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While Malcolm X was eating in a Black restaurant in Harlem, a young white college [illegible] burst in, and running over to him, [illegible] 'What can I do?' He coldly replied [illegible], She left weeping.
For years well-meaning white people had participated in organisations such as the National [illegible] the Advancement of the Coloured People. [With] determination, and often great courage, they had marched, petitioned, sat-in, etc. They succeeded in [illegible] at countless lunch counters, on the voters' roll, the unions, the bus-routes, factories. [But] this success was a pyrrhic one.
[While] many of these gains were real, and brought [some] advantages for some black people, the majority were mere tokens; they left untouched the carefully nurtured legend of bourgeois [illegible]. [The important thing] about Malcolm is that he was [illegible] by this myth. This article is [directed] to the white revolutionaries [illegible] why Malcolm X is important for [illegible].
[After] his break from the Nation of Islam, [his experience had] taught him that there were a few white people who wished to combat racialism, and he welcomed their efforts, so long as they were directed toward attempting to [illegible], and not [to] ask [a black] man how to carry out his fight.
Because Malcolm's message was, of course, directed to [black people, the] revolutionaries can [learn from him about] the nature of the [oppression] of the black people and about the society which we are attempting to destroy, which spawns racialism as a swamp spawns disease.
It was Malcolm X's most important contribution [that] the liberation of black people [had] to be composed of, inspired by, and led by black people [themselves]. [Black people] had delved into the history of [America and] saw that their basic problem was [oppression] by white [men], [that] their captivity was [not] the result of a misunderstanding [but] was a basic corollary of their presence in [America]. From the eyes of the slaver, black people had been taught that they existed to work for white men, to do his bidding, and to regard [illegible]. Malcolm saw that if black people were to gain anything, it would have to be by their own efforts, and their efforts had to be aimed at goals which related to their desires, and these goals had to be achieved by organisations which they ran themselves. Thus his exclusion of white people from his own movement was not the result of hatred toward them, but of love for his own people.
So, 'what can we do?' Indirectly Malcolm answered this question, and his answer has a universality which applies not only to anti-racialist whites in America, but in Britain too.
After his trip to Africa, Malcolm realised that racialism was an essential element in imperialist exploitation of that continent; the struggles of the black people in Africa and the United States were linked. More than that, without defeating imperialism there can be no end to racialism.
The essential link between imperialism and racialism is an important aspect of the struggle in Britain. We belong to a nation with a long imperial history; the ideas and assumptions which were essential to preserve that Empire have bitten very deeply into every aspect of life here.
The ruling class had a conscious policy of corrupting whole generations of workers with the privileges they could spare at the expense of the colonial workers. We must face the fact that they were in a large measure successful, and that large sections of British workers are infected with the poison of racialism.
It is foolish to ignore this problem, but it is equally foolish to see it as unrelated to the general fight against capitalist ideology. The penetration of the working class by racialist ideas is the result of the weakness of any alternative theory to that of the bourgeoisie within the working class movement. It is here too that Malcolm X's ideas are important, because they expose the complete inadequacy of Liberal/Fabian ideas to combat racialism.
Because Fabianism's critique starts from the need to make society efficient, and not from a commitment to fight oppression, as does marxism, racialism is opposed because it engenders irrational conflict. Thus the suppression of the slavemaster and the resistance of the slave are equated, and the concept that racialism is an intolerable evil which must be fought now is totally foreign to its method. And because Fabianism eschews the possibility of any rapid change in capitalist society and seeks merely to remove the tensions within it, inevitably it must seek to preserve it against the revolt of the black people. The record of the Labour Government is clear proof of the role of this pernicious theory in the British labour movement; the actions of Wilson, Callaghan & co. are not the result of any personal prejudice on their part, but are the logical result of their brand of ideology, and of course are directly linked with their attacks on the working class.
Malcolm X taught us that the fight against racialism was much more than a fight against discrimination; he showed that racialism pervaded every aspect of capitalism and that the challenge to that aspect was inevitably a total challenge to the entire world system of oppression.
Discrimination must of course be fought, and militantly, but unless we break from the methods employed by the Brockways and Sopers, we will never succeed. The idea that racialism can be eliminated by legislation is not only foolish but has proved dangerous; it is not possible for black people to say what they think of this country and of the racialists they come into contact with day after day, without running the risk of a prison sentence. What is under attack here is not the sincerity of the good Lords but their notion that racialism is a limited unrelated phenomenon which can be reasoned or punished out of existence.
Equally to be criticised are those 'marxists' who swallow the Fabian concept of racialism whole, and equate the selectivity of the Black Power movement with racial discrimination. Often they are the same comrades who are reluctant to face up to the fact that racialism influences large sections of the workers.
There is not room here to go into a detailed examination of how Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky saw the question, but there will be no dispute about the fact that they maintained the duty of revolutionaries in imperialist countries to defend the right of self-determination for national struggles against imperialism. If we accept Malcolm X's analysis of the link between imperialism and racialism, it becomes clear that we must accept the right of black people to determine their own methods of struggle against imperialism and racialism.
We return to the question asked earlier: 'What can we do?' - Fight imperialism!