Examples Of Racism In The Autobiography Of Malcolm X

Ironically, racism in America in not simply black and white. There are many causes and layers to the issue. Civil Rights Leader Malcolm “X” Little attempted to approach a few of the largest themes concerning racism in his 1965 autobiography “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (co-written by Alex Haley). Malcolm was an ex-convict who had converted to Islam in prison, and slowly became a defining civil rights leader during the late 1950’s to mid 1960’s. In comparison to Martin Luther King’s peaceful protest marches, Malcolm was painted as a more aggressive and violent alternative to King. However, as the book reveals, there was more than meets the eye to Malcolm X. In his Autobiography, Malcolm X argues that Blacks in America are institutionally brainwashed into preferring

There were plenty of blacks Malcolm encountered that he clearly despised, and one of the most obvious examples were those he met in the well off Roxbury neighborhood Malcolm lived in when staying with Ella. In comparison to the rest of Boston’s black population, these residents were pretty wealthy. Therefore, they tried to imitate the white suburbanites they worked for by talking white, maintaining their houses like suburban ones, and mostly importantly snootily looking down on the rest of the blacks who populated the ghettos, and their counterparts who had come from down South. Looking down on the poor and immigrant groups was associated with the upper class whites of the time, but Malcolm explained that this was the symptom of this group of blacks being the most brainwashed by the whites. Malcolm strived to be like the hustlers of the ghetto, but he soon realized they were just as brainwashed. He later describes the Harlem hustler community by saying “All you had to do was put a white girl anywhere close to the average black man, and he