Malcolm X didn’t hate white people. And that frankly amazes me. Not only because he had every right to but because it’s a lot better than I do on most days. He did, however, understand that it was ridiculous to ask people who had stolen your freedom to give it back. You need to take it back yourself. “By any means necessary.”
The thing that impresses me most about Malcolm X, is that he did not just revolt against the power structure but what it had made him into. This was something that he continued to do until his death. It’s his relationship with history — personal, cultural and political — that I admire. Just as I doubt Wilde saw any difference between his three geniuses of conversation, prose and life, I doubt that Malcolm X saw any difference between the personal, cultural and political.
He met life as a petty crook and left it as one of the last century’s greatest orators. Along the way, between the Malcolm and the X, he was thrown into jail where he had a religious/political/personal awakening. He saw that he was diseased, diagnosed the illness and treated it. This was a man who, when he saw the truth, accepted it and acted upon it. Refusing to avert your eyes from the truth, even when it makes you and your whole history look bad, is bravery. Most people lack it. Most people would rather live a lie. But not Malcolm. He evinced the same courage when he saw through Elijah Muhammad.
I think that a lot of people see him as a person who blamed the “white devils” for everything. I’ve never been under that impression. I think he laid blame where and when it belonged but, more importantly, advocated a rigorous philosophy of human decency and self-responsibility. He refused to be a dog begging at his master’s table. He was a dignified human being who accepted and dispensed nothing other than equal treatment. Use force upon him and he would use it back upon you. That scared the people who were accustomed to monopolizing justice; people who were, in other words, unjust. It scared the right people. Real justice does that.
To me, Malcolm X is a history of names. He was born as Malcolm Little. On the streets he became known as Red. In prison, he was called Satan. But history knows him by the name he gave himself: Malcolm X. It’s a good name.
2 comments
Minister Faust
October 30, 2007 at 5:06 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Thanks. I really appreciated that.
Ryan Oakley
October 30, 2007 at 3:45 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Myself and another waiter sat around for a couple of hours after work one night listening to his speech you sent me. It was great but depressing because, you change a few of the names, and it could have been given today. It seems like more than names should have changed between then and now.