Episode Transcript
It is February 21, 1965, the weather is grey, cold and overcast, with temperatures close to freezing.
Today, one of the greatest, and bravest, intellects in American history is going to be murdered at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem around 3:10 PM.
His surname is curious because it asks a question. His answer is that he has thrown away his given surname of Little, and adopted this letter because he is searching for a word that will really reflect his true identity.
He is Malcolm X.
His death will reveal many things about America, including the cold fact that a country built on Exclusion has no shared national identity that all its people can buy into, because many have been actively denied it.
Identity as we can see all around us today is the single most important question in America because it is a country made in the image of the very few.
What makes Malcolm X unique is that he not only begins this journey when few are willing to do so, but he does it in public by challenging the system.
What makes him doubly dangerous is that as a black man he symbolises the largest group of people in America who have been denied not only their own identity as individuals, but shared national identity as equal Americans. This is happening in the Nineteen Sixties, a period when the American system is under wider social and political stress.
Today, the question of identity is prominent as old certainties die, and individuals break free to align with values and grouping that they feel they belong to.
This exposes the hollow reality of what America is as a nation - a dysfunctional, authoritarian country with an elite who exclude the people from having a true voice and stake in it. Many of the very same elite who have loyalties to national interests that are not American.
We need to ask ourselves how this is possible?
What distinguishes homo sapiens from most other species is our outstanding ability to quickly understand, and adapt to the social environment we find ourselves in.
Our environment plays a significant role in defining our thinking and our actions. This, of course, is impacted and reinforced by the prevailing language and its use.
At base, this is a survival mechanism.
In a more complex societal framework, it allows us to do more. Perhaps, prosper.
This mechanism also allows previously established power frameworks, and their thinking, to become embedded into our subconscious minds. This then dictates what value we attach to ourselves and what happens to us through its prism.
This is a form of imposed but internalised societal schizophrenia.
That is how we understand and judge our world, our place within it, other human beings, our successes and failures.
There is no escape from this human condition. It is common to all of us. The billionaire in his penthouse, and the woman sleeping rough in the street both share it, even if they share nothing else.
For a land of migrants, both unwilling and willing, like America, this is even more important because ‘newbies’ know no better, and need something, anything, an idea, a job, a flag, better still, all three, that they can attach themselves to in their new environment that they can call their own, and so belong.
This, paradoxically, makes immigrants, and the disenfranchised, less likely to challenge the system. Because the less we have in our lives, the greater the value we give these things, because they give us an identity, a sense of belonging.
This given identity ensures that people accept whatever takes place in society as normal, even when it is against their interests, and even when it is contrary to what the society they live in claims to stand for.
This ‘conditioned normality’ is vital for maintaining the status quo.
You accept and live within the given framework, and because life does not work always within defined societal boundaries, you can become rich and successful, although always with the designation you previously had.
So, Narcissus, a slave, became Emperor Clodius’ secretary of letters and one of Rome’s richest freedman.
In post-independence India, K. R. Narayanan, became the first Dalit (Untouchable) President of India (1997–2002).
Both states, one ancient, one current, not really known for their civic values. Just like America.
Individual success does not change the system. It leaves millions still yoked as they were at birth.
Now imagine life as slave, or descendants of slaves. There is no City on the Hill for you in America, only a huge, steep, cliff-faced, grey mountain you have to climb naked to see the wider expanses of life with your own eyes, make your own choices, and decide who you are when all institutions of the state are ranged against you.
It takes extreme courage, and a dissecting intellect, to break this paradigm of acceptance and challenge the system head on.
Most of us never do.
Malcolm X did.
This explains both his life and death. And his singular importance.
It also explains why Barack Obama can become American president. He is not a man challenging the system but one representing it. Not a man of change but one reinforcing the status quo.
One more example that is both telling, and revealing, of how the system regains control is in front of us.
Today, for most American people, the letter ‘X’ is associated with an oligarch, Elon Musk, and his businesses and not Malcolm, all this while the country tears itself apart on the issue of identity.
Is his choice of this letter a coincidence, or a subtle attempt to wipe away another element of independent black consciousness that still exists to challenge the system?
Given his privileged upbringing in apartheid white South Africa, we leave it up to you to decide.
We are all born into an environmental narrative, most commonly national, that may be true or false, or a combination of both.
The important thing is that a narrative is an intrinsic part of our existence as a species.
We, individually, all have a narrative within us about who we are, and what our lives mean. That includes our place in society.
Very few people can live by wholly rejecting what rejects them.
To understand the strength of the narrative conditioning that is in place for all of us in all societies, for good or evil, we need only to look at two examples to see how this works.
