Malcolm X
Article
Malcolm X is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between March 10, 2022 and September 05, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “People like to contrast the soft-spoken MLK with the more radical Malcolm X”; “The titans of black anti-racism are Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, both most active in the 60s”; “used by everyone from white academics to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King”. It most often appears alongside Martin Luther King, Ibram X Kendi, Wikipedia.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: March 10, 2022
- Last seen: September 05, 2023
Appears In
- Advice For Unwoke Academic?
- Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring
- Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade
- My Presidential Platform
Related Pages
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- Martin Luther King (3 shared issues)
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- Ibram X Kendi (2 shared issues)
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- Wikipedia (2 shared issues)
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- 60s and 70s (1 shared issues)
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- Albert Einstein (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- American Christianity (1 shared issues)
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- Andrea Dworkin (1 shared issues)
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- Asian Community Center (1 shared issues)
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- Asians For Biden (1 shared issues)
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- ASVAB (1 shared issues)
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- Athens (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
How Did Other Protest Movements Solve This Problem? People like to contrast the soft-spoken MLK with the more radical Malcolm X, but probably both of them fall on the Berserker side of our dichotomy above. Does that mean our dichotomy is too weak? Did anyone do Fabian for civil rights? The best example I can think of is the NAACP passing over lots of less-sympathetic test cases before they settled on Rosa Parks for fighting bus segregation. Maybe a more to-the-point retort is that people who employ the Fabian Strategy successfully don’t make the news. Or make the news as Congressman #26 Who Voted For Civil Rights Legislation. On the other hand, some good examples of Fabian Strategy successes are the actual Fabians and the neoliberals.
The answer is: they were, we just need to look further back. The titans of black anti-racism are Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, both most active in the 60s. The titan of Hispanic anti-racism is Cesar Chavez - also the 60s. The titan of gay rights is Harvey Milk - now we’re up to the 70s. Ask someone who isn’t an expert on feminism to name famous feminists, and you’ll probably get people like Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Andrea Dworkin - 70s again. I’m not sure any modern black, gay, or feminist activists measure up to these people in terms of influence, which is fine: the modern paradigm of minority rights began around the 60s and 70s, the first few people to operate within it got outsized acclaim, and there’s no easy way to equal them now.
Slurs are like this too. Fifty years ago, “Negro” was the respectable, scholarly term for black people, used by everyone from white academics to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King. In 1966, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael said that white people had invented the term “Negro” as a descriptor, so people of African descent needed a new term they could be proud of, and he was choosing “black” because it sounded scary. All the pro-civil-rights white people loved this and used the new word to signal their support for civil rights, soon using “Negro” actively became a sign that you didn’t support civil rights, and now it’s a slur and society demands that politicians resign if they use it. Carmichael said - in a completely made up way that nobody had been thinking of before him - that “Negro” was a slur - and because people believed him it became true.
Inline links: society demands that politicians resign if they use it
Still, this would only buy us a few more years, and eventually we would have to think bigger. Mt. Rushmore (the whole mountain, not just the faces) is big enough that copying it would take twenty years of national coal production. Given that all the faces on Rushmore are white, I propose a companion mountain on the opposite side of the observation plaza, “Mt. Racemore”, featuring Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Henrietta Lacks, and Ibram X Kendi.