Missing Malcom X

[Mark Kohut]

And, as a middle-class white boy once said to me:
"The Autobiography of Malcolm X scared the shit out of me"....

Another Pynchonian resonance?

On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 6:06 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> What makes Malcolm different from every signature Black figure in
> American history is that he combines the two central characters of
> Black folk culture. He is both the trickster and the minister. He’s
> both. That’s “Detroit Red”—the hustler, the gambler, the outlaw. And,
> he is also the minister who saves souls, who redeems lives, who heals
> the sick, who raises the dead. He’s both. King is one. Jesse Jackson
> is one. Malcolm’s both and he understood the streets and the lumpen
> proletariat. I hate that phrase, but it comes from Marx. As well as,
> he saw himself as a minister and an Amun, a cleric. He was always
> this. And he embodied the cultural spirit of Black folk better than
> anyone else. When I asked one student about a decade ago, “What was
> the fundamental difference between Malcolm and Martin?” He said, “Dr.
> Marable, that’s easy. Martin Luther King, Jr., belongs to the entire
> world. Malcolm X belongs to us.” There is a tremendous degree of
> identification on the part of people of African descent, and globally
> on the part of Muslims, invested in the figure of Malcolm.
>
> http://isreview.org/issue/63/missing-malcolm
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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