Today we celebrate the 83rd birthday of our father and commander-in-chief, El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, Malcolm X. Although he was assassinated over 40 years ago, he is today what he has always been: a theorist, a revolutionary, a teacher, and a Black man whose political analysis was so clear, so precise, that it rings as true today as it did at the time of his assassination.

Malcolm is a man who can best speak for himself, so in discussing the continuing relevance of Malcolm X, it becomes necessary to look directly to him for an assessment of current events: the Sean Bell verdict, Barack Obama, and self-defense in the greater context of Black Liberation.

On the morning of April 25, 2008, the three New York Police officers who murdered Sean Bell and wounded Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield by riddling their vehicle with 50 bullets were acquitted on all charges. "They killed Sean all over again," Nicole Paultre-Bell, Sean's fiancée, said

But there should be nothing surprising about the verdict. Black murder has always been legal: enslavement and peonage; state-sponsored sterilization of Black women and girls; mass incarceration; forced displacement; etc. What we see in the case of Sean Bell is the continuance of a long tradition of state-sponsored Black extermination. The police were only doing what they are designed and trained to do: liquidate Black life. Our real outrage should come from our naïve belief in a judicial system and government that has historically proven to be our enemy.

When speaking of the need to elevate the struggle for civil rights to the level of human rights, Malcolm said,

Any time you find the government involved in a conspiracy to violate the citizenship or the civil rights of a people, then you are wasting your time going to that government expecting redress. Instead, you have to take that government to the world court and accuse it of genocide and of all the other crimes that it is guilty of today. ...you don't take your case to the criminal. You take your criminal to court.

It makes no sense to take the police, who enforce an unjust law, to the courts who uphold an unjust law, in search of justice. They are one and the same, defenders of the same interests. One is the tail; the other is the head, but it's the same pig.