Sunday 21st February will mark 56 years since the assassination of Malcolm X, long enough for people to embrace the figure but ignore his politics. In an age of so-called “decolonial” education and PR commitments to racial justice, it is disappointing how little people have actually engaged with the intellectual ideas that have shaped this moment. Terms like Coconut, House Negro, and Uncle Tom are not, and never were racial slurs. To view them as such is to fall down the rabbit hole of “reverse racism.” That Negro is now being starred out as though it was an expletive is ludicrous if we honestly want to bring in a different set of ideas into the way we understand the world. If we can’t say Negro we will give up a considerable amount of the intellectual production of Black people, from the Garveys, through Claudia Jones, and even Martin Luther King. Consider the absurdity of how we would have to describe the most important Black organization in history, the Universal N**** Improvement Association.
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