The Geography of Malcolm X

Black Radicalism and the Remaking of American Space

James Tyner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317793632
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios afroamericanos

The impact of Malcolm X and black nationalism can hardly be overestimated. Not only did they transform race relations in America, they revolutionized the study of race in all fields of study, from American history to literature to sociology. Jim Tyner's The Geography of Malcolm X will be the first book to apply a geographical perspective to black radicalism. The Geography of Malcolm X explores how the radical black power movement that emerged in the 1960s thought and acted in spatial terms. How did they conceive of the space of the ghetto? The different social and political geographies of the North and South? The imaginative geographies connecting blacks in America to Africa and the emerging postcolonial world? At the center of his account is the intellectual evolution of Malcolm X, who at every stage of his development applied a spatial perspective to the predicament of blacks in America and the world. The Geography of Malcolm X introduces critical race theory to geography and demonstrates to readers in many other fields the importance of space and place in black nationalist thought. Given his range of thinking and his centrality to the era, Malcolm X is an ideal window into this long-neglected aspect of race relations in America.

1
MALCOLM X AND BLACK RADICAL THOUGHT

. . . for us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond.

—Aimé Césaire¹

This is not a biography of Malcolm X, but rather a geography of knowledge.² This is an attempt to place the political thought of Malcolm X within a broader context of fundamental concepts of Geography, including segregation, territoriality, representations of place, scalar politics, and representations of self-hood. My starting point begins with a challenge posed by Malcolm X himself. Shortly before his death in 1965, Malcolm X concluded his autobiography with a reflection on his greatest failing, namely, the lack of an academic education. More significant, though, was his understanding of the confluence of knowledge, liberation, and African Americans. Malcolm X wrote:

You see, most whites, even when they credit a Negro with some intelligence, will still feel that all he can talk about is the race issue; most whites never feel that Negroes can contribute anything to other areas of thought, and ideas. You just notice how rarely you will ever hear whites asking any Negroes what they think about the problem of world health, or the space race to land men on the moon.³

I propose to ask Malcolm X about geography.

An enigmatic and controversial figure, the legacy of Malcolm X continues to evoke intense debate over the meanings of both justice and humanity. “We want freedom, justice, and equality,” Malcolm X wrote. “We want recognition and respect as human beings.”⁴ Malcolm X was clearly a product, and producer, of his times. Malcolm X also represented both a continuation with earlier radical black intellectuals as well as a transitional figure between the counterculture and youth movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, as the Civil Rights Movement shifted in the mid-1960s, demanding economic equality as well as social justice, scholars and federal offi cials attempted to untangle the threads of poverty, race, and gender; much of this scholarship began to focus on core themes that were recurrent in the speeches and writings of Malcolm X.⁵

The late 1950s and early 1960s—the years of Malcolm X’s most intense political maturation—were a chaotic period of Cold War politics, wars of national liberation, and social movements for selfdetermination. Following the Second World War the United States found itself as the most powerful economic and military state in the world, and American policy-makers worked to maintain this supremacy. During the Cold War the United States dedicated itself to the endless accumulation of capital and to the securement of markets for resources and investment. Politicians were prepared to exercise the political and military power to defend and promote that process across the globe against the communist threat.⁶ Billions of dollars in aid were distributed to Western European states in an attempt to buttress America’s preeminence in the world market. And even Japan, a country devastated by America’s nuclear power, was reconstructed with American monies.

In its foreign affairs, the United States presented itself as the chief defender of liberty and equality. But American policies were at times seen as contradictory and hypocritical. The United States, for example, supported in principle the ideals of self-determination, and yet simultaneously helped France reimpose its colonial reign on Indo-China. American offi cials likewise suppressed anticolonial liberation movements in the Congo and the Philippines. Malcolm X, among others, was a vocal critic of American policies, daring to challenge the hypocrisy of American foreign interventions.

