Cop out

Is it plausible that the white man really is the devil, or is this just a copout? I've found that it's easier to blame one thing or person for my grief than work through the drudgery of the often complicated issues surrounding my problem. I don't discredit the fact that white dominance has been splattered all over history. The white's need to rule the world has been one of the main reason so many in the world hate them. White people are known to have raped and pillaged in the name of love, in the name of Christ. What has been done is atrocious.

In the book, as the idea of the white devil was presented to Malcolm X, he perused his memory and remembered absolutely nothing good from any white person he had ever come in contact with. Had this really been true? Was he buying into this because it was easy? It's easy to say, "I hate the white man, he is the root of all my problems, he must be the devil."

I will say that the white man is not the only one to exploit. Blacks exploit. In the Color Purple, they exploit and rape their own. As do many many other races and peoples. Are they the devil?

I think Mr. Muhammad's religion is a cop out. He's crazy.

One sided view

One thing that I kept asking myself is "how much is this completely true and how much of this is his viewpoint?" This obviously is an autobiography and I noticed that he has painted himself pretty well throughout the entire thing. He points out his obvious faults before he became a Muslim but what about after? He seems to be pretty good at everything he does. We don't see a lot of down falls or struggles that he has toward the latter part of the book. Did he really refute every intelligent person that he talked to about Islam? Was he really that cool when it came to his relationship with his wife? I wonder about his viewpoint. I want to talk to someone who knew him.

I just wonder.

He did it big.

" It's was like having tea with a black panther..." The black panther is an aristocrat in the animal kingdom. He is beautiful. He is dangerous. As a man, Malcolm X had the physical bearing and the inner self-confidence of a born aristocrat."

This was what I read on the first page of this book. What an intro! Since I didn't really have any background on Malcolm X's character, i was immediately intrigued and interested in learning more about his character. One of the things that stuck out to me while I was reading is that he commented concerning his early childhood, "So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise." I feel like this is a very important statement and that it is a foreshadowing of what Malcolm X would become both as a struggling black in the ghetto and a revolutionary within society. When Malcolm did anything, he did it to the fullest. When he was in jail, they couldn't tear him away from his reading. When he was a "hoodrat," he became one of the best. When he became an advocate for Mr. Muhammad, he rarely could be refuted, and he proved his points better than Mr. Muhammad himself.

I wonder what it would have been like to meet him. I wonder what kind of impression he had on people. Probably something like what the author felt in the beginning of this book.

Malcolm X's ideal world

As I read through the book, I found myself getting frustrated with some of the things Malcolm X was asking for. I guess, maybe I wasn't reading thoroughly enough or perhaps I wasn't completely understanding everything. I found that Malcolm did a lot of criticizing, which he had a right to do because of his background and what he was advocating. My question is, what precisely did Malcolm want to see happen? If his black brothers were living on the streets, they were too ignorant, poor, and the white man was to blame. If his black brothers were rich, integrating into society with ease, and successful in the world's eyes, they were the white man's puppets, doing everything in their power to assimilate and become "white." So if both extremes were not ideal for Malcolm, what was he looking for? If both were wrong, what did this segregation of black and white have to look like for him to be satisfied? Elimination of all white devils?

I'd like to hear some of your input on this because I feel like perhaps I missed something...

malcolm x early history

I really connected with the first part of this book, and all that surrounded his past. I wasn't expecting the amount of turmoil surrounding his upbringing; I went into the book knowing that a white supremacist group had killed his father, but I never knew that he was institutionalized after his mother went insane.

It was also heart-wrenching to me how he was looked down on for his race, and his mother. The most awful thing of all was when a teacher told him that he could never be a lawyer, and that he should just try and get some "nice" job. The teacher said all this knowing that he was the top of the class. This is where the idea of "attraction" comes in, in the sense that white people saw him as an attraction, and even voted him class president. He was a self-professed "mascot" of these people, and it really hurt him when he realized that they didn't love him for him.

I made so many notes in the beginning of this book because page after page related so well to nearly everything that we had discussed in class! When I began, I'm sorry to admit that I really knew very little about Malcolm X except that he was highly controversial and very radical. This book shed quite a few rays of light to this shadowy area in my mind. It was such an incredible read.

We already know what the ideology toward race was during Malcolm's time but in addition to this we see layers of colorism even within these races. Malcolm explains how he inherited his reddish hair and lighter skin tone from his white grandfather who had raped his grandmother. He states, "...later... I was among the millions of Negroes who were insane enough to feel that it was some kind of status symbol to be light-complexioned." The lighter colored black people were treated with more favor within the black communities. We see this first handedly within Malcolm's family. His father was "belligerent" toward the rest of his siblings except him. Malcolm said that it was the fault of the white man for instilling the idea that white is better and dark is worse. It was a subconscious action taken by many black parents. His father treated him well because of his light color while his mother, ironically treated him poorly because of her past experiences with the white man. I wonder how much of this colorism still resides within culture today. Does anyone have any comments on this idea?