A Pedagogy of Resistance: From Double Consciousness to the Unified Self in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X

The first few minutes of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992) are easy to miss. The Warner Brothers logo appears against a cotton-ball cerulean sky. A voiceover greets with “Salaam Alaikum,” and a congregation of voices answers enthusiastically, “Wa Alaikum Salaam.” The voice then breaks with formality and asks, “How do you feel?” A unified response comes back: “Awesome!” “Who do we want to hear?” The community of voices cheers, “Malcolm X!”  

This call-and-response over the Warner Bros. logo anticipates the film’s own production history. As Lee’s most ambitious project to date, Malcolm X is a three-hour-plus historical epic whose scale and subject Warner Bros. misunderstood from the outset. The studio balked at Lee’s request for US$33 million and suggested US$18 million, without committing to more.¹ Once production began, Lee knew it would take more money to accomplish the scale of what he imagined, and was left without studio funding mid-production. Undeterred, he turned to Black artists and public figures in his community, including Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, and others for support.² As Lee later wrote, “These folks saved Malcolm X. It was their money that kept us to continue to work on the film.”³ In retrospect, the congregation’s call over the studio logo feels prophetic given how he would complete the film.

The communal call is answered in the next shot by Denzel Washington’s voice as Malcolm, heard over the American flag and set to a discordant lone trumpet and repeating drumbeat. He launches into a litany of crimes: “I charge the white man with being the greatest murderer on earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest kidnapper on earth… There is nowhere that man can go and say he created peace and harmony.” The flag ignites and burns, intercut with slivers of video that accumulate as afterimages until the grainy shapes become recognisable: something akin to the ritual of an animal being led to slaughter – no, a man being encircled. A raised baton bears down; the beating continues as the man struggles and topples, trying to get back up, once, twice – there is no recovery. As the flag burns down to an X, we hear Malcolm’s condemnation: “We don’t experience the American dream, we experience the American nightmare.”

These charges introduce Lee’s humanist Malcolm X. Lee first encountered Malcolm through reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X in public school, where Malcolm left an impression not as a figure of random violence but as “a great Black man” who “did not back down from anybody.”⁴ Lee understood that popular culture tended to reduce Malcolm to a one-dimensional radical who advocated random violence. His first challenge to this misrepresentation came at the end of Do the Right Thing (1989), where he juxtaposed quotations from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X: King frames nonviolence as a moral imperative, while Malcolm frames self-defence as a necessary right. As Lee later explained, Malcolm’s position was “a lot different from random violence”; King and Malcolm “chose different paths trying to reach the same destination against a common opponent.”⁵

Warner Bros. wanted a more “crossover” film (one that would appeal “more to a white bourgeois audience”), and objected to the Rodney King footage, the burning flag, Malcolm’s speech over the opening credits and the film’s length; Lee insisted he compromised Malcolm’s image “not one iota.”⁶ On 4 May 1992, while South Central Los Angeles was still burning in the wake of a jury’s acquittal of the police officers involved in the beating of King, Lee screened a second edit and described the opening credits as showing “what it truly means to be an African American in this country today.” For Lee, the footage showed something worse than brutality: police “had not been beating a man … a human being … (but) an animal … a gorilla in the mist.”⁷ 

The litany is not an endorsement of violence but a demand for recognition, accountability and human rights. In Fanon’s terms, oppression first has to be named before the Black subject can answer it and make himself known.⁸ Alongside the congregation’s collective call, the opening sequences establish resistance as both collective address and self-recognition. Lee then moves into Malcolm’s biographical narrative, from self-negation in the conk and street-hustling years toward a pedagogy of resistance. Through the discipline and collective brotherhood of the Nation of Islam, and the decolonising tools offered by fellow prisoner Baines (Albert Hall), Malcolm learns to recognise the methods of the oppressor and face him with selfhood and humanity intact.

We begin in wartime Boston. Shorty (Spike Lee) enters in a flashy zoot suit, his leather oxfords shined on a bustling train-station street. He spills from the chair and swings his arm to a blues track, taking us to a barbershop where he opens a can of “devil’s lye” and concocts a thick white paste. Malcolm sheepishly emerges as the older patrons, comrades in arms, remove their caps to reveal the ravages of lye on their frayed scalps. Unperturbed, he takes the chair. Almost as soon as Shorty applies the paste and Malcolm says, “It’s not so bad,” the burn hits and he lunges for the sink, insisting he’ll never do this again. Yet when the towel comes off, revealing his reddish-brown flattened hair, the pain is forgotten. “Does it look white?” Malcolm asks, grinning.

Malcolm’s pleasure in the conk gives bodily form to W.E.B. Du Bois’s double consciousness: he sees himself through the eyes of others, measuring his altered hair by the “tape of a world” that has already taught him contempt.⁹ The trauma of the white gaze follows him into prison where his street-hustler persona Detroit Red, begins to crack. He refuses his prison number, is labelled Satan and thrown into solitary confinement and absolute darkness. A prison chaplain (Christopher Plummer) arrives with a cigarette and a proposition, “You know what a friend you have in Jesus?” Malcolm’s voice turns from puzzlement to accusation: “If he’s such a friend, where is he? What has he done for me?” Malcolm chides the chaplain until he withdraws, then calls after him: “Where is this Jesus? I’ll tell you. He’s out with the police captain!” The vault’s slats slide open, casting long rectangular beams that partially complete a cross. Malcolm breaks down, writhing against the beams until the slats close and he is dragged out. In the moment, religion, prison, and police appear as parts of the same structure bearing down. 

