wow- where do I even begin with this book...I will admit I did not know much about Malcolm X before reading this book, so in the beginning where he is telling about his life as a juvenile delinquent I was getting upset. Thinking, who wants a leader with no morals, then I thought maybe this was included to show his journey of finding himself. But he glorifies that he is too cowardly to go to war (yet carries a gun) that he is with a married woman and with her just for the sex and status it gives him, he is selling drugs, working for train stations for a couple weeks just to get the passes, breaks into peoples homes and than states "I want to say that I have never previously told anyone my sordid past in detail. I haven't done it now to sound as though I might be proud of how bad, how evil, I was" as though he knows he glorified it, if he has to make a disclosure.
OK, so then he goes to jail for robbery and betters himself. He has all this time to reflect on his life and he cannot take the blame for anything he has done. He needed to find an outlet for his pain and directed his anger and blame towards a race. It is as though he cannot feel any love for anyone and then justifies his ideas with if you do not believe this, then you are brainwashed.
(Which is what cults do and discredit thinking for yourself, but it is sad he cannot accept that he was doing wrong by his own choice and had to find something to blame for his bad decisions.) He does not see that it was due to his hard work and dedication in prison that lead him to be a literate public speaker. Everything to him was racial- black and white, there were no grey areas and not simply right and wrong between races. Granted I never lived in the 1940's, but he would have more been effective to me if he could stick to one idea. At one point he says the Jewish population is as bad as the white devil, but then talks about WWII and the atrocities suffered from the white man to show how the whites are devils, but then two pages later he talks about how the "Jews"rip them off in the ghetto. He talks about his complete faith in the Nation of Islam and then states that they will probably take the only thing he owns, his house. It is hard to determine if he can think for himself or if he is just parroting what Elijah Muhammad said since his beliefs constantly conflict. I was amused by the scandal of adultery with Elijah Muhammad because he justified it with stating it was a "fulfillment of prophecy", " When you read about how David took another man's wife, I'm that David. You read about Noah, who got drunk-that's me. You read about Lot, who went and laid up with his own daughters. I have to fulfill all of those things." It seemed too similar to the YFZ raid in 2008. When you continue reading you realize Elijah Muhammad is actually crazy and the best thing he could have done was to oust Malcolm X, although he does not stop there and orders Malcolm's death. Malcolm states "I knew that no one would kill you quicker than a Muslim if he felt that's what Allah wanted him to do "To be fair though Malcolm did do a lot of good in his community under Elijah, he cleaned up the junkies and gave people the confidence and support to open businesses as well as a sense of unity.
By the end of the book I did respect him, but this did not come until he learned to think for himself. While reading I kept thinking, he is undoing all the work Martin Luther King had done. He completely changed his beliefs each time he had a scare in life, and I truly think he wanted to make a better country, he just needed to find himself first. This book had me on an emotional roller coaster, I did not like the man at all until the very end when he stops having such extremist views and wanted to seek compassion and unite instead of spreading hatred. Now I realize it was written by Alex Haley as the events were occurring, it was not written as a reflection on his life.
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