Malcolm X is in many ways inseparable from the revolutionary fervor of the 1960s. All society was a battleground: a great deal was at stake and powerful social forces were in conflict.⁷ According to Max Elbaum, this conflict entailed, on the one hand, the country’s traditional elite, accustomed to power and absolutely determined to maintain it; on the other hand, were previously marginalized groups who were no longer prepared to accept unequal treatment or unjust wars at home or abroad.⁸

As opposition to international communism became the guiding principle of American foreign policy, so too did this principle translate into increased surveillance and repression of domestic social movements. As the Cold War was increasingly cast in apocalyptic terms, critics of American society—such as Malcolm X, but also Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, and Dick Gregory—often found themselves labeled as “subversive” and “anti-American.”⁹ American politicians, fearful of communism both home and abroad, retained a tight control over ideas and actions. This would have a profound impact on the development of black radical thought. As expressed by Rod Bush, throughout the twentieth century African- American social movements shifted from a concern primarily with their own survival and prosperity to a more antisystemic position, which essentially demanded a fundamental reordering of the capitalist world-system.¹⁰

American attitudes and treatments of “minorities,” however, became international fodder for the communist states of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and China. During the Cold War years America’s self-proclaimed leadership of the free world came under intense scrutiny. Images of police dogs and national guard soldiers attacking African Americans were discordant with the principles forwarded by American politicians. As the United States competed with the Soviet Union for the “hearts and minds” of newly independent states in Asia and Africa, a burning question remained: Did America live up to its own ideals? Such was the American dilemma, the contradiction between racism and the ideology of democracy.¹¹ Malcolm X recognized this dilemma, and understood fully the implications of American foreign policy on the Civil Rights Movement. His message was painfully blunt, his words were passionate but plain: “You and I were born at this turning point in history,” he explained, “we are witnessing the fulfillment of prophecy. Our present generation is witnessing the end of colonialism, Europeanism, Westernism, or ‘White-ism’ . . . the end of white supremacy, the end of the evil white man’s unjust rule.”¹²

Political and economic changes were also manifest on the landscapes of the United States. From Los Angeles to Harlem, Chicago to Boston, Malcolm X witnessed the profound changes that were occurring at the street level. The years of Malcolm X evinced a reorganization of everyday life that was unparalleled in American history. Especially pronounced in the northern and western states, many young American families began to settle in the suburbs. The “American” way of life was that of Norman Rockwell, with private single-family homes and white picket fences. And by 1960, for the first time in U.S. history, a majority of American families owned the homes in which they lived.¹³ But not all Americans were able to participate in these changes. The spaces of America were Janusfaced, with the decaying black urban ghetto contrasting starkly with the idyllic suburban oasis of white America. The color line long ago identified by W.E.B. DuBois was more than a spatial metaphor; it was the literal inscription of social injustice and inequality on the American landscape. For many African Americans, their lives were spatially restricted to high-rise project buildings in overcrowded and underserviced slums. These spaces of oppression and degradation were not the result of local prejudices. Rather, for Malcolm X, these spaces were the result of an entrenched and corrupt system that marginalized peoples in America and beyond.

Economically, many African Americans entered the decade of the 1950s in a better economic position than ever before; earnings as a whole were up, and the number of African-American households that could legitimately afford to own a home had increased substantially.¹⁴ However, many African-American families were unable to participate fully in the American Dream. Lending institutions continued to discriminate in their granting of loans and, with new housing largely unavailable to them, African Americans found themselves left only with hand-me-down houses.¹⁵ Subsequently, as America’s involvement in global capitalism deepened, many African Americans saw their lives continue to worsen. The Cold War rhetoric of self-determination, equality, and social justice rang hollow in the ears of many African Americans. The historical and geographical experiences of African Americans left them with a deep sense of alienation from the society of their birth and an intense longing for full and equal citizenship.¹⁶ This sense of longing, however, was coupled with a profound questioning of their belonging.