Released from isolation, Malcolm returns to the conking ritual in the prison showers, with his tools lined up on a barred concrete windowsill and lye in his hair. Baines interrupts, exposing Malcolm as trapped in a “prison of his own mind.” He presses Malcolm relentlessly: “Why don’t you want to look like what you are?” “What makes you ashamed of being Black?” Then comes the most damning remark: “Go on, put that poison in your hair… trying to be white! … You’re just another one of those cats strutting down there in your clown suit looking like a monkey. The white man sees you and laughs. He laughs because he knows you ain’t white.” Malcolm’s Detroit Red persona resists, falters, and runs out of answers.

At first Malcolm keeps to himself, but is drawn in by the way Baines, a member of the Nation of Islam, carries himself. When a guard orders Baines to break up his preaching to a small gathering of prisoners, Malcolm watches warily from a distance as Baines meets the guard’s gaze squarely, not stopping before he finishes his thought, even as the group disperses. Malcolm comes forward with a Detroit Red performance and genuine curiosity, wondering why Baines is not afraid to talk to the guard like that. Baines simply replies, “What’s he going to do to me that he hasn’t done to me already?” Malcolm scoffs, but stays.

In the prison-yard conversations that follow, Malcolm stays and listens. In one exchange, Baines asserts that God is Black and takes Malcolm to the library to look up “black” in Webster’s dictionary. They read “black” as “soiled with dirt, foul, sullen, hostile,” while the camera skims the page, briefly catching on “Negro.” Malcolm turns to Baines and acknowledges the point. When Baines asks him to read “white” as “the colour of pure snow … the opposite of black … free from spot or blemish … innocent, pure, without evil intent …,” the camera lands on “White Race.” Malcolm dismisses the dictionary as a book for white people, but Baines does not let him settle there: “You got to take everything the white man says and use it against him.” For Baines, words are his stick and his fist.

The lesson of the dictionary leads Malcolm to read and copy it in his cell at night. He wears a black Islamic prayer cap while studying and a black toque over his conked hair by day. One night, a vision of Elijah Muhammad reminds him of his Black selfhood, and he is finally able to kneel in prayer and commit himself to Allah. Malcolm is next seen in the prison barber’s chair having his conked hair cut off. During a prison chapel service, he again challenges the chaplain, asking why God is represented as blue-eyed and light-skinned when the Bible describes him otherwise. The chaplain stumbles: “We can’t know that for sure.”

After Malcolm’s release from prison and his joining the Nation of Islam, the first test of unified selfhood arrives when Johnson Hinton, a member of the Harlem Temple No. 7 congregation he leads, is severely beaten by police, imprisoned, and denied medical attention. Members of the congregation confront Malcolm, expecting a response of equal force. Instead, Malcolm confronts the police without raising his voice, holding their gaze, and refusing to back down until they relent, allowing him to order an ambulance and secure medical care for the injured “brother.” He then marches the community to the hospital, holding the line before a crowd whose fuse is already lit. Once Hinton’s recovery is confirmed, the police captain’s demand for the crowd to disperse has no effect. Malcolm smiles, raises his hand to halt the protesters, and redirects them with a pointing gesture. The police captain’s final words are foreboding: “That’s too much power for one man to have.”

Lee’s dramatisation of the brutal beating of Hinton stays close to the historical record, including Malcolm’s peaceful dispersal of the Harlem community with a silent hand gesture.¹⁰ More glaring is the omission of Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama, who cradled Malcolm’s head as he lay dying after his assassination in February 1965.¹¹ Her presence would have made visible an Afro-Asian political relation developing in Malcolm’s time, one that would have spoken to the urgency of interracial coalition in 1992, in the wake of the Los Angeles uprising.

Additionally, bell hooks condemns Lee’s film for turning Malcolm’s early life into spectacle, arguing that the dance-hall and barbershop scenes move toward “minstrelsy” at the expense of his politics, and that Washington’s nice-guy persona makes it difficult to convey Malcolm’s rage.¹² Yet hooks underestimates how Lee stages the trauma of Du Boisian double consciousness: the self-hatred that makes Malcolm want to remake himself in the image of the oppressor. Lee suggests that before rage can become political force, the more difficult task is making a unified self that does not need to perform rage as spectacle for the white gaze or verify its standards. The film’s ethical gaze lies here, in witnessing Malcolm become himself through patient interior work rather than spectacle. 

Ossie Davis’s voiceover eulogy leads into the film’s celebratory ending with children in Harlem and Soweto classrooms proclaiming “I am Malcolm X.” In the Soweto classroom, Nelson Mandela delivers Malcolm X’s 1964 Organization of Afro-American Unity speech, with its demand for human rights. Mandela appears in the film delivering the speech but could not utter “by any means necessary.” Two years from the presidency, the political situation in South Africa made those words too charged.¹³ Lee travelled to South Africa and saw for himself: “Black people are still living in what amounts to concentration camps…” The only change was that the world had stopped looking.¹⁴ Lee cut to documentary footage of Malcolm saying the line, to complete the declaration. The film comes full circle with the trauma of the Rodney King footage tempered by Mandela’s measured presence. Lee gives us the version of Malcolm X that was most needed in 1992: a figure of quiet, self-possessed resistance for a Black community reeling from state violence. 

Malcolm X (1992 USA 202 mins)

Prod Co: 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks Prod: Marvin Worth, Spike Lee Dir: Spike Lee Scr: Arnold Perl, Spike Lee Phot: Ernest Dickerson Ed: Barry Alexander Brown Mus: Terence Blanchard Art Dir: Tom Warren Cos Des: Ruth E. Carter

Cast: Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, Albert Hall, Al Freeman Jr., Delroy Lindo, Spike Lee, Theresa Randle, Kate Vernon, Ernest Lee Thomas, Christopher Plummer, Lonette McKee, Tommy Hollis

Endnotes