The most extreme example of this is the caste system in India, established by a religious elite who placed themselves at the top.
It condemned millions of fellow Indians, those of the lowest caste, The Untouchables, by segregating them, because they were deemed ‘unclean,’ from what we would regard as everyday life, except with other untouchables. This ensured lifetime of utter exploitation and ghettoization for millennia, and continuous supply of low-paid workers for the Indian society.
Amazingly, this inhumanity is still accepted by them as being normal, and they reinforce the system by abiding by its rules.
A less extreme but glaring example is the experience of white, working-class people in America.
Many of the most neglected white people in America are the greatest supporters of the system that has no regard for them.
40% of white Americans, around 130 million individuals, (without a college degree) are defined as working class. Up and down the age spectrum, deaths from suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse, have been surging for them.
In addition, health problems, with heart disease the most significant, have been exacerbated by obesity, low wages, the gig economy and lack of social provision.
Declining households and marriage have further deprived them of the support framework that we need to lead fulfilling lives.
All this has led to a loss of individual identity and questioning of sense of self-worth.
It’s like your local networks have been severely damaged or switched off, leaving you in semi-darkness.
So, many have found solace in their wider, historic MAAGA identity as white Americans which reiterates their foundational stake in the country and what, they believe, it represents for them.
It’s as if to replace the loss of your local networks, you have plugged directly into the main grid. Bright light is everywhere, suddenly allowing you to see clearly what you already thought you knew was there.
It re-confirms you, and your identity.
And it is absolutely understandable.
Similarly, black and brown people adopted and imposed their own gradations of blackness/whiteness on themselves, and their own ethnic groupings, to create a social hierarchy which echoed and reinforced the one imposed by white people.
It was their way of belonging to, and owning, part of the system.
Acceptance and compromise leads not to a better life, but a less mentally and emotionally exhausting one.
An even longer lasting, extreme American example of this is where slaves adopted, or were forced to adopt, the Christian religion of their enslavers and their particular belief system.
For that reason, the established social parameters took precedence over God’s, and were accepted.
They all prayed to the same God.
But not together.
The God of black worshippers, and the God of white worshippers, had to keep moving house, an unwilling bigamist with two families, to reach the faithful.
It’s hard to let go what you know.
It took over a century after emancipation for this mindset of enforced acceptance to be broken by high-profile African American individuals including Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, who understood exactly how it worked.
How you are seen is how society defines you.
How you think is how you define yourself.
It had manacled them into the imposed thinking of slaves, ensured their ongoing compliance with the system, and acknowledged the inherent superiority of those who represented it.
In an act of insurgency, they both jettisoned their given societal, Christian names (Malcolm Little and Cassius Clay) and joined the Nation of Islam as it represented the exact opposite. A black organisation, based around the second greatest world religion in terms of adherents, because it gave them a new identity.
Muhammad Ali, one of the most famous men on the planet, an iconic figure already, had a personal identity that transcended both his colour and newly adopted religion. His great achievement was that he could be himself, as he proved by refusing to fight in Vietnam because he said the Vietnamese had never done any harm to him, and by refusing to fall for the corrupting blandishment of the white, liberal elite who masquerade as agents of change, but merely give the system a softer mask for its ongoing actions.
The symbolic intent of his action was unmistakable. He was not going to fight for a system that had oppressed him, and now wanted to exploit him, for its own ends.
Malcolm X (the X reflected his acknowledgement that he had no identity of his own), quickly realised that he had exchanged one controlling mindset for another.
Very similar but different guise.
He was still locked in the imposed ghetto of the mind.
This meant no real change that he wanted was possible.
He then very quickly came to understand that a reaction is not a philosophy. It merely reinforces and strengthens what you are reacting against because you have to constantly reference it.
To make something new. and gain a new identity of your own, you have to leave it all behind.
The realisation led to his ultimate self-ostracization from everything he had known, and he became a singular, seeking voice looking for fundamental change he could believe in.
Ironically, like the Pilgrim Fathers had done.
So, in some ways, he was harking back to and following the established American narrative and should have been lauded for it.
Instead, he had now made very dangerous establishment enemies, both white and black, because he questioned their authority.
FBI and the Nation of Islam would collude to murder him. While the shots were conveniently fired by two black members of the Nation of Islam, the gun, bullets, instructions, and subsequent cover-up came from the FBI.
This could be done because one person revolting is a statement.
Many revolting is a movement. And the two cannot be allowed to come together.
Notwithstanding individual revolts against the system, with lifelong rebels like Afeni Shakur, the mother of Tupac, most eventually realise, like her, its futility.
