I talk about Malcolm X a lot, but it’s his bday week & dude was really a prophet. People frame him as the revolutionary foil to King, but they were both revolutionaries.

What’s interesting is HOW they came to differ on the end goal, & geography is rarely discussed (THREAD)

Malcolm *lived* the legal desegregation southerners were fighting for, and his conclusion was “nah, this ain’t the battle y’all.” +

Malcolm saw that white supremacy was so ingrained that even if you got rid of Jim Crow, inequality would continue. He saw it in Detroit. He saw it in Harlem. He saw it through the “desegregated” northern/Midwestern institutions he lived in and frequented +

And he saw the concessions black people would make in an integrated society. Without political or economic power, we would be pawns for both white moderates/liberals AND white conservatives.

I mean. This speech in 1963, my GOD. It describes EVERYTHING happening right now +

Without black cultural institutions to challenge internalized antiblackness or black businesses, which would both be weakened with desegregation efforts, it’d be easier for us to be absorbed into a corrupt white power structure rather than us changing it +

While some black radicalism emerged in the south, there’s a reason it was more prevalent outside of it. The absence of extreme racial terror was one. But the lived experience of black ppl in de facto segregated cities was another +

You don’t have the Fair Housing Act without black urban rebellions in Detroit, Milwaukee, Newark, the Watts, period. We were tiredT!

Black people were sold one thing, and when white liberals outside the confines of Jim Crow had the chance to deliver, they literally fled +

Of course white flight is not as simple as individual choice. It’s an ecosystem of white supremacy, and what it created—concentrated poverty, housing discrimination, displacement, etc—doesn’t just go away just bc it became illegal to be racist +

And now it’s full circle, with America continuing to be segregated, black wealth eradicated, and a few black elites passing off their careerism in liberal establishment circles as black activism. Except we lost many of the black institutions and organizing to counter them+

This doesn’t mean black people can’t still fight for integration. As our black leaders argued then, and folks like @nhannahjones argue now, separate but equal was nonexistent. As a racial minority who knows if it could ever exist +

At the same time, there’s a reason why black nationalism, especially black revolutionary nationalism, isn’t mainstream. There’s a reason King’s earlier messages of integration (and not his antiimperialism or democratic socialism) are heralded more than any other black leaders’.

Integration in and of itself challenges neither white power or capitalism, so it became more palatable. We can have integrated imperialists, integrated police, integrated corporate boards, an integrated military that preys on non Western countries & so on.

Building up black political, economic, and social institutions wasn’t about “the hate that hate produced” and mere separation—it was about our SURVIVAL

All this to say, black people gotta get organized, bc this past week made me damn near pop a vein.

And Happy Birthday (week) Malcolm X, lowkey our preeminent political philosopher.

AND hit me up to get on the email blast for our social justic org Operation POWER. Leaving DMs open for a day.

We talked about some of this yesterday via zoom, and have teach-ins like that for the general public every month!!