Posts tagged Malcolm X
- Journalist: Do you feel, however, that we're making progress in this country?
- Malcolm X: No, no. I will never say that progress is being made. If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, that's not progress. If you pull it all the way out, that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. They won't even admit that the knife is there!
“ And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help to destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America - then, all of the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine”
Malik Shabazz, Sartorially Inclined
“A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.”
“ What is most important to recognize about Malcolm X is that he was the product of a White supremacist state determined to ensure that African-Americans remained in a post colonial form of servitude that rendered them apathetic, uneducated, fragmented and disorganized. In a long African-American tradition of speaking truth to power Malcolm dared to oppose those that would oppress him and this continues to be his largest crime. Marcus Garvey once famously said, “Men who are in earnest are not afraid of consequences” and this is the message that Malcolm internalized each time he dared to speak his truth. There exists this belief that when the marginalized speak that it must be palatable to the listener and this imposes a form intellectual dishonesty and a re-victimization of oppressed bodies. Malcolm referred to White men as, “blonde haired blued eyed devils,” and some would find these words inflammatory and racist – yet it was White men that murdered his father when he was just six years old. It was White men that called him n____, as they attempted to squelch his desire to become a lawyer and finally, it was White men who imprisoned him for utilizing the only skills they allowed him to learn, running numbers, women and theft. There are few words of remorse for the near animal that they made him, only recrimination at his vilification of his persecutors.”
Malcolm X is one of the hardest things to teach my very sheltered, conservative students, because they walk into class knowing that “white devils” bit and nothing else. They’ve been taught it’s un-American and anti-Christian to hear anything else. In five years (four terms per year) of TAing and teaching, I’ve never had ONE white student who has so much as seen Spike Lee’s film. The reframing of Malcolm X is sickening if for that reason alone - and there are countless others. So even though I’m on tumblr preaching at people who know the lesson already, read the entire post at Womanist Musings for Malcolm X’s 84th birthday. It’s fantastic.
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