What does it mean to belong? In a state such as the United States, a nation of many cultures, does it make sense to speak of an American community of meaning, an American culture? According to Kenneth Karst, the question “Who belongs?“ turns out to be a question about the meanings of America. He explains that to speak of self-definition, of the sense of community, and of the community-defining functions of law is not to identify different parts of a machine, but to view a complex social process from several different angles.¹⁷

Questions of belonging are thus as much personal and political as they are legal. But they are also spatial. To belong is to be some place. But as Malcolm X argued, belonging was not a matter of choice, but rather a matter of contestation. The Civil Rights Movement was more than a demand to eat at a lunch counter; it was a demand to be present, to be counted. The message of Malcolm X was, in short, for African Americans to assume their Constitutionally guaranteed place in America. The Civil Rights Movement must be transformed into a revolutionary movement to remake American spaces.

Black Radical Intellectuals and the Pursuit of Geographic Understanding

Geography, as the study of space, is well positioned to contribute to an understanding of racism and other forms of injustice. How these geographies are approached, however, requires a critical reflexivity in the questions we ask, the methods employed, and the worldviews that guide them. In short, a revolution in geography is also required. For nearly four decades David Harvey has been an outspoken proponent of just such an approach. According to Harvey, a revolution in geographic thought does not “entail yet another empirical investigation of the social conditions in ghettos.” For Harvey, suffi cient information exists as evidence of our society’s inhumanity. We do not need another map of malnutrition, poverty, or crime; we do not need further sterile empirical descriptions devoid of critical analysis. Instead, Harvey argued that the immediate task for geographers was and is “nothing more nor less than the self-conscious and aware construction of a new paradigm for social geographic thought through a deep and profound critique of our existing analytical constructs.” Geography was to mobilize its efforts “to formulate concepts and categories, theories and arguments” which could then be applied “in the process of bringing about a humanizing social change.”¹⁸

William Bunge likewise cautioned against “campus geographers” who tended to separate theory from practice. Of these geographers, sitting comfortably within their ivory towers, Bunge admonished that “They read too much and look and, often, struggle not at all. They cite, not sight.”¹⁹ Bunge described his experiences of living in the African-American “ghetto” in Chicago for the Martin Luther King, Jr. demonstrations. At the time, Bunge was contemplating a project on “humankind as a three-dimensional creature.” He wrote:

I worked with a young Black woman, a union worker, and former peddler on 43rd Street. . . . She hated my concern about the three dimensionality of the species and our need to protect the world’s children. Her people’s children were starving. . . . Another young Black woman . . . was teaching me similar lessons, filled with hatred toward me because I did not notice the children being murdered by automobiles in front of their homes or children starving in front of abundant food.²⁰

Bunge concluded that the two young black women, furiously interpreting the world all around him that he could not see, because his life had been spent buried in books, caused him to reverse his analysis.

By the late 1980s, however, a geographic engagement with racial injustice was diminishing. The revolutionary paradigm advocated by Harvey, Bunge, and others remained unfinished. Despite Harvey’s plea in the early 1970s, inquiries into the spatial distribution and development of African-American residential patterns as well as concerns over social problems have dominated the literature at the expense of cultural and historical studies of African Americans and African-American places. Moreover, in tandem with the relative decline of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1970s, and in the face of widespread white-identity backlash, the effect may have been to reduce, if not remove, challenges to racism from the dominant liberal agenda.²¹

Certainly the infusion of critical social theory into the discipline of geography has retained some discussion on racism and social justice. This is exhibited most clearly in the forwarding of feminist and queer theories, and, in particular, the nexus of the personal and the political. Mona Domosh, for example, relates her experience of hearing bell hooks speak at Florida Atlantic University. Domosh was inspired by the talk, but she was concerned by some ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CHAPTER 1 MALCOLM X AND BLACK RADICAL THOUGHT
• CHAPTER 2 THE DISPLACEMENTS OF MALCOLM X
• CHAPTER 3 CONTESTING GEOGRAPHIC KNOWLEDGES
• CHAPTER 4 SPACE AND THE GEOGRAPHIES OF SEPARATION
• CHAPTER 5 SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE REVOLUTIONS OF MALCOLM X
• CHAPTER 6 GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATIONS AND THE PLACE OF AFRICA
• CHAPTER 7 THE SCALAR POLITICS OF MALCOLM X AND BEYOND
• CHAPTER 8 THE SOCIAL JUSTICE OF MALCOLM X
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX