malcolm xcleaver`s vision

Indiana State University
Cleaver's Vision of America and the New White Radical: A Legacy of Malcom X
Author(s): Joyce Nower
Source: Negro American Literature Forum, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Mar., 1970), pp. 12-21
Published by: St. Louis University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3041073 .
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CLEAVER'SVISION OF AMERICAAND THE NEW
WHITE RADICAL: A LEGACY OF MALCOM X
Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver,
Minister of Information of the Black
of essays
Panther Party, is a, collection
on
that conveys a, world perspective
and sets
oppression
and its sources,
forth the major tool of liberation:
The essays,
ranging
self-determination.
of the author's
from a, description
views
spiritual
rebirth to the political
in the 10 Point Platthat are reflected
form of the Black Panther Party, to a,
of black-white
discussion
sex, are
of conwritten in one of the liveliest
temporary prose styles.
himself above all
Cleaver addresses
to black and white youth who, he writes,
are "free in a way that Americans have
never been before."
He observes that the
which is
gap between the generations,
"deeper than the struggle between the
is becoming more and more poliraces,"
tical;
that "white youth are taking the
learned in
using techniques
initiative,
the Negro struggle to attack problems in
the general society."
("The White Race
and Its Heroes")
But the freedom of spirit experienced
by white youth today has been gained by
of the disparity
a, painful recognition
and
between America's professed ideals
of what America, practhe "bitter reality
ticed":
The black vision of American society,
in greater dewhich will be discussed
tail in the next section of this paper,
society in
is that America, is a, static
which only those who belong to a, special
group or those who manage to melt into
that group--the white middle class--are
mobile";
that,
able to be "socially
furthermore, those who cannot conform are
hemmed in by a system of controls that
educational
range from an oppressive
police presence;
system to an oppressive
is not sporadic and
that this oppression
but rather is built into the
individual,
system.
In our century, certain events and
ideas have converged which have prepared
the way for the emergence of the black
For
vision in the minds of white youth.
example, the post World Wax I breakup of
ethic, which has
the Puritan-Victorian
finally presented us with the possibility
of exploring our total humanity; the
after World War II,
Nuremberg trials
the primacy of the law
which established
of conscience
over the law of the state;
to the war in Vietnam,
the resistance
the implementation of
which illustrates
of
and the closeness
this principle;
death, in the form of the nuclear bomb,
which has sharpened the urgency for
leading an examined life stripped of
illusions.
existenOn the philosophical
level,
dramatized in the plays and
tialism,
novels of Sartre and Camus, showed up in
classrooms in the fifties.
university
knowledge and
The emphasis on experiential
in making
responsibility
individual
choices concurred with the mood of the
This outlook was subsequently popuday.
when exisin the early sixties,
larized
went TV on such shows as
tentialism
But
"Route 66" and "Run for Your Life."
sold products on
before existentialism
before it entered the univerTV, a, little
it was the property of a small
sities,
called
alienated
group in San Francisco
Time Magazine
the "beat generation."
once referred to the fifties
a~s the
For all these years whites have
in the myth
been taught to believe
they preached, while Negroes have
of
had to face the bitter reality
. . The
what America, practiced.
core of the Black world's vision
and in fact beremains intact,
gins to expand and spread into
the psychological
territory vacated by the non-viable white
into the minds of young
lies,
i.e.,
whites and this is why those whites
who abandon the white image of
America, and adopt the black are
greeted with such unmitigated hos("The
tility
by their elders.
White Race and Its Heroes" )
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The shades of the prison-house
closed round about us all:
walls
straight and stubborn to the
whitest, but relentlessly
narrow,
and unscalable
tall,
to sons of
night who must plod darkly on in
resignation.
. . .
"silent
generation,"
but Time had overlooked this small but vocal and., subseminority, with its
quently, influential
three most outspoken members: Ginsberg,
Kerouac, and Corso.
The "beat" generation of the fifties
a rebirth of the spirit after
signified
the War, and during the cold war and
especially
the era of McCarthyism.
It
was not simply alienated
from the society.
It was looking for something:
"'Beat'
means beatitude,"
said Jack Kerouac.
