The life of Malcolm X

The key to understanding Malcolm X and his role as a black leader is contained in a brief description from Haley's Introduction. Haley writes that Malcolm was "a man unreservedly committed to the cause of liberating the black man in American society rather than integrating the black man into that society" (X x).

However, Malcolm was also a victim of the prevailing socioeconomic conditions which prevailed in the black culture in the 1940s and 1950s, when he was less concerned with liberation than with crime and greed and personal pleasure. Malcolm was first a member of the society of the United States, society being defined by Schaefer and Lamm as "the largest form of human group" which "consists of people who share a common heritage and culture" (33). However, because of the race-based divisions in American society, especially in the 1940s and 1950s, before the civil rights movement, Malcolm and other blacks were never included in the mainstream of that society. Black

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. Malcolm eventually accepted that the only way he could advance socioeconomically was to become a criminal. This socialization process also involves the stages of the self concept of George Herbert Mead. Mead posited that the individual came to develop a self-identity first through "imitat[ing] the people around them, especially family members" who served as the first "significant others" in the child's life (Schaefer & Lamm 63-64). For Malcolm, this meant carrying his family's contradictory impulses to rebel against white racism and at the same time try to succeed according to the rules of white capitalist society, rules which effectively kept blacks from the success they sought. The concept of generalized others refers to "the child's awareness of the attitudes, viewpoints, and expectations of society as a whole" (Schaefer & Lamm 64). For Malcolm, this first meant recognizing the racism of the society, embodied in one teacher telling him, after Malcolm said he wanted to be a lawyer, "You've got to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer--that's no realistic goal for a nigger" (X 43). At the same time, however, Malcolm rebelled against this racist categorization of his self: "Where 'nigger' had slipped off my back before,
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Approximate Word count = 2429
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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