“By Any Means Necessary” A Neoliberal Sound Byte? : The Memory of Malcolm X in the 1990s CBS Documentary Malcolm X: The Real Story

How is it possible for Malcolm X’s famous call for justice and dignity “by any means necessary” to become a neoliberal sound byte for self-responsibility? What are the social, cultural, and economic conditions that demand a liberal refashioning of the history and memory of Malcolm X? What is at stake not only in the erasure of Malcolm X’s radical message, but also in its deployment in the service of neoliberal policies and logic? This essay explores these questions through a close analysis of the 1992 CBS television documentary Malcolm X: The Real Story. To set the foundation for this analysis, I first explore the resurgence of Malcolm X’s memory in the 1990s and the cultural, political, and economic conditions that shaped the era’s discourse on race. To develop a radical lens through which to interpret the documentary, I relate racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and social movement history to the political contexts of the Reagan and Clinton administrations. In the final analysis, I closely examine rhetorical and visual devices to illustrate how the liberal rewriting of the CBS documentary operates. I mean to expose and critically analyze how white supremacist logic undergirds neoliberal forms of anti-racism and to see the ways in which neoliberal logic contains and adulterates what we can think in terms of equality and justice. I also mean to disclose how presumably anti-racist texts, such as the CBS documentary, under the terms and lexicon of neoliberalism, work to rationalize and justify the violence racial capitalism necessitates.