"The Beat Generation is basically
a
religious
generation."
And the new
religion
turned out to be experiential
knowledge and values derived from that
knowledge, and the desire to end, once
and for all, the traditional
western
alienation
between body and mind.
The gap between the generations,
evidenced in the fifties,
deepened in the
middle sixties
with the emergence of the
hippie culture,
dedicated
to exploring
other modes of existence.
But political
radicalization
of white youth started
at the lunch counters in the South in
the early sixties
when young blacks--and
then whites--moved to action by conscience,
sought to destroy the "bitter
reality
of what America. practiced.."
The
progressive
radicalization
of white
youth, both student and non-student,
is
the process unfolding at the present
time.
The most obvious result of this
growing deviation
from the middle class
code is that white youth is eliciting
a
response from the society that heretofore had been experienced
only by
blacks.
Continual harassment by the
ostracism and discrimination
police,
from
the rest of the Establishment,
including
parents and teachers,
have never before
been perpetrated
on white youth on such
a wide scale.
The black vision of
America is indeed becoming a white vision, too.
The black vision is not a contemporary creation,
however, thought up by
Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Huey P.
Newton, or Eldridge Cleaver.
Black
literature
from its very beginnings in
the eighteenth century has revealed
writes W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of
Black Folk, 1903.
It is not surprising
then that the issues of national
hypocrisy,
justice,
and the key elements
that comprise personal and political
self-determination--manhood,
freedom,
self-defense,
self-knowledge,
and power-to be found in Soul on Ice have a historical
We shall look at each
context.
of these topics in this paper.
When Cleaver writes about our
national
hypocrisy, we axe reminded of
the famous Fourth of July speech by
Frederick Douglass,
given in 1852, in
which he says:
What to the American slave is
your Fourth of July? I answer,
a day that reveals to him more
than all other days of the year
the gross injustice
and cruelty
to which he is constant victem.
To him your celebration
is a
sham; your boasted liberty an
unholy license;
your national
greatness,
swelling vanity;.
.l
your denunciation
of tyrants,
brass-fronted
impudence; your
shouts of liberty and equality
hollow mockery. . .; There is
not a nation of the earth guilty
of practices
more shocking and
bloody than are the people of
these United States at this very
hour.
But lest we dismiss this example as
invalid
because it comes from the period
before the Civil War, we should observe
that any freedom the black masses gained
was so severely limited that as late as
1968, the authors of Black Rage, Doctors
Cobbs and Grier, remind us:
For white America to understand
the life of the black man, it
must recognize that so much time
American society as a caste society,
that is, at its best, hypocritical, and.,
at its worst, inhumanly cruel.
has passed and so little
changed.
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has
This vision is present in most of
as in
whether explicit,
black literature,
in
the example noted above, or implicit
the symbolism of fiction and drama. For
example, towards the beginning of Native
Son, Bigger is standing on a ghetto
street corner, looking up at an airplane,
For him, it is
a symbol of power.
At the close of the
unattainable.
cell;
novel, he is standing in a jail
sentence had already
however, his jail
The
started there on the street corner.
nature of his life is also symbolized
by the white snow: there is no escape
fact" of the oppressive
from the "natural
In William Demby' s
white society.
is
(1950) the leitmotiv
Beetlecreek
The main characstagnation.
spiritual
ter's movements towards freedom consists
of motion away from the small town. But
is offered.
towards what? No alternative
acts
physical
desperate
is
small,
Freedom
suffocation.
of
spiritual
stretches
between
of
antecedents
Two other interesting
are
Of
Love
respect,
this
Ice,
in
Soul on
and Dust by Ernest J. Gaines (19677 and
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Baldwin's
The story of Of Love and Dust
(1953).
in
takes place on a southern plantation
The white owner
the nineteen sixties.
in exchange
bails black men out of jail
A new kind of
for work on the land.
too far removed
serfdom is created--not
Go Tell It
from the system of slavery.
on the Mountain is centered around a
The extent
storefront church in Harlem.
freedom of choice
of the main character's
lies in deciding between the streets and
The drama, of conversion is
the church.
out by the ragged emotions of
cancelled
the family as they walk home together.
choice does nothing to
The Christian
extend temporal freedom
The view of the slave under slavery,
of the Free Negro before and
view
the
after the Civil War looking out from
the
his segregated corner of isolation,
in
the
Reconview of the sharecropper
struction era, the view of the modernday prisoner who has been bailed out of
the
to work a modern plantation,
jail
is
dweller,
view of the urban ghetto
from
still
dramatized by the quotation
DuBois with which we began this
which one, in the back of his mind,
could at one time accept as "the way of
the world," takes on an ugly aspect.
