Excerpt:
Obama would talk about the impact of Malcolm X’s Autobiography on his life and identity in his own Autobiography, Dreams From My Father.
Only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will. All the other stuff, the talk of blue-eyed devils and apocalypse, was incidental to that program, I decided, religious baggage that Malcolm himself seemed to have safely abandoned toward the end of his life. And yet, even as I imagined myself following Malcolm’s call, one line in the book stayed me. He spoke of a wish he’d once had, the wish that the white blood that tan through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged. I knew that, for Malcolm, that wish would never be incidental. I knew as well that traveling down the road to self-respect my own white blood would never recede into mere abstraction. I was left to wonder what else I would be severing if and when I left my mother and my grandparents at some uncharted border.
Reverend Wright, an important figure in his life can be seen as Malcolm to Obama’s Martin. While the media may have put a wedge between the two, it is clear that Obama understands the anger that both Malcolm and Reverend Wright have displayed against America.
Reverend Wright obviously drew a lot of inspiration from Malcolm X. His whole infamous God Damn America speech drew from Malcolm’s famous ‘chickens coming home to roost’ statement after Kennedy’s assassination. Reverend Wright is not the opposite of Obama and definitely helped shape Obama’s worldview as did Malcolm. After the controversy of Reverend Wright’s statements, Obama spoke on the anger that both Reverend Wright and Malcolm X in his More Perfect Union Speech.
The anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
Maybe because Obama grew up vastly different than Revend Wright or Malcolm X he is less cynical about racism and believes that progress can be achieved.
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country — a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.
So in no way is Barack Obama the ‘direct opposite’ of Malcolm X. Rather the two are complimentary figures. Malcom’s anger and militancy allowed white America to be more accepting of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. Malcolm came around before his death to incorporate his idea of Black Nationalism into the Civil Rights movement that set the groundwork for Obama’s presidency. Malcolm’s struggle developed into a struggle not only for black people but for oppressed people, a struggle that Obama has continued. Remember, like Obama, Malcolm X had his roots as a community organizer.