 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Black feminists have had considerable difficulties in presenting a critical yet balanced perspective on Malcolm's evolving ideas about black women, gender and masculinity. One of the most insightful commentaries was delivered by celebrated poet and author Audre Lorde, as a lecture celebrating Malcolm X at Harvard University in 1982. Lorde recalled that "in the last year of his life, Malcolm X added a breadth to his essential vision.... Before he was killed, Malcolm had altered and broadened his opinions concerning the role of women in society and the revolution. He was beginning to speak with increasing respect of the connection between himself and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose policies of nonviolence appeared to be so opposite to his own." Malcolm X was a product of a deeply patriarchal religious organization, and the relatively short period of time in which he moved independently gave little space for comprehensive or radical reevaluation about issues of gender and his personal relationships to black women. Yet despite his shortcomings, Lorde finds in Malcolm a living model for social justice in our own times: "As Malcolm stressed, we are not responsible for our oppression, but we must be responsible for our own liberation. We have the power those who came before us have given us, to move beyond the place where they were standing.... Malcolm X does not live in the dry texts of his words as we need them; he lives in the energy we generate and use to move along the visions we share with him."
|
