Wolfenstein’s psychobiography is especially helpful because it combines several compelling features: a historical analysis of the black (nationalist) revolutionary struggle, an insightful biographical analysis of Malcolm X’s life, and an imaginative social theory that explains how a figure like Malcolm X could emerge from the womb of black struggle against American apartheid. Wolfenstein accounts for how Malcolm’s childhood was affected by violent, conflicting domestic forces and describes how black culture’s quest for identity at the margins of American society—especially when viewed from the even more marginal perspective of the black poor—shaped Malcolm’s adolescence and young adulthood.
Wolfenstein also explores Malcolm’s career as a zealous young prophet and public mouthpiece for Elijah Muhammad, revealing the psychic and social needs that Malcolm’s commitments served. Wolfenstein’s imaginative remapping of Malcolm’s intellectual and emotional landscape marks a significant contribution as well to the history of African-American ideas, offering new ways of understanding one of the most complex figures in our nation’s history.
Undoubtedly, Wolfenstein’s book would have benefited from a discussion of how black religious groups provided social and moral cohesion in northern urban black communities, and from a description of their impact on Earl Little’s ministry. Although Wolfenstein perceptively probes the appeal of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association to blacks—and the social, psychological, and economic ground it partly shared with the Ku Klux Klan and white proletarian workers—his psychoanalytic Marxist interpretation of Earl Little and Malcolm would have been substantially enhanced by an engagement with black Protestant beliefs about the relationship between work, morality, and self-regard.50
Wolfenstein is often keenly insightful about black liberation movements and the forces that precipitated their eruption, but his dependence on biological definitions of race weakens his arguments.51 The value of more complex readings of race is that they not only show how the varied meanings of racism are created in society; but prove as well that the idea of race has a cultural history.52 More complex theories of race would permit Wolfenstein to illumine the changing intellectual and social terrain of struggle by groups that oppose the vicious meanings attributed to African-American identity by cultural racists.
In the end, Wolfenstein is too dependent on the revelations and reconstructions of self-identity that Malcolm (with Haley’s assistance) achieved in his autobiography. In answering his own rhetorical questions about whether Malcolm and Haley represented Malcolm accurately, Wolfenstein says that from a “purely empirical standpoint, I believe the answer to both questions is generally affirmative.”53 The problem, of course, is that Malcolm’s recollections are not without distortions. These distortions, when taken together with the book’s interpretive framework, not only reveal his attempts to record his life history, but reflect as well his need to control how his life was viewed during the ideological frenzy that marked his last year. By itself, self-description is an unreliable basis for reconstructing the meaning of Malcolm’s life and career. Still, Wolfenstein’s work is the most sophisticated treatment to date of Malcolm’s intellectual and psychological roots.
But Bruce Perry’s uneven psychobiographical study, Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America, which reaches exhaustively beyond Malcolm’s selfrepresentation in his autobiography, possesses little of the psychoanalytic rigor and insight of Wolfenstein’s work.54 Although Perry unearths new information about Malcolm, he does not skillfully clarify the impact that such information should have on our understanding of Malcolm. The volume renders Malcolm smaller than life.
In Perry’s estimation, Malcolm’s childhood holds the interpretive key to understanding his mature career as a black leader: Malcolm’s “war against the white power structure evolved from the same inner needs that had spawned earlier rebellions against his teachers, the law, established religion, and other symbols of authority.”55 Perry’s picture of Malcolm’s family is one of unremitting violence, criminality, and pathology. The mature Malcolm is equally tragic: a man of looming greatness whose self-destruction “contributed to his premature death.”56 It is precisely here that Perry’s psychobiography folds in on itself, its rough edges puncturing the center of its explanatory purpose. It is not that psychobiography cannot remark on the unraveling of domestic relations that weave together important threads of personal identity, threads that are also woven into adolescent and adult behavior. But Perry has a penchant for explaining complex psychic forces—and the social conditions that influence their makeup—in simplistic terms and tabloid-like arguments.
Still, Perry’s new information about Malcolm is occasionally revealing, though some of the claims he extracts from this information are more dubious than others. When, for instance, Perry addresses areas of Malcolm’s life that can be factually verified, he is on solid ground. By simply checking Malcolm’s school records Perry proves that, contrary to his autobiography, Malcolm was not expelled from West Junior High School but actually completed the seventh grade in 1939. And by interviewing several family members, Perry establishes that neither Malcolm’s half-sister Ella nor his father Earl were, as Malcolm contended, “jet black,” a claim Perry views as Malcolm’s way of equating “blackness and the strength his lightskinned mother had lacked.”57 Despite Malcolm X’s assertion of close friendships with Lionel Hampton, Sonny Greer, and Cootie Williams during his hustling days, Perry’s interviews show that the “closeness Malcolm described was as fictitious as the closeness he said he had shared with the members of his own family.”58
But when Perry addresses aspects of Malcolm’s experience that invite close argument and analytical interpretation, he is on shakier ground. At this juncture, Perry displays an insensitivity to African-American life and an ignorance about black intellectual traditions that weaken his book. For instance, Perry depicts Malcolm’s travels to Africa—partially in an attempt to expand his organization’s political and financial base, but also to express his increasingly international social vision—as intended solely to fund his fledgling organization. Perry also draws questionable parallels between the cloudy events surrounding a fire at Malcolm’s family farm during his early childhood in 1929 (which Perry concludes points to arson by Earl Little) and the fire at Malcolm’s New York house after his dispute with Nation of Islam officials over ownership rights.
