Quotes from Malcolm X Chapters 1-4

They all liked my attitude, and it was out of their liking for me that I soon became accepted by them

-as a mascot, I know now

that anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you're both engaged in the same business

-you know they're doing something that you aren't.

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.

The ironic thing is that I have never heard any woman, white or black, express any admiration for a conk. Of course, any white woman with a black man isn't thinking about his hair.

But I don't see how on earth a black woman with any race pride could walk down the street with any black man wearing a conk-the emblem of his shame that he is black.

It was a surprising thing that I had never thought of it that way before, but I realized that whatever I wasn't, I was smarter than nearly all of those white kids.

But apparently I was still not intelligent enough, in their eyes, to become whatever I wanted to be.

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-that one was actually fortunate to be born thus.

But, still later, I learned to hate every drop of that white rapist's blood that is in me.)

But it has historically been the case with white people, in their regard for black people, that even though we might be with them, we weren't considered of them.

Even though they appeared to have opened the door, it was still closed. Thus they never did really see me.

Why did Malcolm X always ask to sit facing the door?

He wished to see every person who entered the restaurant because he was in constant danger.

To have treated her as I did for a white woman made the blow doubly heavy. The only excuse I can offer is that like so many of my black brothers today,

I was just deaf, dumb, and blind.

"integrated" lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria, and you'll see conks on black men. And you'll see black women wearing these green and pink and purple and red and platinum-blonde wigs. They're all more ridiculous than a slapstick comedy.

It makes you wonder if the Negro has completely lost his sense of identity, lost touch with himself.

Later, I remember, we came to the textbook section on Negro history.

It was exactly one paragraph long. Mr. Williams laughed through it practically in a single breath, reading aloud how the Negroes had been slaves and then were freed, and how they were usually lazy and dumb and shiftless.

Mine was the same psychology that makes Negroes even today, though it bothers them down inside, keep letting the white man tell them how much "progress" they are making.

They've heard it so much they've almost gotten brainwashed into believing it-or at least accepting it.

She was plainly proud of her very dark skin.

This was unheard of among Negroes in those days, especially in Lansing.

The Klansmen shouted threats and warnings at her that we had better get out of town because "the good Christian white people" were not going to stand for my father's "spreading trouble"

among the "good" Negroes of Omaha with the "back to Africa" preachings of Marcus Garvey.

I drew away from white people. I came to class,

and I answered when called upon.

I actually believe that as anti-white as my father was, he was subconsciously so afflicted with the white man's brainwashing of Negroes that he inclined to favor the light ones

and I was his lightest child.

When we went by the casket, I remember that I thought that it looked as if my father's strong black face had been dusted with flour,

and I wished they hadn't put on such a lot of it.

Credit is the first step into debt

and back into slavery.

They didn't give me credit for having the same sensitivity, intellect, and understanding that they would have been ready

and willing to recognize in a white boy in my position.

hey would talk about anything and everything with me standing right there hearing them, the same way people would talk freely in front of a pet canary. They would even talk about me, or about "n-words," as though I wasn't there,

as if I wouldn't understand what the word meant

The reason was that we raised much of our own food out there in the country where we were. We were much better off than the town Negroes who would shout,

as my father preached, for the pie-in-the-sky and their heaven in the hereafter while the white man had his here on earth.

in any black ghetto in America, to have a white woman who wasn't a known, common thot was-for the average black man,

at least-a status symbol of the first order.

He contended that if the leaders of the established civil rights organizations persisted, the social struggle would end in bloodshed

because he was certain the white man would never concede full integration

Most Negro parents in those days would almost instinctively treat any lighter children better than they did the darker ones. It came directly from the slavery tradition that the "mulatto,"

because he was visibly nearer to white, was therefore "better."

She went out of her way never to let me

become afflicted with a sense of color-superiority.

To the very end, Malcolm sought to refashion the broken strands

between the American Negroes and African culture.

If I hadn't, I'd probably still be a brainwashed

black Christian.

No man in our time aroused fear and hatred as did Malcolm, because in him the white man sensed an implacable foe who could not be had for any price- a man unreservedly committed to the cause of liberating the

black man in American society rather than integrating the black man into that society

He no longer inveighed against the United States

but against a segment of the United States represented by overt white supremacists in the South and covert white supremacists in the North.

Malcolm,there's one thing I like about you. You're no good,

but you don't try to hide it. You are not a hypocrite.

It seemed that the white boys felt that I, being a Negro, just naturally knew more about "romance," or sex, than they did-

that I instinctively knew more about what to do and say with their own girls.

but all he could see for me was the kind of future "in your place"

that almost all white people see for black people.

I'm speaking from personal experience when I say of any black man who conks today, or any white-wigged black woman,

that if they gave the brains in their heads just half as much attention as they do their hair, they would be a thousand times better off.