Cleaver observes
And, consequently,
that for many young whites:
The foundations of authority
to bits in
have been-blasted
America because the whole society
and
tried,
has been indicted,
("The
convicted of injustice.
White Race and Its Heroes")
Now, what about the mechanism of
In the
in such a society?
justice
on the AssassiReactions
essay "Initial
nation of Malcolm X," Cleaver writes
that "the prison system, which will be
of our
into the consciousness
injected
goes to the very-heart of
society,
Black
America's system of justice."
see themselves as "prisoners
prisoners
dog-eatof war, the victims of a vicious
system that is so heinous as
dog social
to cancel out their own malefactions:
In the jungle there is no right or
Furthermore, he says that
wrong."
feel "their imprisonment
Negro prisoners
is simply another form of oppression
which they have known all their lives."
then is an extenThe system of justice
sion of the system of white racist oppression.
But had not DuBois observed something similar in 1903:
system of the
. . the police
designed to
South was originally
keep track of all Negroes, not
and when
simply of criminals;
the Negroes were freed and the
whole South was convinced of the
of free Negro labor,
impossibility
the first and almost universal
device was to use the courts as a,
It
blacks.
means of reenslaving
was not then a question of crime,
but rather one of color, that
on
a man's conviction
settled
Thus Negroes
almost any charge.
came to look upon courts as
and
instruments of injustice
and upon those conoppression,
victed in them as martyrs and
victims.
(The Souls of Black Folk)
The prison-house of America
section.
The gap beis "the bitter reality."'
tween ideals and practice, that gap
Cleaver and the Black Panther Party
this black vision of
politicized
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in Point 9 of the
American justice
Black Panther Party Platform:
the others and which gets at the heart
of what is meant by the term dehuma~nization is the stereotype which presents
black people as not quite human, but
somewhere on the great chain of
situated
being between man and the lower animals.
It
This stereotype has many uses.
the attitude that the black
justifies
man has no right to the usual prerogatives
freedom of choice and action;
of manhood:
self-knowledge
the right to self-defense;
historical
which includes a positive
image grounded in past heroisms, an image
which will ensure a sense of cultural
and, of course, access to the
continuity;
It is this stereotype
sources of power.
which denies people of color their humanity
and which also denies them the very core
of the democratic process--self-determina.tion.
War example of this
A pre-Civil
stereotype can be found in a, medical
in 1863 in New York by
book published
Negroes
Dr. J. H. Van Evrie, entitled:
The First an Inferior
and Negro Slavery:
Race; The Latter Its Normal Condition.
jargon and a deIn pseudo-scientific
tone of voice, the
tached "scientific"
as "the
author makes such observations
of the brain and the
obtuse sensibility
nervous system generally would enable
him E he Negr 7. . . to bear hanging
But we need not refer to a,
well."
which, although not so
stereotype,
expressed nowadays, is still
blatantly
felt in its effects in almost every
for example in
phase of American life;
of
our school systems whose destruction
the minds of children is magnified a,
in the case of black childmillionfold
Certainly the marks of this abuse
ren.
carry over into adult life.
It is not surprising then that
about the
Cleaver speaks unequivocally
humanity of black people:
We want all Black people when
to be tried in
brought to trial,
court by a jury of their peer
group or people from the Black
communities, as defined by the
of the United
Constitution
States.
in relationThis question of justice
ship to blacks has thrown open the question
as it is administered to
of justice
For example, how do we
others as well.
Are
conceive of the duties of the police?
they to be roving judges and juries?
