Nobody Can Give You Freedom: The Political Life of Malcolm X

Malcolm X “is the intellectual we need to reshape the future,” according to this whip-smart reinvestigation of the firebrand’s politics. Black studies scholar Andrews (Blackness at the Intersection) delves into the “liberatory” politics Malcolm formed and was able to expand upon after leaving the “cultish” Nation of Islam, arguing that these politics are a part of his legacy often overlooked in favor of an excessive focus on his early segregationist views. Those views Andrews also nonetheless defends as emerging from necessity—he quotes Malcolm’s insight that “the only person who can organize the man on the streets is the one who is unacceptable to the White community.” Andrews’s writing is no-holds-barred; he attacks contemporary Black bourgeois intellectuals who he sees as selling out Malcolm’s radical liberatory politics. He also pushes back against attempts to turn Malcolm into a Marxist figure, highlighting that class wasn’t a driving force in his activism, so much as Black solidarity in a white supremacist world order (“White is an attitude more than it is a color,” Malcolm asserted). Throughout, Andrews offers astute insights clarifying Malcolm’s thinking, in the process laying out a revolutionary political program he feels is still the right path to follow. Most fascinatingly, he persuasively delineates how Malcolm presaged contemporary debates around race. Searing, bold, and direct, this is a must for those interested in how race intersects with leftist politics. (Sept.)