When the welfare state came... in their eyesight we were just things,

that was all.

if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling,

he's cheating.

complacent and misguided so-called "middle-class" Negroes-the typical status-symbol- oriented,

integration-seeking type of Negroes.

They called us "n-word" and "darkie" and "Rastus" so much that we thought those were our natural names. But they didn't think of

it as an insult; it was just the way they thought about us.

A white man in charge of a black man's children! Nothing but legal,

modern slavery-however kindly intentioned.

But an educated woman, I suppose,

can't resist the temptation to correct an uneducated man.

The only Negroes who really had any money were the ones in the numbers racket, or who ran the gambling houses,

or who in some other way lived parasitically off the poorest ones, who were the masses.

Malcolm had purged himself of all the ills that afflict the depressed Negro mass:

drugs, alcohol, tobacco, not to speak of criminal pursuits.

Negroes then were stronger than they are now,

especially Georgia Negroes.

Black Legionnaires were reveiling him as an "uppity n-word" for wanting to own a store, for living outside the Lansing Negro district,

for spreading unrest and dissention among "the good n-words."

In the ghetto, as in suburbia, it's the same status struggle to stand out in some envied way

from the rest.

He added, I remember, an anthropological footnote on his own, telling us between laughs how Negroes' feet were "so big that when they walk,

they don't leave tracks, they leave a hole in the ground."

I just can't see how those n-words can be so happy and be so poor." He talked about how

they lived in shacks, but had those big, shining cars out front.

Even then, I had learned enough about women to know not to pressure them when they're thinking something out;

they'll tell you when they're ready.

Whites are correct in thinking that black people are natural dancers. Even little kids are- except for those Negroes

today who are so "integrated," as I had been, that their instincts are inhibited.

It turned out that he was one of those bragging, self-satisfied, "middle-class" Lansing Negroes. I wasn't ingratiated. He was the type who would never have been associated with Africa,

until the fad of having African friends became a status-symbol for "middle-class" Negroes.

A Negro just can't be whipped by somebody white and return with his head up to the neighborhood, especially in those days, when sports and, to a lesser extent show business,

were the only fields open to Negroes, and when the ring was the only place a Negro could whip a white man and not be lynched. When I did show my face again, the Negroes I knew rode me so badly I knew I had to do something.

Anyway, he swore that if a woman, any woman, gets really carried away while dancing,

what she truly is-at least potentially-will surface and show on her face.

he only difference was that the ones in Boston had been brainwashed even more thoroughly. They prided themselves on being incomparably more "cultured," "cultivated," "dignified," and better off than their black brethren down in the ghetto,

which was no further away than you could throw a rock. Under the pitiful misapprehension that it would make them "better," these Hill Negroes were breaking their backs trying to imitate white people.

if Mr. Ostrowski had encouraged me to become a lawyer, I would today probably be among some city's professional black bourgeoisie, sipping cocktails and palming myself off as a community spokesman for and leader of the suffering black masses,

while my primary concern would be to grab a few more crumbs from the groaning board of the two-faced whites with whom they're begging to "integrate."

So early in life, I had learned that if you want something,

you had better make some noise.

Never ask a woman about other men. Either she'll tell you a lie, and you still won't know, or if she tells you the truth,

you might not have wanted to hear it in the first place.

I knew I wouldn't be back to see my mother again because it could make me a very vicious and dangerous person-knowing how they had looked at us as numbers and as a case in their book, not as human beings. And knowing that my mother in there was a statistic that didn't have to be, that existed because of a society's failure, hypocrisy, greed, and lack of mercy and compassion.

Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.

They would tell me that they'd already had the girls themselves- including their sisters-or that they were trying to and couldn't. Later on, I came to understand what was going on:

If they could get the girls into the position of having broken the terrible taboo by slipping off with me somewhere, they would have that hammer over the girls' heads, to make them give in to them.

White people always associated watermelons with Negroes, and they sometimes called Negroes "coons" among all the other names, and so stealing watermelons became "cooning" them.

If white boys were doing it, it implied that they were only acting like Negroes. Whites have always hidden or justified all of the guilts they could by ridiculing or blaming Negroes.

I have rarely talked to anyone about my mother, for I believe that I am capable of killing a person, without hesitation, who happened to make the wrong kind of remark about my mother.

So I purposely don't make any opening for some fool to step into.

And I was proud; I'm not going to say I wasn't. In fact, by then, I didn't really have much feeling about being a Negro, because I was trying so hard, in every way I could, to be white.

Which is why I am spending much of my life today telling the American black man that he's wasting his time straining to "integrate." I know from personal experience. I tried hard enough.

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.

This is the sort of kindly condescension which I try to clarify today, to these integration-hungry Negroes, about their "liberal" white friends, these so-called "good white people"-most of them anyway. I don't care how nice one is to you;

the thing you must always remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind. He may stand with you through thin, but not thick; when the chips are down, you'll find that as fixed in him as his bone structure is his sometimes subconscious conviction that he's better than anybody black.