Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America

Notes

201 Introduction 1. Dianne Feinstein, “Opening Welcome Remarks at the 2009 Presidential Inauguration,” speech given in Washington, D.C., January 20, 2009. 2. Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” speech given in Detroit, April 14, 1964. 3. See Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Free Press, 2000). 4. See Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997); and George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). 5. See Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism , 1937–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935– 1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). 6. See Roderick D. Bush, The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009); William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 7. Manning Marable’s recent biography of Malcolm X is a stunning work of archival history through which he weaves his narrative of Malcolm X. But despite Marable’s research and the breadth of his historical imagination and framing of Malcolm, his reading of Malcolm in his post–Nation of Islam and post-Mecca period seems to suggest that Malcolm was oriented more toward a Civil Rights framework, an assertion rooted in the assumption that Malcolm notes was choosing between integration and separation and that, once he left the Nation, he moved toward integration and Civil Rights frameworks. As my project suggests, Malcolm’s choice was not between integration and separation but rather between integration and internationalism, and in his post-Mecca period, Malcolm continued to center race and the intractable forms of white supremacy squarely within his political vision, even strongly suggesting that the legal frameworks and political institutions in the United States were incapable of providing Black freedom and equality. As my project suggests, Malcolm was deeply opposed to the Cold War liberal assumptions of Civil Rights and, as a result, continued to cultivate a terrain of anti-imperialism and antiracism. In addition, Marable’s reading of Malcolm in the post-9/11 era seems to want to “rescue” Malcolm from the throes of “Islamic radicalism.” In doing so, Marable fails to grasp the complexities of Muslim identities and overlooks the multiple and various forms of resistance that can be and are embodied by Muslims who do not conform to what Mahmood Mamdani refers to as the “good Muslim” or the “bad Muslim”( see Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror [New York: Pantheon Books, 2004]). In addition , by framing Malcolm in this way, Marable undermines the range of political positions, ideological orientations, and critical postures that Muslims in general can embody, and he unwittingly replicates the very containment of Black Islam that is the legacy and redemptive force of Malcolm X. See Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011). 8. Because of the initial concern that the label Black Muslim suggested they were somehow un-Islamic and distinct from the global community of Islam, many in the Nation of Islam rejected the label, which had originated in C. Eric Lincoln’s 1961 book The Black Muslims in America (Boston: Beacon Press). Informed by the belief that the Nation of Islam was seen as a heterodox interpretation of Islam, some have rejected the term with the assumption that the qualifier Black challenges the universality of Islam and continues to espouse a supposed racial separatism. While recognizing that Black Islam is not monolithic and is incredibly diverse, however, I use Black Islam or Black Muslim throughout this book to refer to anyone who identifies as Muslim and is African-descended. I do not mean to collapse or undermine the brilliant diversity of Black Islam (including Sunni, Shia, Five-Percenter, Nation of Islam, etc.), but instead I use the qualifier Black to underscore the highly racialized and even anti-Black context in which Black...