The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “And if I can die having brought any light…” The Autobiography of Malcolm X As Told to Alex Haley (1965) was absorbing and illuminating. At times it made me uncomfortable: Am I a white devil? It often moved me. Because I knew that Malcolm X was assassinated shortly before the book was published, for example, it’s poignant when, only about 39, he tells us in the first chapter that “It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence” and in the last chapter that he’s learning Arabic and hoping to learn African languages and Chinese, but that “I live like a man who is dead already.” His autobiography recounts growing up early as Malcom Little in Lansing after the brutal murder of his father and the psychological decline of his mother, becoming the “mascot” of his all white junior high school, moving to Boston and getting involved in the night and dance scene and conking his hair with lye and wearing loud zoot suits, moving to Harlem and hustling as Detroit Red (e.g., numbers, drugs, and “steering” men to prostitutes), returning to Boston and starting a burglary team, being arrested and sentenced the full ten years because of the involvement of his white girlfriend and her sister, being called Satan in prison but then discovering the dictionary and books and the Nation of Islam and its leader Elijah Mohammed, leaving prison and joining the Nation of Islam (as Malcom X), becoming its most prominent spokesperson and preacher and promoter, becoming envied by other NOI officers, learning of Elijah Mohammed’s several illegitimate children, becoming friends with Cassius Clay, getting exiled from and or leaving the NOI, going to Mecca and having his eyes opened as to the cross-cultural cross-racial brotherhood of international Islam, returning to the USA and being accused by the media of hate-mongering after having realized that it’s not white people who are universally racist but the American political, economic, and cultural system. At the end of his autobiography, Malcom X expresses his hope that if his book could be “read objectively it might prove to be a testimony of some social value.” I’ll say! I wish I had read it forty years ago. And I’m struck by how many things he said still ring true today, for example, about “the malignant cancer of racism in American culture,” as in the never ending killing of unarmed black people by white police. Malcolm X’s argument that Christianity has been used to keep black people in their places by promising them pie in the sky in heaven hit home to me. But (being an atheist) I had to ask, Why did he need to replace Christian “brainwashing” with another religion’s brainwashing? Especially one like NOI that used a bizarre pulp-sf novelesque “history” to explain racial differences and white evil. He did come to realize that NOI wasn’t where it’s at, with too much worship of a flawed human leader, but he still needed Islam. I found his defense of racial separation (chosen by a group to survive) as opposed to segregation (imposed on a group to exploit them) interesting, though I think (hope?) it’s more feasible and desirable to aim for true integration. I found his explanation of Kennedy’s assassination convincing: the violence and hatred “generated and nourished” by whites against blacks ended up getting out of control and turning on white people, even their own leaders. C.f. the January 6 assault on the Capitol. I found admirable his lack of personal enrichment through his many speaking engagements, such that he had to borrow money from his half-sister to go to Mecca. I loved his direct, vivid, vernacular English with powerful similes and flourishes, like: “If you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling, he's cheating... It's like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time. He's a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.” “The woman who had brought me into the world, and nursed me, and advised me, and chastised me, and loved me, didn't know me. It was as if I was trying to walk up the side of a hill of feathers.” “This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man's hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are “inferior”--and white people “superior”--that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look “pretty” by white standards.” “You know what my life had been. Picking a lock to rob someone's house was the only way my knees had ever been bent before.” “They wore that ‘troublesome nigger’ expression. And I looked ‘white devil’ back into their eyes.” “I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land--every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike--all snored in the same language.” Laurence Fishburne’s reading of the audiobook made me imagine Malcolm X talking to me, though he may at times inject more emotion and energy into the already potent words than they need. I regret that the audiobook excludes the physical book’s “Foreword” by Attallah Shabazz, “Epilogue” by Alex Haley, or “On Malcom X” by Aussie Davis. Reading the autobiography, I admire what Malcolm X achieved in his 39 years (given the deck stacked against him) and grieve that he didn’t live longer to achieve more. When he says that he might not be alive to read his book when it's published and that “the white man will use me as a symbol of hatred,” I have to admit that, in my ignorance, my image of Malcolm X had been an intelligent, articulate, charismatic, fiery, and scary teller of uncomfortable truths, especially for me as a white man. Yet his book ends with him saying, “I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” And “But it is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come; it is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.” View all my reviews
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