The conclusion from the Netflix series “Who Killed Malcolm X?” – yes, Nation of Islam, with a hockey assist from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI – illuminated a fundamental truth about the current day.
We could seriously stand for having someone emerge as a statesman for what’s right in the here and now.
Look at where things are a month out from the beginning of the protests into the police murder of George Floyd.
What is there to show for weeks of protests?
A few toppled statues, and COVID-19 spikes.
And now life is getting back to wherever it was before.
The issue: there was nobody rallying anybody to an actual cause.
Which was the motivation, from the investigation into the murder of Malcolm X, and what we learned from a peek inside the FBI files, behind law enforcement turning a blind eye into the very real threats on his life that materialized in his 1965 assassination.
It was similar to the assassination three years later of Martin Luther King Jr.
The official policy of the United States was that King and X were dangerous because they had proven themselves capable of organizing the disaffected.
Fifty-plus years since their deaths, what do we have in terms of spiritual heirs to their legacies?
The sound you hear is crickets chirping.
You can really only think of one name of anybody in the past, say, 20 years, who comes anywhere near King and X in terms of being statesman-like, and for whatever reason, Barack Obama is in self-imposed exile.
There’s no one – not one person – who speaks for the powerless, who embodies the will of millions for change.
We have politicians, celebrities, star athletes, but we don’t have leaders.
And so we flit about, aimlessly, in circles, with the occasional spasm of energy after something high-profile – a mass school shooting, police murdering an unarmed citizen – that turns into nothing.
This isn’t a bug, but is rather a feature, of how our system has come to work.
Change is a threat, so the system smooths things out.
This is the self-preservation mechanism.
As necessary, when the energy spikes, we are allowed crumbs – the toppled statues, the upcoming removal of the president – and then things get back to whatever normal there needs to be for life to be able to go on.
What’s interesting is that there aren’t any modern-day Malcolm Xs and Martin Luther King Jr.’s to even pose a threat to the system anymore.
Think about it. There isn’t anybody that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI would even bother to allow to be assassinated anymore.
Story by Chris Graham
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