How can we be sure that the citizens-control over such
all the citizens--have
autonomous group? How do
a potentially
Do policemen
deviants?
they treat social
come from the kinds of backgrounds which
make them judge harshly those who have
different ways
different sexual mores?
of cutting or not cutting their hair?
How
different modes of dress and speech?
Whomdo they represent?
about juries?
Do they condemn certain people a, priori?
Camus in The Stranger has suggested an
answer:
Meursault is not convicted for
but
an Ara~b (a mere "native"),
killing
for outraging the conventions of the
What has been called
middle class jury.
into question here is that institution
life.
which is at the heart of societal
in general has
The question of justice
now been pointedly raised and must be
discussed.
Not only, however, is a, society made
It is also made up
up of institutions.
of the cement which holds those instituand one of the ingredients
tions together,
in that cement is the myths that justify a
In order to justify slavery,
culture.
and after the Civil War, serfdom, myths
about the black man were
or stereotypes
These myths were constructed
required.
of the
novelists
by Puritan divines,
and others.
school, Presidents,
Virginia
before the
Certain Negro types emerged:
Civil War--the happy and dutiful servant;
after the Civil War--the good Negro who
returns to help his old master now in
and the bad Negro who doesn't;
distress,
the Negro as enterthe Negro as criminal;
We shall have our manhood. We
shall have it or the earth will
be leveled
by our attempts to
Reactions
("Initial
gain it.
of Malcolm
on the Assassination
X")
Nor is it surprising that the leader
in William Wells
of the insurrection
(1854) talks about
Brown' s novel Clotel
tainer; and now the Negro as militant.
But the stereotype which obscures all of
his freedom and his rebellion
his manhood:
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in terms of
My liberty is of as much consequence to me as Mr. Wilson' s is
to him. I am as sensitive
to
feeling as he. . . . I am free
to say that, could I live my
life over again, I would use all
the energies which God has given
me to get up an insurrection.
tion.
The issue of the humanity of blacks
has thrown open the question of the
humanity of the rest of us.
Young
whites know that they cannot become
full-sized
human beings when there are
crippling
restrictions
imposed on their
moral and emotional development.
Frederick Douglass,
in his Autobiography,
provides a vivid moral lesson when he
how Sophia Auld, who had
illustrates
never owned a slave,
changed from a
person who treated Douglass "as she
supposed one human being ought to treat
another," into one who was mean and suswho treated Douglass as one
picious,
was supposed to treat a slave--aas a
commodity. Although the specific
conditions may have changed, young whites and
blacks know that the master and slave
in our society,
mentalities
persist
and
it is those dehumanizing attitudes
that
are now being thrown off:
Just as the concepts of manhood and
freedom are intertwined,
so are they both
bound up with the idea, of self-defense.
The right of self-defense
is the antithesis of submission to slavery, because
it keeps alive the sense of self.
In his
Autobiography, Frederick Douglass makes
explicit
reference to his sharpened
sense of manhood after he has thoroughly
beaten up his white owner, Mr. Covey,
who has used him unmercifully.
Manhood,
self-defense,
and freedom: we see this
trinity expressed throughout Cleaver's
essays,
and set forth in the stance of
the Black Panther Party, which, at its
was called the Black Panther
inception,
Party for Self-Defense.
It becomes clear then that what is
at issue here beyond housing, fair
employment, education,
etc.,
but intertwined throughout all of the practical
matters of daily life is the issue of
manhood and womanhood--the full humanity
of the people of color.
To exercise
one's full humanity is to assert oneself on both the political
and personal
levels.
This, in fact, is the content
of the principle
of self-determination
which simply means that people have a
right to control their environment; that
is, their communities and the institutions
that serve them. As applied to black
people,
in particular,
the principle
is
as Malcolm X observed,
critical
because,
black people have been separated out of
America, while hostile
control has been
maintained over them. Consequently,
as
a, caste they have been powerless and
alienated.
Within a self-determined
self-determination
community, personal
The movement towards
can flourish.
alone
self-determination
political
The
creates self-determined
people.
interand the personal
political
and the
. . . the initiative,
future, rest with those whites
and blacks who have liberated
themselves from the master/
slave syndrome. And these are
to be found mainly among the
youth.
