BrightestYoungThings: BYT Book Club: The Autobiography of Malcolm X

When my book club named its February selection, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I was unenthusiastic. Long story short, I'm not a big biography/memoir fan. Also, Malcolm X was obscure to me. Here's what I knew about him: 1) He was a civil rights figure 2) Spike Lee made a movie about him 3) No relation to Professor X, mutant chief. As an IgnorantYoungThing, I wasn't feeling particularly inspired.

From cover to cover, I came out on the other side with the opinion that The Autobiography of Malcolm X is indispensable to the American canon, a classic. Much like Toni Morrison's Beloved or Richard Wright's Native Son, The Autobiography of Malcolm X lends critical insight to black experience in America. It kindles perspectives unassailable to a normative übermensch like myself, a straight white middle class Anglo male. Like a geological dig, the book reveals layers of cultural programming that accumulated to form a topography of racial marginalization. Its heart lies in the confessions of Malcolm X, a man that underwent multiple transformations of education, philosophy, and spirit.

Malcolm's story begins in Lansing, Michigan under tragic circumstances. His father, an evangelist of black pride, is mysteriously murdered in a hit and run incident. Malcolm's widowed mother subsequently caves under the strain of parenting ten children, and Malcolm is jettisoned to white foster parents and attends a white school. Despite tiptop grades and even his election as class president, he is still black, as his teacher Mr. Ostrowski so cruelly reminds him:

"Malcolm, one of life's first needs is for us to be realistic. Don't misunderstand me, now. We all here like you, you know that. But you've got to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer—that's no realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you can be. You're good with your hands—making things."

(I've heard too many "trade school is a great option," blurbs to know this sentiment is alive and well). As Malcolm notes multiple times, this "advice" stuck with him throughout his life, fueling him to new platitudes. But before his transformation into a black power demagogue, he travels from Lansing to Boston and finally to New York City. During this time Malcolm lives as a criminal, rigging as many hustles as possible to afford drugs and life as an underworld socialite. These stories and anecdotes would fit comfortably in any gangster film boasting its glamorized hazards and street savvy soundbites. It's amazing to think he's an Important Historical Figure when here he is a mid-level hoodlum. But it's in this debased social experience that would later afford him the trust of the black community.

Inevitably, Malcolm is arrested for one of his thefts. In prison he sheds his old identity and molds himself anew through the prison's library:

I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive ... My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America.

For long passages, Malcolm X shares his prison research, disclosing knowledge on the implicit or explicit racism throughout history and his present, the late 1940s. The amount of intellectual sifting he did is impressive. Through his heightened literacy, he learns to articulate his hatred for the idea of integration, seeing it as a form of white society's false sincerity and dissolution of guilt: "The white man feels 'noble' about throwing crumbs to the black man." Instead of integration he wants human rights and "not to be shrunk from as though [blacks] are plague-ridden."

Once out of jail he begins his servitude to the Nation of Islam and its leader, Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm employs his natural charisma and newly acquired knowledge to evangelize Muslim virtues throughout black America. He postures Christianity as a tool of white oppression and Islam as a blank slate to instill new values. Rather quickly Malcolm is thrown into the spotlight. His hatred of white society is almost constant, and even goes as far as to celebrate their death: Malcolm creates a shit storm of controversy for openly expressing approval of John F. Kennedy's assassination, and it leads to his expulsion from the Nation of Islam and subsequent disillusionment with Elijah Muhammad.

I live as if I am already dead ... I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form.

These stark predictions find their place several times in Malcolm's biography, and are especially poignant because he was correct. But just before his predicted demise, Malcolm undergoes one last critical transformation of racial philosophy. During his pilgrimage to Mecca, the teeming interracial patchwork of worshipers fills him with hope, hope that a colorblind, egalitarian world is possible. He becomes what we might loosely define as a religious humanist:

It isn't the American white man who is racist, but it's the American political, economic, and social atmosphere that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man.

The epilogue, by the Autobiography's co-writer Alex Haley, goes into extensive account of Malcolm's assassination and also describes his writing process. But the book ends rather abruptly, cut off by Malcolm's death. After finishing, I was uncertain how I felt—sometimes a sign that something is good, or at least provocative: a complex feeling slowly assembling in the subconscious before a rational process can assert itself.

I think more than anything it, ahem, recolored some of my views. There were no epiphanies, just subtle deprogramming of prejudices. Consider the politics of language. On a small scale it called into question why we modify certain words. "Woman comedian" or "black quarterback," for instance, always seem to be saddled with an unspoken, condescending subtext. On a larger scale, the autobiography overwhelms you with examples of deeply rooted systematic racism, such as in public education or society's view of interracial relationships.

In a (literary) world that often seems obsessed with breadth of knowledge, it was a pleasure to occupy a new depth of understanding of something so fundamental as race and prejudice. Not only that but potentially clarifies a window of American history that was once opaque. But to reiterate, the text is hardly an antidote for racial maladies, more like a booster shot to heighten sensitivity to them. Get inoculated, y'all.

Brightest Young Things

BYT BOOK CLUB

BYT Book Club: The Autobiography of Malcolm X

THURSDAY 5/17

Milkman @ Fillmore Silver Spring

Previously in BYT BOOK CLUB:

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Logan Donaldson!