Everything You Know Is Wrong

A new biography of Malcolm X by Manning Marable claims that what we know about him is wrong. (Marable recenty died, but his book is coming out Monday.) The false picture is there for a number of reasons, according to Marable.  Some of it is just lack of proper research, but much of this alleged misinformation is due to self-interest.  Malcolm exaggerated his criminal past so his redemption through religion would seem more powerful.  The authorities didn't reveal that they allowed his assasssination to happen and didn't investigate it properly.  Alex Haley, who put together the famous Autobiography, was an integrationist who soft-pedaled Malcolm's radicalism.  And so on.

Sounds like the book'll do well.  Malcolm X has gotten safe--nothing like making him controversial again to get a debate going.

PS  Two things about the Times article I linked:

1)  Here's a quote from Michael Eric Dyson.

This book gives us a richer, more profound, more complicated and more fully fleshed out Malcolm than we have ever had before.  [Marable has] done as thorough and exhaustive a job as has ever been done in piecing together the life and evolution of Malcolm X, rescuing him from both the hagiography of uncritical advocates and the demonization of undeterred critics.

Boy, that sounds just like Dyson.  I don't want to dump on him too hard, but he's a guy who likes to throw in extra words.  Are "richer, more profound, more complicated and more fully fleshed out" four different things, or four ways of describing the same thing?  So the research is both "thorough" and "exhaustive"?

Then there's "hagiography of uncritical advocates." If it's a hagiography, it's going to be uncritical, and it's going to be from advocates.  But that I can almost accept compared to "demonization of undeterred critics." Lucky for us a lot of critics have been deterred, and so can only mumble demonizing rhetoric under their breath.  It seems likely he put in "undeterred" for parallel structure. It wasn't worth it.

2)  Here's the kind of sentence that you only seem to read in The New York Times.

Mr. Marable contends that although Malcolm X embraced mainstream Islam at least two years before his death, law-enforcement authorities continued to see him as a dangerous rabble-rouser.

So if one embraces mainstream religion (Islam or otherwise), one can no longer be a dangerous rabble-rouser?  This would be odd by itself, but odder still in an article that discusses how Malcolm X was probably more radical than believed.