("The White Race and
Its Heroes")
Furthermore, a society which dehumanizes in one way will do so in other
ways.
It is here that the struggle for
black self-determination
converges with
the movement for campus autonomy and the
anti-war movement, and the point of conof
vergence is centered on the principle
self-determination.
This principle
simply states that human beings have the
right to create their own environments,
thus restoring power to those who had
been managed by others.
previously
Black
or black power has
self-determination
given birth to a desire for white power
or student power on predominantly white
campuses and this power is defined in
terms of campus autonomy and studentBoth domestic movefaculty coalitions.
and
reflect
ments
support the worldwide
movements for national
self-determination.
There is also a keen awareness that at
its heart, this struggle is the struggle
for a redistribution of power. Therefore, many of the initial steps will be
twine. It is, therefore, no accident
that self-determination or Black Power
or communitycontrol has been accepted
by blacks as their main tool of libera.-
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and socia.l
the result of a. political
in
of the black man's position
analysis
This
American society and the world.
made by Malcolm X, with its
analysis,
in Garvey and others, and
antecedents
Cleaver,
in Carmichael,
successors
its
later on
be
discussed
will
others,
and
paper.
in this
In view of the above, it is fitting
that Eldridge Cleaver opens his book
with a chapter entitled "On Becoming."
In this chapter, Cleaver traces his own
manhood."
struggle towards "self-conscious
contains the
His path of self-knowledge
in
rebellion
of alienation;
stations
acts of rape," which
"insurrectionary
freeabsolute
proclaimed an impossible
dom; and then an understanding that at
acts
the source of these insurrectionary
and finally a, re-birth,
was self-hate;
aided by the ordering of thoughts on
paper, based on an understanding that at
the seat of human wisdom and compassion
This chapter is a.
is love of the self.
parable for our times because it is a,
parable of re-birth from the dehumanizing
society.
effects of a racist
For young whites it has pertinence
the pain
because they too are experiencing
of re-birth and a. sudden deepening of
self-knowledge:
attitude
thwarted by an official
actively
which has made people into interchangeable
items to be manipulated according to the
of the managers and owners of
interests
the System.
A dramatic example of such ma.nipulation can be found in a. quotation from a.
Service document issued in
Selective
July of 1965--and speedily withdrawn-"Channeling":
entitled
Throughout his career as a. stuthreat
dent, the pressure--the
of loss of deferment--continues.
It continues with equal intenHis
sity after graduation.
periodic
local board requires
reports to find out what he is
He is impelled to purup to.
sue his skill rather than embark
upon some less important enterprise and is encouraged to
in an essential
apply his skill
interest.
in the national
activity
Dehumanization always begins with an
attitude
towards human beings as objects
or commodities.
which involves
But self-determination
the concepts of manhood, freedom, and
also involves the idea of
self-defense,
In The Souls of Black
self-knowledge.
Folk, DuBois notes that America. yields to
the black man no knowledge of the self;
that is, no true understanding of his own
The
to the world at large.
relationship
in
is
split
black man's consciousness
he sees himself as a,
two, says DuBois:
mind dominates
and
since
white
Negro,
he
sees
the society,
the "Negro" part
of himself through white eyes, and the
image is a negative one; and he sees himself as an American, but in an ambiguous
with that nation, since as
relationship
a "Negro" he has been separated out of
its life:
It is among the white youth of
the world that the greatest
It
change is taking place.
is they who a-re experiencing
the great psychic pain of
to
waking into consciousness
find their inherited heroes
turned by events into villains.
("The White Ra-ce and Its Heroes")
based
Young whites feel an alienation
upon a split between the moral ima-gina.This split,
reality.
tion and the social
common in the process of growth, is
usua.lly modified by some kind of compromise
But the
reality.
with the prevailing
is such
times are such and consciousness
that the split can no longer be a-ccomYoung whites are pressing for
modated.
these courses are
Third World courses;
too.
vehicles
for their self-knowledge,
They a-re pressing ha-rd against the
are
system because trustees
university
often business men who have a+ctively
The history of the American
Negro is the history of this
longing to attain
strife,--this
manhood, to
self-conscious
merge his double self into a
better and truer self.