The greatest, illusional dream factory in America is not Hollywood, it’s a supporting actor, but its political system.
Its actions while loudly trumpeted on every available screen or social network feed are largely symbolic, include very little or no substance, and have about the same level of cohesive implementation.
The instances where the American political system has worked for the common good, its people, are few and far between.
Yet each such small attempt, as we have seen with black rights after the Civil War, are seeing now with even limited social welfare programmes being cut, Fannie Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association) and Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation) being lined up for privatisation, has been followed by a rollback so that while outwardly things appear to change, they, in fact, move back towards what they were. In the hands and pockets of the elite.
Today, over a century later, segregation in schools still remains at 95% in certain areas, revealingly the most segregated cities like Milwaukee, Buffalo, Chicago and Detroit are in the North.
African American people still occupy the lowest rung in terms of economic indicators, health, education, home ownership, wages and voting.
Over 98% of all government loans for housing over a fifty-year period beginning in 1932 and ending in 1982, went to white applicants who themselves were graded according to their origin, with the darker skinned South Italians bottom of the whitelist.
In 1908, William Ripley, professor of politics at Columbia University, had likened “Mediterranean, Slavic and Oriental” immigrants to locusts swarming in and overrunning the “Anglo-Saxon” people of America in a sign that these views, and the historic discrimination they imposed on fellow Americans, were mainstream, widespread and respected.
Their impact is everywhere today.
African American people still suffer disproportionally from having to pay more for mortgages and loans, face police brutality daily, vigilante justice as seen fit by a fellow countryman, are disproportionally the largest group in prison population, and African American subsistence, in terms of day-to-day living hardly matter more than they did.
Black and Hispanic children, the generation who will be into their thirties in the middle of this century with families, have access to just one cent for every dollar enjoyed by their white counterparts in 2021.
The failure of President Johnson’s Great Society, an attempt to share the nation's wealth with all countrymen and women, should not come as a big surprise.
It had been tried mainly on behalf of white working- and middle-class people thirty years previously as the New Deal by FDR, and defeating it, or anything resembling it, had become the foundation of elite action since.
One of the great unasked questions of American politics and society is, who does the president represent?
As the holder of the only political office which all the American people vote for, the answer should be obvious.
Everyone.
The reality argues otherwise, and is behind the rise of Donald Trump. The fact that even after his electoral defeat in 2020 his supporters still backed him and put him in the White House in 2024, suggests that something fundamental is happening in American politics.
Counterintuitively, it is a revolt by the conservatives for the status quo.
It appears just electing him is enough for those who vote for him. He does not have to deliver any manifesto commitments to his ordinary voters.
He is in person both the manifesto and the commitment.
He represents something, or someone, they can call their own because he was a political outsider.
He is their president.
That should not come as a surprise in these fevered times of flux and confusion.
Yet Trump is the president who has given the wealthiest people in America the biggest tax cuts in American history.
It is no surprise that so many American presidents have come from the wealthy elite, and those who have not like Reagan, it is because they have chosen to represent elite interests. Thus, they owe those very people for their privileged position and are charged with increasing their wealth and power.
White workers, while apparently sharing the privilege of being the right colour, have rarely found a helping hand in U.S. institutions at the highest level.
As far back as 1834 in what was called the Era of the Common Man, President Andrew Jackson while presenting himself as a man of the people, sent troops to the construction sites of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal to break strikes.
In 1887, President Hayes ordered the army to break the Great Railroad Strike.
In 1894, President Cleveland ordered federal troops to disrupt the Pullman Strike.
Governors and mayors have regularly used the National Guard, the people’s militia, and police to confront workers on strike in their own states.
It is May 4, 1886. Chicago, Illinois, is enjoying mild spring weather, yet today is cloudy and cool, perhaps in anticipation of what is to come.
Today, one of the most infamous examples of white worker suppression in America will take place in what is part of a national campaign to secure an eight-hour workday.
Known as the Haymarket Affair, also called Haymarket Riot or Haymarket Massacre, the violence had begun the previous day, May 3, when one person was killed and several injured, as police intervened to protect strike breakers and intimidate strikers during a union action at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company.
To protest against police brutality, labour leaders have called a mass meeting for today in Haymarket Square.
The gathering is pronounced peaceful by Chicago Mayor, Carter Harrison, who attends as an observer.
After Harrison and most of the demonstrators depart, a troop of police arrive and demand the crowd disperse. At that point, a bomb is thrown by an individual never positively identified, and police respond with gunfire. In the ensuing violence, seven police officers are killed and 60 others wounded. Civilian casualties are estimated at four to eight dead and 30 to 40 injured.
