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.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
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.
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I agree with you about the teacher. That was probably one of the most pivotal points in Malcolm X's history where a teacher could have given him hope and a dream. Instead, his words were riddled with low expectations and racial discrimination. It just goes to show how important it is to be an educator and even during your most unguarded moments as a teacher, you have to remember that every word counts. A word like that can make or break a student and in this case it "made" him. But it made him into someone that was finding that the world wasn't fair and it was against him from the beginning. The teacher only solidified this fact.
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