Politics & Power Quote by Malcolm X

Malcolm X draws a razor line between two revolutions that can look identical from a safe distance. “The Negro revolution” is his deliberately domesticated label: respectable, legible to white America, and therefore steerable. Calling its managers “foxy white liberals” isn’t just name-calling; it’s a diagnosis of power. Liberalism, in this frame, becomes a velvet glove for the same old control - a way to launder authority through grants, speeches, and access while keeping Black anger on a leash. The sharper twist is “by the Government itself,” which yanks the reader from moral melodrama into political reality: movements can be administered, surveilled, and redirected as a matter of policy, not conspiracy.

Then he detonates the second clause. “The Black Revolution” refuses that old vocabulary and its implied permission structure. The word “Black” signals a shift from assimilation to self-definition, from pleading for entry to building leverage. Saying it’s “controlled only by God” isn’t pious decoration; it’s strategic. He appeals to a higher jurisdiction than the state, a way to sanctify militancy as not merely political but inevitable, righteous, beyond negotiation. It also sidesteps the trap of leadership decapitation: if the movement’s authority is divine, it can’t be bought off, co-opted, or legislated away.

Context matters: Malcolm is speaking from a moment when civil rights gains were real but tightly policed in both scope and narrative. His line is a warning about managed liberation - and a dare to imagine revolt that can’t be managed at all.