A challenge confronting any attempt to revisit Malcolm X’s intellectual legacy is the need to sift through a fragmentary and often contradictory inheritance to precisely describe his thought near the end of his life. Saladin Ambar’s innovative solution to this dilemma is to recover and rely upon what he calls “the lost jewel of the American civil rights movement” (p. 33): Malcolm’s 1964 speech at the Oxford Union. In the legendary debating hall, Malcolm spoke passionately in favor of the evening’s motion, drawn ironically from Barry Goldwater’s inflammatory 1964 Republican convention speech: “Extremism in the name of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
As Ambar readily admits, Malcolm “left no legislation, no philosophical treatise, no building, no organization” (p. 168). Traditionally, therefore, scholars have focused on “The Message to the Grassroots” (1963) or “The Ballot or the Bullet” (1964) as most representative (Breitman, 1994). Ambar, however, argues that Oxford “represented the most comprehensive, best articulated, and clearest sense of [Malcolm’s] personal and political vision on the future of race relations—not only as a domestic concern, but also a global one” (Tuck, 2014, p. 33). To this interpretive claim, he appends two other major arguments.
The first, which is historiographical, is that the Oxford debate offers a powerful lens into a transformational era that “can help better explain our own time,” on questions of race, immigration, pluralism, and the legacy of empire (p. 3). The second is normative, and expresses Ambar’s hope that “if we are willing to listen” to Malcolm’s speech, it might inspire righteous critique and militant struggle against wide-ranging injustices from the use of predator drones in U.S. foreign policy to the intractable inequity in the ratio of black-white unemployment (p. 3–4).
All three arguments are controversial propositions, even among those who are broadly sympathetic to Malcolm X. Manning Marable’s biography devotes less than a paragraph to the Oxford debate, and does not regard it with any special significance (Manning, 2011). Archie Epps, the most underrated of Malcolm X scholars, makes a strong case for the 1964 speeches at Harvard to be the best distillations of Malcolm’s political and programmatic aspirations. These have the added bonus of more sophisticated respondents than Oxford could recruit: Epps himself, and the political scientists Martin Kilson and James Q. Wilson. Where one falls on this question of representativeness is not simply a matter of taste; it reflects larger judgments about the level of critique and expectation to which we subject Malcolm as an intellectual and activist.
Perhaps because of Malcolm’s remarkable talent for delivering “unmasking critique” (Kompridis, p. 201), coupled with the aesthetic force of his autobiography, it is difficult to avoid grading him on a curve, so to speak. We find, for example, Ambar applauding as “astounding” transformations, Malcolm’s late support of interracial marriage and rejection of black separatism (p. 38). But these are positions that most black intellectuals treat as axiomatic, to no great a posteriori applause. I note this, because Ambar’s pattern of brilliant restatement, and hesitance to critique, even on Malcolm’s own grounds, persists as a pattern throughout the book.
Ambar celebrates, rightfully, Malcolm’s relentless deconstruction of how rights of self-defense, revolution, and self-determination are partitioned by racial ideology and racialized media discourses and denied to nonwhites. He supplements this with a brilliant close reading of Malcolm’s rhetoric of “by any means necessary” (p. 73–78). Ambar transcends means-bound discussions to draw out how the invocation of “necessity” constitutes Malcolm’s non-black addresses as possible co-authors of a break from existing iterations of rule or peoplehood. Their response to his address, in other words, is the most indispensible part of what constitutes necessity. It is ultimately the depth of whites’ commitment to white supremacy or black emancipation that will determine the nature—violent or otherwise—of what means will be necessary. By reading the phrase “as a mirror [Malcolm used] to hold up to his audience,” Ambar’s reading contributes to the growing sophistication of rhetorical analyses of African-American political developed by Melvin Rogers among others.
But Ambar does not press Malcolm’s critical insights about the interactive dynamics of group identity, partiality, and value pluralism, against Malcolm’s own endorsement of “extremism.” The perpetual worry with revolutionary politics and political violence, is that we are often mistaken in judgments of how deeply liberty is at risk, or in how to assess dangers confronting our conceptions of virtue—to mention our notions of liberty or virtue themselves. After all, Goldwater’s quote was originally seen as a gesture of support to white supremacist militants opposed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Given that calls still go out for a renewed “black radicalism,” drawing upon Malcolm X’s legacy, this seems a missed opportunity to unpack the normative dilemmas this entails.
Another crucial element of Malcolm’s politics is the judgment that “to be free,” as Ambar writes, “one had to be capable of deterring attacks as well as inflicting harm upon one’s enemies” (p. 78). Indispensible to this is the capacity to instill deterrent fear in potential enemies—arguments that Ambar situates within “American realist doctrine” (p. 121). In this vein, Malcolm argued for local self-defense efforts, social movement vigilance, and transnational, Third World solidarities institutionally empowered through the United Nations. For example, Ambar approvingly cites Malcolm’s reported remarks in the wake of China’s successful atomic weapons test, that, “the US imperialists would never loosen their grip on the 22 million colonized American Negroes before the people of Asia and Africa cast off the yoke of imperialism and became strong” (p. 131).
But, yet again, one wonders why the enduring insights of international relations realism are not turned back against Malcolm’s own arguments. Was it ever really possible that the essentially humanitarian or ideological problem of black subordination would be able to be the decisive foreign policy consideration for emerging postcolonial states, especially when confronted with U.S. state power? Or, if we praise Malcolm’s analysis of the anti-black implications of Congress’ committee and party logics, is it not also incumbent on us to draw attention to his utopian naiveté regarding United Nations politics? What about the demonstrated fragility, which Ambar details with great insight in the case of Smethwick, England (p. 159–162), of “people of color” solidarity across social classes and in confrontation with conservative reaction?
How one comes down on these judgments spills into other controversies, namely the enduring question of how Malcolm may have developed. Sometimes, as in the case of denouncing Islamic fundamentalist extremism, Ambar confidently proclaims that Malcolm would have been opposed (p. 111). At other times, Ambar appears more tentative—especially when recounting conversation with former Malcolm associate Carlos Moore, who wisely “resists the temptation to speak about Malcolm’s future politics had he lived” (p. 149). Not only, as Moore notes, did Malcolm have sanguine views about anti-black racism in Latin America or the Islamic world, but we also have the tragic example of Malcolm’s Black Power devotees. Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, and Robert F. Williams all became deeply entangled with authoritarian regimes in the name of Third World solidarity, Black liberation, and American hypocrisy.
These questions, while certainly critical, are evidence of the quality of Ambar’s provocations, not detractions from his achievements. The book is at its most superb when using the small, but significant changes in the ethnic composition of Oxford’s student body as an entry point into the demographic and political transformations (e.g., diasporic anti-colonial movements, racial violence, nativist conservatism, the fragmenting of leftist parties, etc.) occasioned across Europe, but particularly in the United Kingdom and France, by widespread nonwhite migration in the mid-20th century. Of particular note are Ambar’s brief discussions of the research and discourse of British Foreign Office bureaucrats on American “race relations,” and his implicit juxtaposition of their managerial and technocratic interests in this inquiry with the utopian hope among students and migrants that another American import, Malcolm X, might have answers from below. At every step, Ambar treats Malcolm’s thought with careful reconstruction, historical sensitivity, and rhetorical insight. While he often insulates Malcolm from trenchant criticism, the text remains an important testament to a formative moment in the political thought of one of the most significant figures in the African American and postcolonial traditions.
