Sublime

Malcolm X was a realist

Malcolm gave himself an extraordinary education: Herodotus, Kant, Nietzsche, H. G. Wells’s History of the World, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, Gregor Mendel’s Findings in Genetics, J. A. Roger’s Sex and Race, Will Durant, Mahatma Gandhi, and so on.

Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds.

Attallah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter, imparted that “we have to get into the habit of really liking ourselves—simply—in order to determine that when we do acquire the power, we have some sense of responsibility. [Do not be] retaliatory, [or] just motivated out of being pissed, or angry, or mad. [Because] that means somebody knows what button to p

On television I caught glimpses of the heroes of the Black Power movement. Muhammad Ali, Stokley Carmichael and Yuri Kochiyama were all preaching about the condition of black people, and Angela Davis was still regarded as the most dangerous person in the USA.