365 When the righteous sister Dr Lenora Jean Daniels writes, we should read

Malcolm X’s Message: Finish the Work that Must be Done! Represent Our Resistance By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

The symbols of the French Revolution are female, women of marble or bronze with powerful naked breasts, Phrygian caps, flags aflutter. But what the Revolution produced was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizens, and when the revolutionary militant Olympe de Gouges proposed a declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, she was hauled off to jail. The Revolutionary Tribunal found her guilty and the guillotine removed her head. -Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone This monopoly also ensures that, when required, a woman can be allowed or made to participate in political struggles, but always as an individual. Whose force is necessarily weak and dispersed, and always under the control of a man, who dominates her as father or husband in the home, as supervisor or boss at work, etcetera, and as political leader in the political movement. -Nawal El Saadawi, “Women Organizing for Change,” The Nawal El Saadawi Reader Repetition. Some crew members take note: the same card game resulting in the shuffling of the same cards to the same players and the same outcome. The doctor believes she examines the same patient for an inner ear infection and the patient seems to recall the same examination. The captain thinks aloud that he has read the same passages in his book, but maybe, he says, he has read the book before and just cannot remember. Too late again - “Main propulsion systems collapses.” Red Alert! Another ship appears and another collision and explosion. The day begins again... Repetition, repetition, repetition….A “sense of repetition” is pervasive. All over the ship, the crews expresses feelings of déjà vu. But as the doctor says, with déjà vu, you only think you are repeating the same events. We actually are! Individual alterations in attitude or behavior, minor reforms, do not fundamentally alter the fate of the ship and its crew. Finally, senior officers discuss the phenomena until an explanation develops: The USS Enterprise is caught in a “temporal causality loop” (TNG, “Cause and Effect”). Voices heard by the doctor (did I mention, she is a woman!) are discovered to be “echoes from previous loops - the voices of over 1000 crew members in the moments leading up to their annihilation. “Stay on course until,” says the captain, “we have reason to change.” But, there is a reason to escape the loop and avoid the collusion. The captain’s subordinates devise a plan to send a message in the next loop to crew of the USS Enterprise - or there is a danger that what has been learned will be forgotten. Finally, a particular course of action is in fact a mistake! A brilliant captain nonetheless makes a decision based on an assumption and an alternative course of action is ignored - for 17 days. The captain of the theoretical “other” ship, an 80-year-old, out-dated Federation Starfleet ship, the USS Bozeman, believes the ship left dock only 3 weeks before. No. the crew and the temporal causality loop have been one for 90 years. On Earth, we are the crew of the USS Bozeman, rejecting the warning message regarding our fate… Consider the controversy surrounding historian Prof. Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. It would seem that Malcolm X, our greatest and most dedicated warrior for “freedom,” “equality,” and “justice,” was the only man ever to disregard the role of women in the struggle. But is this really the message of Marable’s Malcolm X? In 1959, Malcolm X, at the behest of Elijah Mohammad, commenced his first visit to Africa and the Arab region, writes historian Manning Marable (Malcolm X). Betty and daughter, Attalah, were sent to Betty’s parents’ home in Detroit. Malcolm viewed his wife “largely as a nuisance - someone he was obliged to put up with rather than as a loving life partner,” Marable writes. He learns from his youth and life on the street that “women were only tricky, deceitful, untrustworthy, flesh” (from The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley X quoted in Malcolm X). From the Nation of Islam (NOI), he learns that a wife should be “obedient and chaste,” bear children, and “maintain a Muslim household.” In other words, as Marable explains, for the NOI and subsequently Malcolm, “Black women had been (my emphasis) the mothers of civilization, [but for now] they would play a central role in the construction of the world to come” – behind, not beside men. In North Africa and the Arab region, Malcolm quickly recognizes several key messages referencing contradictions within the NOI. All Muslims are not Black, yet, Saudi Arabia had enslaved Africans “for more than fifteen hundred years.” Nonetheless, he champions a campaign to align “Third World Nations” with Black Americans, in order to achieve racial empowerment. Among this loop of