Dispatches to the AfroNet #004
Tweet from April 3^rd, 2025
Title: Do We Fear Malcolm X’s Message

Original Tweet – This past weekend I lectured on a provocative topic, one Malcolm X spoke about 60 years ago. The question I have today is, do we fear that message, do we fear what faces us in this country or are we ready to Answer the call of our Ancestors?

EXPLANATION: In a bygone era, to capitalize a word contextualized the entire statement around the meaning ascribed to that word, fore in so doing the author meant to highlight the central position occupied by its meaning. The same must be said to be true about the above tweet. While custom dictates the capitalization of the name “Malcolm X”; no such dictation informs the capitalization of the two words bookending the phrase “Answer the call of our Ancestors”. Respect motivates the emphasis on the final word in that phrase but the aforementioned rule instructs the capitalization of the first word. The question, in and of itself is one we as a community have not given enough thought to, maybe because if we gave thought to it, it would conjure new questions to our minds forefront, including “what is the call of our Ancestors”, “what are they asking from me and us”, “have I heard this call before” and “why didn’t I hear the call or answer it earlier”, just to name a few. These questions would then place us in the uncomfortable position of admitting our ignorance. We would have to come to terms with how little we know about our inner workings, our connection to God and to our Ancestors; we would have to admit, we don’t know what we think we know, including how to live actively the vision for ourselves both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. shared with us.

From there we would have to sit with ourselves and devise a way back to being whole enough to see ourselves in the Ancestral web we call life – but this is a topic for another time as the conversation would lead to a broader spiritual subject that is unneeded for us to understand the alluded to context, so I’ll digress back to the tweet.

There is an order to the questions leading to the final statement conjuring those questions; beginning with “do we fear the message [from Malcolm X to say nothing about Dr. King’s]” then continuing to “do we fear what faces us in this country” before finally landing on “or are we ready to Answer the call of our Ancestors”, the order is deliberate. The opening line to the tweet, acting both as an advertisement for my latest lecture and an introduction meant to offer a broader frame to set the rest of the tweet inside; references one of Malcolm X’s most popular and possibly most philosophized speeches, “The Ballot and the Bullet”. The pointed question following this introductory is provocative, meaning to question our actual adherence to Brother Malcolm’s teachings; a question even the staunchest reader of his works, would likely have to pause before answering truthfully. Since it is not easy to live up to the mantle Brother Malcolm left, the question is less focused on shaming his readers and more on encouraging them to “Answer the call of our Ancestors [like Brother Malcolm]”.

Why we likely fear Brother Malcolm’s message, a “fear of what faces us in this country” if we did listen closely to this message, follows the first question; though many of our people may not realize this fear exists within us. Malcolm X has always been seen as the anti-Dr. King, the one who hated white people as fiercely as they hated black people, the one who advocated violence against white people – indiscriminate violence – just like the violence white people advocated against black people and to a lesser extent, he has been seen as the response to the stochastic white terrorism dished out against non-aggressive blacks who sought to live in peace with the country who had formerly enslaved them. This vision of Malcolm X stands as an oddity since he himself only advocated violence as a self-defense tactic and never advocated injuring any white person who did not pose a physical threat to a physical community or a person within that physical community. Nonetheless, accepting Brother Malcolm X’s message as legitimate without the explanation just offered will see you tarred and feathered as a Black Supremacist with White-Racist views. In this way you will become, in the eyes of ill-informed whites, as no better than the Klan. For our human-centered culture, such a designation is akin to a living death; the Klan was zombified by a possessive demonic spirit who demanded blood for its continued existence which drove people to commit terrible acts against innocent people. To us, such a state is a living death. To be thought to be worse than it is nightmarish; so, even when the accusation holds little evidence to back it up, we flee away from it lest we become painted by its prejudice. We might learn before we did flee, that those who wish to paint us with the stigmatism derived from the accusation are not honest actors. They do not see the world the way we do and thus they use stigmas as weapons against our decency and to keep us away from our destiny which Brother Malcolm understood would require us to mature our sight so we could see clearly the world we are living in.

This leads perfectly into the next question, “do we fear what faces us in this country”; a question that fits into the previous one but with broader implications. What exactly awaits us in this country if we stopped fearing Malcolm’s message? The same that awaits the drunkard as they began to awaken from their stupor; pain, body aches, clear thinking and realization of the position they are relative to the mistakes they’ve made and the problems they tried to escape from. The same is all true for us. We awake to the pain we experience every day as the world continues to stab us, prick us and demean our existence; we become more aware of the physical pain that comes to a body tired from dealing with the psychic attacks we fight through every day; our mind begins to clarify as to what must occur to prevent the pain and body aches from continuing or coming back as we begin to grapple with the realization of the position we are in in this country and how that position has been negatively impact by the mistakes we have made mistakes that are relative to the problems that surround us systemically (culturally, socially, legally, politically). Yet this is not driving our fear, it is ostracizing from the broader white community that we fear; because Brother Malcolm is seen so negatively throughout the white community, to be attached to him is seen as a warning sign for extremist behavior by many white people who can control your destiny in this society. This fear is seldom communicated or spoken about within the community, yet it does exist and it should be given much thought as the consequences from awaking from your stupor could have unforeseen negative consequences that can and often does turn your life upside down. A negative fact only if your mind does not evolve to understand that your stupor had in fact turned your mind and thus your world and your life, upside down already, resulting in the world and your life becoming right side up again as you moved away from your condition.

Here, now, we return to the original last line. Not it begins with the word “or” not “and”. Through seeing the fear we must face in the first two questions, we see that “Answering the call of our Ancestors” is not something we can achieve if we are racked with the limitations imposed by those fears; thus, we should see them as grouped together and separate from the final question. Hopefully at this pieces conclusion we can answer yes to this final question, but I doubt it; our community has become comfortable with seeing Brother Malcolm (and Brother King, Brother Du Bois, Brother Garvey and many more) as pop culture icons which demeans their work. We must now seriously study these predecessors so we can fully see how we fit into the visions they were trying to create for the world