This "better
and truer
self,"
it seems
to me, is emerging today in what is
called
tbla~ckconsciousness," and it is
perpetuated economic and socia.l oppression
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referring to himself as a black nationalist,
although he did not know what term would
On January 18,
best describe his position.
in
believed
1965, when asked if he still
a, separate black state, he replied no,
"in a. society in which
that he believed
people can live like human beings" on the
Young
(Interview,
basis of equality.
The basis
March-April, 1965).
Socialist,
as
stated in the OAAUBasic
of equality
Unity Program is self-determination.
In the speech "?The Ballot or the
(April 3, 1964), Malcolm X
Bullet"
image
develops the idea behind DuBois'
He obof America, a-s a. prison-house.
serves that racism is not a, segregationist
but rather a governmental
conspiracy,
is important.
The distinction
conspiracy.
conspiracy connotes
A segregationist
action or the action
either an individual
A governof a. section of the country.
on the other hand, rementa-l conspiracy,
fers to the entire structure of the country.
It says that this structure perpetuates
He supports this obthe caste system.
servation by noting that northern Demowho are in the
crats are white liberals
those same
same party with Dixiecrats,
black disenfranchisemen who perpetuate
ment in their home states and who also conIn the
committees.
trol key Congressional
through
North, blacks are disenfranchised
Thus the government itgerrymandering.
its own
self is criminal and violates
laws and pretended principles.
By November of 1964, after his first
trip to Africa, (April 13-May 21, 1964),
Malcolm X extends the black vision of
He talks about
America. to the world.
extension of
American imperialism--the
U.S. domestic oppression to people of
color around the world.
Furthermore, his perusal of the varyin Africa., as
ing systems of socialism
that capitalism
well as his observation
and imperialism and racism were thoroughly
intertwined led him to the conclusion
that only indigenous non-capitalistic
could deal with Afro-American
solutions
problems here at home. During his second
trip to Africa, (July 9-November 24), he
notes in a Cairo interview, that the
American black man has only made a-dvances in America, as the result of intersuch as World Wa.r II
na-tional pressures
They are pressing
on minority groups.
because
administrators
hard on college
to
are
slow
these same administrators
institutional
of
fact
wake up to the
to
racism, and often provide obstacles
a
of ethnic studies,
the establishment
move
step which many feel is a. minimal
And
to right centuries of injustices.
and
they are pressing hard on professors
teachers in genera.l because these are the
people who have, in the past, controlled
the textbook writing and the classroom
discussion.
Malcolm X was describing these young
people when he observed that to effect
any changes, whites must be willing to
break with the status quo, to engage in
a. struggle which will not be endorsed by
furthermore, that
the power structure;
they must start to work "right where
they are," that is, within their own
In a. comment directed
white communities.
at white students (January 18, 1965),
Malcolm X notes that if students could
research the problem of racism for themselves,
independent of what they have
been told by those in power, "then some
of their findings would be shocking."
Young whites have done the research,
and they are
have made the connections,
shocked.
for change
Malcolm X saw the potential
It was he, who, in our
in white youth.
times, was in large measure responsible
for the awakening of both the black man
and the young white man. He set forth
of the colonyanalysis
the basic political
between blacks
mother country relationship
He made the connection beand whites.
tween the bla~ck vision of America. and its
(Others such
implications.
international
a-s W. E. B. DuBois had explored this
He reiterated
territory before him.)
demoof political
the basic principle
black
to
cra-cy, this time as it applied
he
And
noted
people--self-determination.
the role which white youth could pla-y in
change.
social
Malcolm X started out in prison as a.
Bla~ck Muslim and an advocate of a.
