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race--or something else?
It's interesting that, before they died, both Malcom X and Martin
Luther King Jr. were beginning to argue that the real opponent
of racial (and other) equality was capitalism. Dr. King began
pressing for sweeping economic reform. Malcom went so far
as to call capitalism "a parasite system." Malcom's change was
the more radical of the two. He began speaking at socialist
and labor forums, and his worldwide travels, he said, made
him aware that capitalism and imperialism damaged oppressed
peoples of all races. Biographers, commentators, and
filmmakers (eg Spike Lee) have largely ignored that stage
of Malcom's life--the very stage when his political thought
was going through its most sweeping development.
The "real" negative ground on a civil rights topic would, in my
opinion, be the effectiveness of formal or legal reforms, period.
On these racism threads, many people have argued that you
can't change racism until you change attitudes--a "micro"
approach. But many of history's leading anti-racist fighters
have ended up taking the "macro" approach--that we cannot
change those attitudes until we provide a structural (read
socio-economic) context for equality.
(unapologetically) for a civil rights topic!
matt stannard
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