In the mass hysteria and panic that follows, eight anarchists including the unfortunately named, August Spies, a radical labour activist and newspaper editor, are convicted of murder on the grounds that they had conspired with, or aided, an unknown assailant.
Many of the so-called “Chicago Eight,” are not present at the May 4 event, and their alleged involvement is never proved.
Nevertheless, Spies and three other defendants are hanged on November 11, 1887, and another defendant commits suicide.
Six years later, in 1893, Illinois Governor, John Peter Altgeld, is petitioned by the famous criminal attorney Clarence Darrow, and others, to grant clemency to the surviving three men.
Studying the transcript of the case, Altgeld concludes that the defendants were not given a fair trial because the judge was biased, the jury was packed in the prosecution’s favour, and much of the evidence fabricated.
His decision to issue the pardons is widely condemned by corporate leaders, and the mainstream print media of the time, because it runs counter to the narrative that has been promoted by them of anarchist-inspired violence rather than a fight for worker rights.
However, the main aim of the narrative has already been achieved.
The Knights of Labour, at the time the largest and most successful union organization in the country, is destroyed.
However, no one is innocent, or has been, when it comes to worker rights in America except the workers.
America is not a nation with people who share a common national identity, but a grouping of self-interest groups, with the elite the most powerful, who act in accordance with their own needs and wishes, to the detriment of everyone else.
How else to explain a political elite that openly vouches loyalty for a foreign state, gives it and its citizens huge financial support that allows them free access to health and education denied to their own countrymen and women, the very people who voted for them?
Gun ownership, and its handmaiden, selfish individualism, in America is presented as a strength when it is in fact a sign of the utter failure of America to create a greater consciousness of what it is as a society and the shared values that any nation naturally comes to accrue.
The frequent, daily mass shootings, one hundred deaths and two hundred injured every day, only reinforce the sense of isolation and alienation, ‘not feeling that you belong,’ that is resultant in the heart of the American darkness.
In a society based around ‘Me, Myself and I,’ the solitary cell is home.
Only a people fearful of their environment and seeing their fellow countrymen as a threat, and not having faith in their institutions to protect them, can think carrying guns in public is justifiable.
And gated communities that separate you from your fellow citizens an aspiration.
It also situations society to see violence as an act of defence no matter how egregious.
Violence as part of everyday life makes the word, ‘war’, part of everyday lexicon and it justifies and ensures America has been at war 231 out of 245 years since 1776.
At home, major social problems become issues of combat; us v them, good v evil; war on poverty, war on crime, war on drugs, war on Covid.
War is imprecise.
Social actions require on-the-ground precision to work.
The focus is subtly shifted so that rather than being subjects of careful, inclusive and consensual consideration of society, they are broad brush statements of intent (‘Tweets’ for history) which can then be hijacked by vested interests to control the narrative and generate profit for the few, not provide enabling help for the people.
Furthermore, consensus, once something has been agreed upon, requires accountability from the political elite.
No consensus, no accountability.
The two-party system cleverly creates a false sense of identity, while providing the power frameworks the means to ensure only what they desire is enacted upon.
We can see this in front of our eyes where one group conveniently forgets what their president did, and foists all negativity on the president representing the other party, ignoring that they are both equally culpable and do not represent them, or their interests.
This is the supremacist mindset that is being bought into by ordinary people, with all the dices set at six, unconcerned with their lives.
They get away with it, not only because they control all the levers of power, but In a largely dysfunctional, antagonistic society based around greed and self-interest, a society where domestic consensus is not usually sought, there is no acknowledgement of the equality of all citizens with a shared national identity, but mainly because a settlement of these fundamental rights would require a change in the status quo.
That, of course, is a paradox of the impossible meeting the possible.
There is one final question we all need to ask ourselves, and each other.
It relates to the issue of identity in its most valuable and fundamental form because it is about shared individual and national identity.
That requires a re-set in an abusive relationship.
To challenge what JFK said on his inauguration, we think you should ask not what you can do for your country, ask what it does for you. Because without you, it does not exist.
That is, the people who need you to validate their positions and power. Therefore, those who claim to both represent and rule this entity.
What is the purpose of government, a government that you pay money to in the form of taxes, if its role is not to look after all its people?
And what is the need for a nation state if it does not represent the needs, and look after the interests of all its people?
Answering those questions will be the existential challenge facing governments in the Twenty First Century.
The get out of jail card provided by the fraying veneer of democracy will no longer be enough for things to continue as they are.
It will be especially pertinent to America, and its survival as a cohesive entity.