In the months beseparate black nation.
he
denounced all
fore his assassination,
black selfand
advocated
forms of racism
in
communities.
black
determinantion
While he was a, Bla~ck Muslim, he referred
by
to himself as a. black nationalist;
stopped.
had
he
1964,
of
the end of Mazy
and the Cold Wa~r. It is not surprising
then to find him speculating about the
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in his speech "The Harlem Hate-Gang
Scare" (May 29, 1964), refers to the
as an occupying army in Harlem,
police
there to protect white non-resident
It is not surinterests.
business
beprising then that self-determination
comes the first basic aim of the newly
of Afro-American
formed Organization
For Malcolm had
Unity (June 28, 1964).
observed in Africa that self-determination
did in fact restore power to colonized
and gave them control over their
people,
own destinies.
furthermore, that
He understood,
by psychomoves are paralleled
political
that the
changes in individuals;
logical
emerge on
earlier
key elements discussed
a sharpened sense
the personal level:
of manhood, the taking of freedom, selfand, of course,
defense, self-knowledge,
And so his concern reached out to
power.
to the
human beings and, in particular,
He notes in
"brother on the street."
Voice
an interview with the Village
(February 1965) that the black man must
be awakened to his own humanity, and,
furthermore, that once the brother on the
and
street is awakened, both positive
and
negative energies will be released,
that these energies must be "channeled
Furthermore, that the
constructively."
brother can only be organized by those
to the white
unacceptable
totally
between
The relationship
Establishment.
"Nobody can
manhood and freedom follows:
If you're a. man, you
give you freedom.
And you
take it" (December 20, 1964).
also defend yourself.
which has so hurt
fact that capitalism,
Afro-America,, will not survive the
movements towards selfinternational
The
nations.
determination of colonial
black struggle in America then, Malcolm
X shows, is very intimately bound up
with the worldwide struggle for selffor these movements will
determination,
a~s we
end imperialism and thus capitalism
January
(Young Socialist,
know it today.
18, 1965)
in his speech "The
But even earlier,
he is talking about
or the Bullet,"
Ballot
seeing
the struggle,
internationalizing
the domestic issue within a world framefor the
work. In that speech, he talks,
first time, of the need to replace the
with the struggle
civil rights orientation
The source of strength
for human rights.
first,
of this new approach is twofold:
black people see themselves a~s a. minority
only when they accept the white man's
of the problem as limited to
definition
When
the confines of the United States.
they free themselves from this psycholothey are able to view
gical shackle,
their struggle a-s part of the worldwide
movement of the oppressed for selfSecondly, this approach
determination.
makes the United Nations the natural
of
for the resolution
legal vehicle
and points up the absurdity
grievances
of the century-old attempts of taking
to one's oppressor.
one's grievances
Malcolm X did indeed bring the problem
before the United Nations, but his proposal
was not acted upon because of an interVarious
of dues.
minable discussion
African states did see fit, however, to
at home
attack the U.S. racist policies
and abroad.
to see that,
(It is interesting
the Black
following this new orientation,
Panther Party in the summer of 1968 sent
headed by Bobby Seale and
a, delegation,
Eldridge Cleaver, to the United Nations
to voice a demand for a. black community
and
in the United States,
plebiscite
This
asking for UN observer teams.
proposal found support from sixteen
nations of the Third World but has not
yet been acted upon.)
Once the connection between the Black
in America and the Third
Revolution
Malcolm said once that to remain
was
situation
in a violent
non-violent
As is noted in the statemasochistic.
of the OAAU: tactics
ment of objectives
based on moral suasion can only work
within a. moral system.
Malcolm obAs for self-knowledge,
served that once the street brother was
awakened, he would be filled with rage,
of rage would ultimately
and that release
for it will be a main
be constructive
oneself from
technique for releasing
and gaining a, sense of personal
self-hate,
power.
It was the hope of Malcolm X to
channel black energies into the OAAU. He
World Revolution had been made, the
colonia] condition of black people in
Malcolm,
America. became self-evident.
did not live long enough to carry out this
plan.
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The OAAU, created by Malcolm X in
June of 1964, never got off the ground
after his death. Eldridge Cleaver, who
describes in Soul on Ice, the importance
of Malcolm X to his own life, came out of
prison in 1966 with plans to revive
The plans were never
that organization.
