Posted by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article on Mandela and Question of Violence is really worth reading. In it, he takes to task those people who would condemn Mandela’s prior forays into political violence and the inconsistent development of the South African state after Apartheid while simultaneously glossing over the violence meted out by the American state as well as its own inconsistent democratic development.
“Towards a more perfect union…”
We cannot posit that ours has been anything but an imperfect union. We can only strive towards the perfect. Yet, when we cast our eyes abroad, the concept of American Exceptionalism blinds us to this very fact. Specifically, the role of violence in changing internal American dynamics. Martin Luther King, Jr. realized the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act but some measure of this triumph, this change also belongs to the likes of Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers. Imperfect actors to be sure but ones whose influence indelibly advanced the cause of the Civil Rights Movement.
Malcolm X understood:
If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.
It is not uncommon in this day and age to gloss over the contributions of Malcolm X and other more strident leaders.
But,
Martin Luther King Jr. agreed:
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems … But, they asked, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.
Dr. King didn’t advocate violence, of course. But he came to understand its causes. And so he demanded non-violence from both the state and the individual. Eventually he got (some of) the changes he sought.
The Civil Rights Act was a triumph, but long-term, Malcolm X’s realism about the state’s continued use of violence is more realistic. The state will never give up the threat of the sword. This is separate from its responsibility to regulate the law and punish crime. At its heart is the nature of power and, more tellingly, the nature of group dynamics. The state traded the outright violence of segregation and Jim Crow for the more subtle violence of profiling, unequal law outcomes, gerrymandering and even eventually bringing back archaic laws like poll taxes under the guise of colorblind policies. After all, someone has to be held down, to be made a scapegoat. It can’t be the elites.
