[Book Reviews] "The Autobiography of Malcolm X"

[thewronghands]

A month or two ago, I came across "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" in a used bookstore. Malcolm X is one of those historical figures that I knew virtually nothing about but felt like I ought to, so I swooped on it. Before reading, my impressions could mostly be summed up by childhood encounters with Nation of Islam recruiters at stoplights. (As

Comments

[etcet]

Re: The "Nothing" anecdote - while, at the time, MX may have believed she could do nothing, and, directly, she didn't; indirectly, it certainly seems like she did quite a bit for him and those whom he influenced later on. Maybe a net win after all.

[thewronghands]

Maybe. But oof, still pretty rough on both of them.

[etcet]

Hindsight is 20:20, but with Lasik, it can be 20:10

[sinboy]

There's a lot of ways that can be taken "nothing" I think was meant as saying that black liberation needed to come form black hands, and that helping would inevitably mean cooping by white ideas as to how the movement should be run. It also means that someone ought not to get in the way of the movement by blocking things the movement wants to do, for good or for ill. It didn't mean "don't vote for civil rights".

That's my take on it

Malcolmology

[caitriona_nnc]

Manning Marable's, *Malcom X: A Life of Reinvention*, is an excellent companion piece. Very in-depth, published last Spring, with the benefit of hindsight whereas *Autobiography* is very much of its time.

Paul and I are reading it right now. We're in the section where the schisms in NOI are becoming more pronounced, and it's becoming obvious Malcolm's life is in grave danger. It's like watching a friend on the railroad tracks, knowing the train is coming, but you can't do a thing to change what's about to happen.

Re: Malcolmology

[caitriona_nnc]

The other thing that is striking me so deeply, is the lengths to which Malcolm was willing to go to try to justify the bad behaviour of Elijah Mohammed, as well as the crazier aspects of what Mohammed was teaching. Here's this brilliant man, willing to justify crazy shit, because of his deep emotional investment and loyalty to the incredibly flawed man he credited for saving his life.

Re: Malcolmology

[thewronghands]

Yeah, a lot of the read for me was thinking about the nature of our emotional connection to religion. It's kind of an inherently non-rational experience; it brings us to patterns of thought that are charged and altered states, and we're often very vested in our philosophical stances that we look to religion to support. And when you think someone/something has saved your life, well, that's a lot of vesting and a lot of loyalty, and hard to get over emotionally. Add to that that we resolve cognitive dissonance subconsciously, and... yeah.

Re: Malcolmology

[thewronghands]

Thanks for the recommendation! That sounds worth reading, yeah. I'm glad I started with the from-the-horse's-mouth version for context, but yes, knowing how it turned out so far does shape our understanding of the long term effects of the movement.

[stolen_tea]

I first read that as required reading in high school, and it's one of the books that I've re-read periodically since then. I was fascinated by many of the same parts as you, and was especially impressed by how his changing perspective was reflected in the later chapters of book; it was an unusual honesty that allowed us an unhedged glimpse of his thoughts at the time.

Also, regarding religion, it's fascinating how people responded to the version of him that they encountered, and how that bore relation to his path over time. It's not just a matter of people selectively interpreting, it's that Malcom X was (of course) a different person at different times, and any one person's experience of him is necessarily a small set of snapshots. (It makes me wish that there were an "Autobiography of Jesus".)

[thewronghands]

Ha! I would totally read an "Autobiography of Jesus". [grin] And yes, to the series of snapshots and evolving views. It's something that we tend to lose when taking a historical view, with possible exceptions for road-to-Damascus one dramatic change situations.

[stolen_tea]

The other thing this put me in mind of, is the variations of what "aikido" means, which seem to depend on when the sub-style's founder studied with Ueshiba Morihei. ;)

[tylik]

I've been listening to a lot of discussion of racism and the civil rights movement on the radio, recently (among other things the Cleveland City Club often has excellent speakers). It's made me a better feminist (and intersectional feminist) but oh, damn, the sexism can be really amazing. And I don't mean historical sexism, I mean sexism right now. I wish I understood more of some of the cultural dynamics there. I had a teacher once who explained that the particular stigma given to black men meant that in many black communities women had more economic opportunities available to them

[sinboy]

Who the what?

[tylik]

Am I not making sense? (This seems pretty likely - I reread my post and it still seems to make sense to me, but I'm on kind of amazing amounts of drugs right now, as I wait for spine surgery next Monday...)

[sinboy]

You made sense. The professor was either making patriarchy-sense, or no sense. I can't figure out which

[thewronghands]

I can't decide whether the lesson of the last few weeks for me is that the books I'd been putting off out of wanting to dedicate full-attention time to them were less daunting than I'd thought, or whether that was a great call so that I could do attentional justice to the subjects. [grin] But again, it took me a month to get to it and then when I did I ripped right through it without needing to stop and cogitate. (Even with my current stress... though sometimes it does help to get distracted by other problems than one's own immediate ones for a while.)