But it was at that
put into effect.
time, however, that Cleaver was introduced to the Black Panther Party for
Self-Defense, now called simply, the
Black Panther Party. He subsequently
became its Minister of Information,
effected a, coalition with the Peace and
Freedom Party, spoke all over the country,
was almost railroaded back into prison,
and is now, as every one knows, in
exile in the black underground.
political
In Soul on Ice, we see the logical
extension and consolidation of the ideas
of Malcolm X. Cleaver, however, has a,
somewhat different focus: he sees the
impulse towards unity between human
beings, in particular male and female,
thwarted by the American social structure. The thwarting of the impulse towards unity is one of the prime foci of
Cleaver's vision, and is at the heart of
the denial of the black man's humanity.
(The lynching of a black man was usually
See
accompanied by his castration.
Calvin Hernton's Sex and Racism in
America.) To deal with this problem,
which is inter-connected with all of the
others, Cleaver proposes that selfdetermination must be gained, not only
on the social and political
levels, but
on the personal level as well.
WhereAnd he speaks to all people.
as Malcolm X had hesitatingly suggested
that perhaps white radicals could help
if they severed their
black liberation,
connection with the System, Cleaver
addresses himself to the fact that many
whites, especially the young, are oppressed
by that same System. As Jerry Rubin,
head of the Youth International Party and
Cleaver's choice for a, running mate on
the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, observed in a. recent article in the New
York Review of Books (February 13, 1969):
serve as a. warning to others.
Arrests become a. form of punishment and detention.
Cleaver observes that domestic
counteroppression has its international
the struggle of
part, when he relates
young white Americans for self-determination
to the worldwide struggle of mother
for self-determination.
country radicals
He speaks then in the terms of the oppresrather than
sor versus the oppressed,
Why? Because the
white against black.
is a, world system,
system of oppression
affecting all people.
this argument, he seez
Elaborating
armed might abroad as an extension of police power at home. And both the domestic
and the foreign arms of Law and Order have
as their purpose the control of the
people in behalf of the few, and, consequently, "Nowhere are the people consulted;
their daily problems are never solved."
Order")
("Domestic Law and International
by a. jungle
Society is controlled
ethic where the weak are the natural
prey of the strong and the ethic is "every
man for himself."
But, says Cleaver in
"The Blood Lust," we do not admit to
this as the ethic which governs our
When we are confronted with it
society.
the
that cooperation,
and its corollary
rather than competilaw of civilization,
should
tion, the law of the judgle,
we react with anger.
govern our actions,
We will not admit that behind the brutality
of a.
of the police
lies the brutality
system which sets
and political
social
up stop-gap poverty programs which only
("Domestic
"hide bread from the hungry."
We do not
Law and International
Order")
want to face the fact that fundamental
order may be
changes in our social
society.
necessary in order to reconstruct
that the beginnings
But it is possible
are here now,
of this reconstruction
spreading across the country, in prepara.tion for the taking of power by those
As Cleaver
who are currently powerless.
and interon both the national
observes,
levels:
national
The police, district attorney,
and judges use arrests freely:
to get activists off the street,
to tie us up in endless judicial
and legal procedures, and to
What is
involved
here,
what is
being decided right not, is
the shape of power in the world
tomorrow. ('"The Bla~ck Man's
Stake in Vietnam")
20
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is to be a re-birth of freedom. All of
this the new white radical has learned
from the black liberation struggle and
from at least two of its most eloquent
spokesmen--Malcolm X and, more recently,
Eldridge Cleaver.
The new radical knows this.
He knows
that self-determination is the principle,
therefore, on which he must focus. For
framthis principle flow diversity, autonomy,personal creativity, a sharpened
feeling of brotherhood, and, therefore,
a lessening of destructive competitiveness,
and a possible end to the exploitation of
one group by another. At the heart of
the principle of self-determination then
lie fundamental structural changes which
musttake place in our society if there
Joyce Nower
Department of English
San Diego State Coll.
San Diego, California
VK1
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of the younglad who is the principalcharacterin 'JIT.", firstof the threeoriginal
pectively,
dram-aspecials broadcastthis season on -the"CBS Children'sHour,"a new series designed
Network.
foryoungviewers,
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21
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