In a movie directed by Spike Lee and released in 1992, Denzel Washington played Malcolm X, the controversial spokesman of the Black Muslims in the turbulent 1960’s. Any fan of the movie will certainly remember the scene below:
At the time of the speech, Malcolm X was proselytizing for the Black Muslims' official organization, the Nation of Islam. While the words he spoke were his own, the ideas were not. He was a part of a group that collectively held the beliefs he espoused in the clip along with many other much more incendiary and divisive ones that blamed all the ills of the world on “the white man”. It wasn’t until he took his Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are expected to make at least once in their lifetimes, that he discovered that he himself had been had, took, hoodwinked, and bamboozled by the leaders of the American Black Muslims that he had come to identify with. While in Mecca, to his surprise, he met white Muslims who meant him no harm and actually expressed genuine good will towards him. As a result of his encounters in Mecca, he was forced to examine everything he had come to believe. Unable to reconcile the new information with his foundational beliefs, he trusted the new knowledge he had gained for himself and broke with the Nation of Islam in America. The move would ultimately lead to his death, if the conspiracy theories are to be believed.
So what’s the point? Well, that depends on how you answer this question: What do you do when you discover new facts that are at odds with what you have come to believe - when you discover that your so called leaders have been bamboozling you?
Need some context to help clarify the question? Okay. Take this recent headline, “More Mexicans Are Leaving The U.S. Than Entering It” , and the excerpted WSJ article that accompanies it below:
......................“For the first time since the 1940s, more Mexicans have been leaving the U.S. to return home than arriving, a reversal that brings down the curtain on the largest immigration wave in modern American history, according to a new study.
Mexican migration has been falling for some time. But the Pew Research Center figures released Thursday suggest that the surge in legal and illegal Mexican immigration that helped transform America—and remains a contentious issue on the presidential campaign trail—may have peaked for good......
“Mexican migration to the U.S. has been one of the world’s great migration stories, and this data shows it has come to an end,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Pew’s Hispanic research. Pew based its study on an analysis of U.S. and Mexican government data for the years 2009 to 2014....
About 16 million Mexicans flocked to the U.S. during the last 40 years—about half of them illegally. But between 2009 and 2014, some one million returned to their country of origin, while 870,000 headed to the U.S., according to the report......
Several factors have undermined the lure of the U.S....
Mexican families have fewer mouths to feed as the country’s birthrate has declined to near replacement level, similar to that of the U.S., relieving economic pressure that motivated migrants to go north to find higher-paying jobs than are available in Mexico. Meanwhile, Mexico’s economy improved.
“The days of mass immigration from Mexico are over,” said Pia Orrenius, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas who studies migration. “Slower population growth in Mexico along with a stable economy and an expanded public-safety net are developments that have trimmed the ‘push factor.’ ”
The immigration reversal has reduced the number of Mexicans in the U.S., with or without legal status, to 11.7 million in 2014 from 12.8 million in 2007.
The Mexican undocumented population has continued to fall since peaking in 2007 at 6.9 million. It stood at 5.6 million in 2014, according to Pew estimates.
All told, the number of undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. has dropped by more than one million since 2007.......
Family ties are the primary reason Mexicans return home, the report said. Sixty-one percent of Mexicans who had lived in the U.S. in 2009 and returned by 2014 said that family reunification was their main motivation, according to a survey by Mexican authorities cited by Pew.......
Despite the decline in Mexicans coming to the U.S., illegal immigration has featured prominently in presidential debates, with some candidates saying border security should be boosted. ......
Donald Trump has called for deporting about 11 million people in the U.S. without status, while some other GOP candidates, including Jeb Bush, criticized that position......
Some politicians “are missing the emerging reality of U.S. immigration,” he said. “Immigration reform is needed to ensure that the labor needs of the U.S. economy can continue to be met.”....................
So, the new information here is that the lack of immigration may be the real threat we're facing. Our politicians either don't know this or do know this but find the truth inconvenient. Either way, what do you do with this new information? Maybe you never have occasion to do anything with it. And that's okay.
But you just might find yourself in a situation where you have the opportunity to disabuse someone in possession of fewer facts than you now have on this topic. If you do and you start to waver, it might help you to recall that Maya Angelou once said, "Courage is the most important of all virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently."
Malcolm X appears to have endorsed a code similar to Ms. Angelou's. Despite how closely held his views had been, he had the courage to challenge and change them when new information presented him with the opportunity to do so.
KM
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