Malcolm had arrived at a tenet of inclusiveness that Gandhi often stressed, to “Hate the sin and not the sinner.”36
It is important to recognize that the evidence of Malcolm’s change to an inclusive attitude is found not only in his autobiography but also in his speeches. In the final year, and especially in the last month of his life, his speeches often carry the same humanist spirit present in his autobiography. Thus in a speech delivered on April 8, 1964, entitled “The Black Revolution,” Malcolm declared:
“We have to keep in mind at all times that we are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition as human beings. We are fighting for the right to live as free humans in this society. In fact, we are actually fighting for rights that are even greater than civil rights and that is human rights.”37
In the week before his assassination, he gave two important speeches, the first in Rochester, where he clearly explained his attitude toward whites:
We don’t judge a man because of the color of his skin. We don’t judge you because you’re white; we don’t judge you because you’re brown. We judge you because of what you do and what you practice. And as long as you practice evil, we’re against you. And for us, the most—the worst form of evil is the evil that’s based upon judging a man because of the color of his skin … So we’re not against people because they’re white. But we’re against those who practice racism.38
Finally, in his last public speech, given on February 18, 1965 at Barnard College in New York, Malcolm reiterated a theme that he had first expressed at Harvard University two months earlier:
It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a radical conflict of black against white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter. The Negro revolution is not a racial revolt. We are interested in practicing brotherhood with anyone really interested in living according to it.39
This inclusive global vision had not been conceived before Malcolm’s travels abroad. It recalls Gandhi’s frequent indictments of imperialist exploitation. Yet, there does remain a subs
tantial difference, even in Malcolm’s final phase, between his position on the one hand and Gandhi’s or King’s on the other. This is over the issue of violence.
Gandhi’s unequivocal advocacy of nonviolence and particularly of the necessary relationship between nonviolent means and ends has been discussed at length above. Martin Luther King’s views on this are identical to Gandhi’s. King believed that “Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is preexistent in the means.”40 Malcolm remained unimpressed by this argument to the end. In the final chapter of his autobiography, which represents the last stage of his thought, he wrote: “Well, I believe it’s a crime for anyone who is being brutalized to continue to accept that brutality without doing something to defend himself. If that’s how ‘Christian’ philosophy is interpreted, if that’s what Gandhian philosophy teaches, well, then, I will call them criminal philosophies.”41 He could hardly have put it more forcefully and he argued this position consistently in his speeches:
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