No More Malcom X’s, Please!
Thank God White America Reformed Prisons
Yes, Malcolm X was and is a very inspiring leader, really a thought leader/activist/thinker though he wasn’t really a political leader of a group of people in terms of organizing. He didn’t carry a gun during his critical orating and thinking years, only toward the end when he was threatened. But what I just recently discovered was that his life wasn’t a complete 180. He spent time in jail, but it wasn't the modern jail system inherited from the mass incarceration period that we have come to know and hate.
Malcolm X went to prison apparently in the Goldilocks zone of American history.
His father and mother were inspirational activists, who had their house burned down the father’s outspokenness by a group called the Black Legion (which was like a klan group or White League or red shirts, and hated blacks, despite the name). It was only from their deaths that he ended up a drift, engaging in his teens in what can be described as a petty crime.
When he landed in jail, he transformed himself by reading a lot over the course of 8 years or so and got his about self-empowerment in particular from Elijah Mohamed’s idea of a black culture that relied on itself and nothing on whites. He then got out and was self-empowered and highly educated, and the rest as they say is inspirational history.
But he started off not in some “gangster” “hood”, as they largely didn’t exist in the form recognizable today, and there really wasn’t the “horrific” prison conditions either. He was “lucky” to be in prison at a time and place in history (the 1940s and 50s not in the South) where he could basically be left alone in his own cell, have access to books and read and write and learn, and emerge “reformed”.
He ws double lucky he went to jail in 1944 and not sent to the frontlines in Europe or Japan during World War II. He was lucky it was after the brutality of slavery, and he was not in the South where, honestly, he would have just been beaten or hanged; and lucky it was not in the mass incarceration period that followed starting in the 1980s. He took advantage of the solid moral activist base his parents gave him, the Pan-African ideas his dad got from Marcus Gravey, and other ideals related to his parents, who were people from my reading who were what I would call black American intellectuals and activist.
After that period, with the FBI watching his every move and his and MLK’s death, the goals of prisons set by white politicians’ changes. It almost seemed like some white politician in DC said, Hey, we can’t have white prisons that treat black people with a modicum of dignity and give them books. Let’s eviscerate all traces of dignity, make supermax prisons for superpredators, pack them two or more to a cell, and let drugs come in, gangs form and not interfere in shanking fights, and hopefully we won’t get another Malcolm X emerging.
Because, let me tell you, there were only about 60 thousand total people, of which 30 percent were black Americans (from the official government statistics I'm reading but might be misinterpreting) in prison before Reagan/Bush/Clinton did the mass incarceration of 3 million blacks over the decades starting in 1980s to 2000s.
And if black men got the kind of benign neglect and quiet cell Malcolm got in prison so he could reform, then prisons would be really dangerous: could you imagine just 1 of the 3 million black men emerging from prison during a 20-year times period, and being educated activists like Malcolm X? Holy Jesus Mohammed Mary Joseph and Buddha.
Whites couldn’t even deal with one Malcolm X, but one million?
Those prisoners would get shut down faster than you could blink and the politicians on both wings of the political spectrum would give all those black men jobs, any sort of jobs, send them to technical schools or something instead. Do something for God and Allah’s and Yahweh’s sake, we have to stop the prisons from producing well-spoken, inspiring black American activists! OMG, I can feel the white mainstream American in me having a heart attack at just the thought of it.
We can have black gangsters and rappers and drug dealers on the streets shooting drugs and bullets, but white America cannot tolerate a million Malcolms demanding justice proudly and with such unshakeable dignity.
