Happy birthday, Malcolm X
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Sat May 19, 2012 10:25 AM EDT
Today is the birthday of Malcolm X. He would have been 87 years old.
Malcolm rarely receives the kind of mainstream press attention that his better known counterpart, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. does. And perhaps that is best. Unlike King, Malcolm has been not been subjected to the ahistorical nostalgia machine of American hero-making. His radicalism remains intact.
Let me be clear by what I mean when I say radicalism.
I do not mean that Malcolm X sought to overthrow the American state. He did not. What he did seek was the undermining the structural inequality on which so many practices of the American state rested. At various points in his political career he advocated for separatism from a country he found irredeemably racist. He also evolved into a more nuanced thinker. He embraced a broad internationalism that sought to hold the United States accountable to world standards for human rights and free democracy.
I do not mean that Malcolm X advocated violence. He did not. Malcolm was a staunch believer in the rights of citizens to defend themselves and their homes. He was, in some ways, a true second amendment theorist who believed that men, women and communities have a right to