Week 07

Prophets/prophetesses are people who walk amongst us but see the world from above; they see the truth beyond the false ceilings we live under and push us to reorient our own vision. They possess the courage to expose and confront the mechanisms and mechanics of oppression. As such, they’re no ordinary people. They reside at the fringes of movements and causes, and rather comfortably so. They yield no desire to adjust their sight to placate others, they want their sight to singe.

The Black prophetic tradition gave us many prophets/prophetesses of which two dominate the mainstream, influential in their afterlife more so than they were in their remarkable lives: Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.. While the trickster and the reverend are posited in opposite ends of ideologies and while that is a contentious claim to make in its own right, what’s of more importance is that they are united on two main fronts. Firstly, it was fairly early, as innocent children discovering the world in wonder, that they were made aware of their blackness, how it robbed them of innate and external freedoms, and forced them to live a life of loss. Secondly, they were tied by their intense, common love for the African American folk; they were fearless in their pursuit of justice for the community they belonged to and loved deeply. They wanted to free their people of what constrained them from within, by calling out complacent, tyrannical people of color and pushing their people to recognize their marginalization and mobilize to foreground their concerns in the fabric of the American society. They wanted to free their people of what constrained them from without, by calling out complacent, prejudiced white people and pushing them to recognize their undue privilege, their resounding silence at the perpetuation of the unequal status quo, and their empty promises at things improving eventually. However much one sanitizes Martin Luther and vilifies Malcolm X, neither of them were willing to wait for this freedom to arrive on its own accord for they knew both as a fact of history and society, that freedom had to be wrested away from those that hindered its possibility for the African Americans. They were, as Martin Luther puts it, extremists of love: invoking God to move their people, shaking them out of their inertia; for the white people, it was redemption that was to agitate them into a common brotherhood and for the people of color, it was salvation that was to excite them into breaking their chains – phantom chains of a past whose shackles still kept the children of slaves bound to laws of the white people.

While Malcolm X was attracted to more violent measures of revolution in his days with the Nation of Islam and King was a preacher of non-violent means, they both were seen to be converging in their positions eventually as the former grew into the latter’s methods. Regardless, they had more that united them than what divided them. They sustained each other and pulled their people towards their calling – the calling of a freer, more just future uninhibited by the shadows of the past.