The Autobiography of Malcolm X

The chief criticisms leveled at the Nation of Islam, and its representative Malcolm X, are that they are “Black supremacist” and thus a hate group. The Southern Poverty Law Center, the chief US arbiter of racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, and anti-LGBTQIA+ groups, supports this characterization. The judgment comes from Nation of Islam ideology. The group explicitly advocates the notion that Black Americans are superior to White Americans, who are labeled with the dehumanizing term “devils.” In addition to parroting these talking points, Malcolm engages in his own hateful rhetoric, as when he responds to the deaths of over 30 White people in a plane crash by exclaiming, “I’ve just heard some good news!” (453).

The fact that Malcolm later disavows his blanket hatred of White people does not make these statements any less uncomfortable. Malcolm is keenly aware that the Nation of Islam’s angry and hateful rhetoric appeals to so many Black Americans, particularly those who belong to the lower and working classes, because it is the hatred of the oppressed towards the oppressor. To Malcolm, White supremacy invites hate, so White America has no one but itself to blame. Malcolm summarizes this dynamic when he says, “For the white man to ask the black man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the raped, or the wolf asking the sheep, ‘Do you hate me?’” (277).

Malcolm’s rhetoric is less problematic if one replaces “White people” with “White supremacy,” which Malcolm characterizes as “the collective white man,” saying, “You cannot find one black man, I do not care who he is, who has not been personally damaged in some way by the devilish acts of the collective white man!” (306). Still, Malcolm only acknowledges that this cannot justify hate toward all White people or individual White people after making the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Malcolm justifies his statements channeling Black anger by centuries of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and less codified—though no less insidious—forms of White supremacy in the North. This is why Malcolm repeatedly characterizes social unrest in Black communities as “the white man’s problem” rather than “the Negro problem” (1) as academics, journalists, and politicians described it in the 1950s and 1960s.

Malcolm is tactically coy about his disavowals of violence—never actually coming out against it. As he tells one journalist who accuses him of inciting violence, “It takes no one to stir up the sociological dynamite” (421), citing widespread disproportionate outcomes for Black Americans in unemployment, education, and housing, all of which are the result of White supremacy. Malcolm calls it a “miracle” that Black people haven’t risen up violently against the White supremacist systems and structures of America, dismissing isolated acts of violence as incommensurate to the centuries of state violence unleashed against Black Americans. In response to the then-common refrain that Malcolm X is the only man who could stop a race riot or start one, Malcolm put it succinctly in a private conversation with Haley: “I don’t know if I could start one. I don’t know if I’d want to stop one” (455).