A major example of the limitation of Perry’s psychobiographical approach is his treatment of Malcolm’s alleged homosexual activity, both as an experimenting adolescent and as a hustling, income-seeking young adult. Perry’s remarks are more striking for the narrow assumptions that underlie his interpretations than for their potential to dismantle the quintessential symbol of African-American manhood. If Malcolm did have homosexual relations, they might serve Perry as a powerful tool of interpretation to expose the tangled cultural roots of black machismo, and to help him explain the cruel varieties of homophobia that afflict black communities. A complex understanding of black sexual politics challenges a psychology of masculinity that views “male” as a homogeneous, natural, and universally understood identity. A complex understanding of masculinity maintains that male identity is also significantly affected by ethnic, racial, economic, and sexual differences.
But Perry’s framework of interpretation cannot assimilate the information his research has unearthed. Although the masculinist psychology that chokes much of black leadership culture needs to be forcefully criticized, Perry’s observations do not suffice. Because he displays neither sensitivity to nor knowledge about complex black cultural beliefs regarding gender and sexual difference, Perry’s portrait of Malcolm’s sex life forms a rhetorical low blow, simply reinforcing a line of attack against an already sexually demonized black leadership culture.
The power of psychobiography in discussing black leaders is its potential to shed light on its subjects in a manner that traditional biography fails to achieve. African-American cultural studies, which has
traditionally made little use of psychoanalytic theory, has sacrificed the insights such an undertaking might offer while avoiding the pitfalls of psychological explanations of human motivation. After all, psychobiography is also prone to overreach its capacity to explain.
In some ways, the psychobiographer’s quest for (in this case) the “real Malcolm” presumes that human experience is objective and that truth is produced by explaining the relation between human action and psychic motivation. Such an approach may seduce psychobiographers into believing that they are gaining access to the static, internal psychic reality of a historical figure. Often such access is wrongly believed to be separate from the methods of investigation psychobiographers employ, and from the aims and presumptions, as well as the biases and intellectual limitations, that influence their work.
Because both Wolfenstein and Perry (like Goldman) are white, their psychobiographies in particular raise suspicion about the ability of white intellectuals to interpret black experience. Although such speculation is rarely systematically examined, it surfaces as both healthy skepticism and debilitating paranoia in the informal debates that abound in a variety of black intellectual circles. Such debates reflect two crucial tensions generated by psychobiographical explanations of black leaders by white authors: that such explanations reflect insensitivity to black culture, and that white proponents of psychobiographical analysis are incompetent to assess black life adequately. Several factors are at the base of such conclusions.
First is the racist history that has affected every tradition of American scholarship and that has obscured, erased, or distorted accounts of the culture and history of African Americans.59 Given this history (and the strong currents of antiintellectualism that flood most segments of American culture), suspicion of certain forms of critical intellectual activity survive in many segments of black culture. Also, black intellectuals have experienced enormous difficulty in securing adequate cultural and financial support to develop self-sustaining traditions of scholarly investigation and communities of intellectual inquiry.60
For example, from its birth in the womb of political protest during the late 1960s and early 1970s, black studies has been largely stigmatized and usually underfunded. Perhaps the principal reasons for this are the beliefs held by many whites (and some blacks) that, first, black scholars should master nonblack subjects, and second, that black studies is intellectually worthless. Ironically, once the more than 200 black studies programs in American colleges and universities became established, many white academics became convinced that blacks are capable of studying only “black” subjects.
At the same time, black studies experienced a new “invasion” by white intellectuals. This new invasion—mimicking earlier patterns of white scholarship on black life even as most black scholars were prevented from being published—provoked resentment from black scholars.”61 The resentment hinged on the difficulty black scholars experienced in securing appointments in most academic fields beyond black studies. Black scholars were also skeptical of the intellectual assumptions and political agendas of white scholars, especially because there was strong precedence for many white scholars to distort black culture in their work by either exoticizing or demonizing its expression. Black intellectual skeptics opposed to white interpretations of black culture and figures employ a variety of arguments in their defense.
Many black intellectuals contend that black experience is unique and can be understood, described, and explained only by blacks. Unquestionably, AfricanAmerican history produces cultural and personal experiences that are distinct, even singular. But the historical character of such experiences makes them theoretically accessible to any interpreter who has a broad knowledge of African-American intellectual traditions, a balanced and sensible approach to black culture, and the same skills of rational argumentation and scholarly inquiry required in other fields of study.
There is no special status of being that derives from black cultural or historical experience that grants black interpreters an automatically superior understanding of black cultural meanings. This same principle allows black scholars to interpret Shakespeare, study Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and master Marxist social theory. In sum, black cultural and historical experiences do not produce ideas and practices that are incapable of interpretation when the most critically judicious and culturally sensitive methods of intellectual inquiry are applied.
