The Malcolm X Image Has Become a Pro-Black Prop Used by Frauds
by Sabrina Dawkins
Red, black, and green flag glued neatly to the wall in the background, Malcolm X intently staring at me from a two-dimensional black-and-white picture on the wall, the actor draws me into the pro-black façade he has created. Tattooed all over like newspaper print, after playing his curse-rapping, narcissistic intro music to present himself as the savior of the black race, he curses his way through a diatribe against someone who has offended him, or secondarily offended his race. Sparsely he may even mention Malcolm X, the prop he has motionless in the background, a little bigger and more prominent than the other pro-black props. An Egyptian ankh is around his neck, as if a metal pendant could give life to a man.
He is irreligious. And the hodgepodge of African-signaling props in his background are only to prop up the image he wants to portray of himself as a confident African warrior of his people to lead them to a knowledge of themselves and out of subtle oppression. He has never lived in Africa, however, and his clothing, manner of speech, and the topics he chooses to discuss seem to convey that he is fully American and that Africa, in his mind, is like a Wakanda, a fictional land where blacks can be movie stars. Worse, he may not believe in black people at all, and his act is just used to attract his target market: black people. And to do this, he uses the image of someone else, a true revolutionary, to lazily and deceitfully attach himself, a mere actor, to something real and substantial.
Previously she had worn attached straight hair that had belonged to someone else. But now that she is pro-black and acting in front of a larger audience, gone is the conventional weave. The sharp contrast between her a-little-less-tightly-coiled jet-black curls and her pale skin can be either unsettling or interesting, or a combination of both. It’s clear she grew up around black people from her insight into current black culture, but her appearance shouts that one of her parents is a different race. And something about her vernacular is too exaggerated, almost as if she’s not talking to me but to an idea of blackness, the popular image of blackness broadcast on the television and radio, almost as if her white side interferes with the ability to be naturally black, so she overcompensates by being stereotypical, exaggerated black so that we, her target audience, are distracted from her half-white appearance.
Has blackness become a fad like the Angela Davis afro, a fist flashed high in the air for a few seconds before we go back to our regular lives, an image on the television screen that we naively copy because someone somewhere told us it was the cool thing to do? Has the real revolutionary Malcolm X become a crispy chicken salad with extra ranch dressing, bacon, and cheese, a pretend diet, a pretend revolution that we cling to because it’s much easier to remain morally corrupt and expect change than to be the actual change? Is he now the backdrop for a long fast-food commercial starring a front man wearing a cap with an X on it and red, black, and green while serving up feel-good but unsatiating junk food?
A two-dimensional picture of Malcolm X on the wall; the red, black, and green Pan-African flag; an ankh; and an afro are not enough to change the inner man. And they may be used by the unconverted to hook in their target market. And in their false reality, their Wakanda, their blaxploitation film in which they are the protagonist hero and you are the grateful followers and/or consumers, you will worship Malcolm’s legacy in vain, as the real fades away, the small motionless picture in the background, and a big false personality takes its place, animated and always providing fresh fodder for entertainment as it slowly blocks the passage to the real, which it hangs conveniently and almost mockingly in the background (Matthew 15:7-9).