strategists, it was agreed that anti-communist organizations in Africa and in the Arab region would make a suitable alliance with Black Americans for a Pan-Africanist front. Malcolm returns to the U.S. and begins preaching of “freedom,” “equality,” and “justice” - “the racially inclusive language of the civil rights cause.” Whether religious or secular, pro- or anti-communist, socialists or traditional party- affiliated organizations, women are in the background as foot soldiers, cooks, secretaries, singers, poetess, occasional speakers, occasional leaders but always the majority, bearing the results of alternatives never considered. Any planned organizing of people to affect fundamental change credibility if any pattern of inequity remains in place. Malcolm (and he was certainly not the only man or woman) had yet to recognize that white supremacy is most importantly the hierarchical ordering of people along race, class and gender and that this macro ordering is reflected at the micro level, structuring organizations and institutions, impeding the break to freedom, equality and justice for all of humanity. He was working hard to re-shape his views on race, but he had yet to understand how patriarchal structures impacted and shaped his views on women. By the same token, Prof. Marable’s Malcolm X should be read as message urging the reinvention or the evolution of our lives, beginning with the discourse on and the treatment of women and girls. A revolution in our time needs to be different than anything the world has seen before. In part, something different happened in Tunisia and then in Egypt. Receiving the message sent by citizens, past and present: reject the status quo of servitude to U.S.-backed dictators. Take a risk. Try something different! Men and women did just that! But as activist and writer Dr. Nawal El Saadawi declares, “the revolution is not over in Egypt” (“The Backlash against Women and Egypt’s Revolution,” PRI and WNYC’s The Takeaway, March, 11, 2011). Women organized a peaceful march on International Women’s Day and they were confronted by gangs of Mubarak supporters who oppose the revolution. The new Egyptian governments has made “gestures” to women, but El Saadawi says, “gestures’ have no meaning “‘if we have one or two [women] here and there,’” she says. There is no revolution unless there is “at least 30 to 40 percent women in the new temporary government.” ”In every activity, political, economic, social, women should be represented”… “Women are half the society, so they should be there. Not to put one or two as a sample…How can we postpone their rights?” she asks. “Their rights are the rights of the revolution.” Women, writes Nadine Naber, “are active participants in a grassroots people-based struggle against poverty and state corruption, rigged elections, repression, torture, and police brutality” (“The Meaning of Revolution,” Solidarity Us-Org., March-April 2011). But if, she explains, we ignore the historical trajectory of the post-Cold War era, in which particular strands of U.S. liberal feminism and U.S. imperialism have worked in tandem, then we will come to rely once more on “a humanitarian logic that justifies military intervention, occupation and bloodshed as strategies for promoting ‘democracy and women’s rights.” Revolution - like no other - would mean a complete break with thought and behavior that results in women being asked to remove themselves from the struggle, for such patterns of thought and behavior have long suggested an adherence to corporate capitalists’ systems of oppression and the repetition of servitude to “humanitarian logic.” Mass marketing of patriarchal values includes, these days, selling the presence of pants-suited women “in power” as a symbol of progress. It is not a matter of women imitating the patterns of death, entering electoral politics by marshalling support from corporate capitalists and voting for war and the dropping of bombs on women and children. Nor is it a matter of women in camouflage with training in the use of advanced weaponry, competing for medals of honor. We do not need more CEOs who happen to be women or a woman Pope. We do not need a woman Commander in Chief of the U.S. Empire. We need a revolution! We need women uprising in the streets everywhere! We need the women in force, leading the way to freedom, equality, and justice for all! Malcolm was not alone in his belief that “leaders of the people” can go the journey alone. But Malcolm was not most leaders either. He thought and therefore he was evolving as a human being, a leader. A leader dedicated to the revolution - the dismantling of white supremacy - he would not have stayed long in the loop, complicit with patriarchal oppression. For this, his work was a threat to those adherents of the status quo. Perhaps Malcolm’s grappling with ways to bring about freedom, equality, and justice is the message he sends to us: Finish the work that must be done! BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.