Many intellectuals also believe that black culture is unified and relatively homogeneous. But this contention is as misleading as the first, especially in light of black culture’s wonderful complexity and radical diversity. The complexity and diversity of black culture means that a bewildering variety of opinions, beliefs, ideologies, traditions, and practices coexist, even if in a provisional sort of way. Black conservatives, scuba divers, socialists, and rock musicians come easily to mind. All these tendencies and traditions constitute and help define black culture. Given these realities, it is pointless to dismiss studies of black cultural figures simply because their authors are white. One must judge any work on AfricanAmerican culture by standards of rigorous critical investigation while attending to both the presuppositions that ground scholarly perspectives and the biases that influence intellectual arguments.
Psychobiographies of Malcolm X’s life and career represent an important advance in Malcolm studies. The crucial issue is not color, but consciousness about African-American culture, sensitivity to trends and developments in black society, knowledge of the growing literature about various dimensions of black American life, and a theoretical sophistication that artfully blends a variety of disciplinary approaches in yielding insight about a complex historic figure like Malcolm X. When psychobiography is employed in this manner, it can go a long way toward breaking new ground in understanding and explaining the life of important black figures. When it is incompetently wielded, psychobiographical analysis ends up simply projecting the psychobiographer’s intellectual biases and limitations of perspective onto the historical screen of a black figure’s career.
VOICES IN THE WILDERNESS:
REVOLUTIONARY SPARKS AND MALCOLM’ S LAST YEAR
To comprehend the full sweep of a figure’s life and thought, it is necessary to place that figure’s career in its cultural and historical context and view the trends and twists of thought that mark significant periods of change and development. Such an approach may be termed a trajectory analysis because it attempts to outline the evolution of belief and thought of historic figures by matching previously held ideas to newer ones, seeking to grasp whatever continuities and departures can be discerned from such an enterprise. Trajectory analysis, then, may be a helpful way of viewing a figure such as Martin Luther King Jr., whose career may be divided into the early optimism of civil rights ideology to the latter-day aggressive nonviolence he advocated on the eve of his assassination. It may also be enlightening when grappling with the serpentine mysteries of Malcolm’s final days.
Malcolm’s turbulent severance from Elijah Muhammad’s psychic and worldmaking womb initiated yet another stage of his personal and political evolution, marking a conversion experience. On one level, Malcolm freed himself from Elijah’s destructive ideological grip, shattering molds of belief and practice that were no longer useful or enabling. On another level, Malcolm’s maturation and conversion were the result of his internal ideals of moral expectation, social behavior, and authentic religious belief. His conversion, though suddenly manifest, was most likely a gradual process involving both conscious acts of dissociation from the Nation of Islam and the “subconscious incubation and maturing of motives deposited by the experiences of life.”62
Many commentators have heavily debated the precise nature of Malcolm’s transformation. Indeed, his last fifty weeks on earth form a fertile intellectual field where the seeds of speculation readily blossom into conflicting interpretations of Malcolm’s meaning at the end of his life. Lomax says that Malcolm became a “lukewarm integrationist.”63 Goldman suggest
s that Malcolm was “improvising,” that he embraced and discarded ideological options as he went along.64 Cleage and T’shaka hold that he remained a revolutionary black nationalist. And Cone asserts that Malcolm became an internationalist with a humanist bent.
But the most prominent and vigorous interpreters of the meaning of Malcolm’s last year have been a group of intellectuals associated with the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist-Marxist group that took keen interest in Malcolm’s post-Mecca social criticism and sponsored some of his last speeches. For the most part, their views have been articulately promoted by George Breitman, author of The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary and editor of two volumes of Malcolm’s speeches, organizational statements, and interviews during his last years: Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements and By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter, by Malcolm X. A third volume of Malcolm’s speeches, Malcolm X: The Last Speeches, was edited by Bruce Perry, who claimed “ideological difference with the publisher.65
Breitman’s The Last Year of Malcolm X is a passionately argued book that maintains Malcolm’s split with Elijah took Malcolm by surprise, making it necessary for him to gain time and experience to reconstruct his ideological beliefs and redefine his organizational orientation. Breitman divides Malcolm’s independent phase into two parts: the transition period, lasting the few months between his split in March 1964 and his return from Africa at the end of May 1964; and the final period, lasting from June 1964 until his death in February 1965. Breitman maintains that in the final period, Malcolm “was on the way to a synthesis of black nationalism and socialism that would be fitting for the American scene and acceptable to the masses in the black ghetto.”66
For Breitman’s argument to be persuasive, it had to address Malcolm’s continuing association with a black nationalism that effectively excluded white participation, or else show that he had developed a different understanding of black nationalism. Also, he had to prove that Malcolm’s anticapitalist statements and remarks about socialism represented a coherent and systematic exposition of his beliefs as a political strategist and social critic. Breitman contends that in the final period, Malcolm made distinctions between separatism (the belief that blacks should be socially, culturally, politically, and economically separate from white society) and nationalism (the belief that blacks should control their own culture).
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