Black Psychological Perspective of Malcolm X

I have helped Mr. Muhammad and his other ministers to revolutionize the American black man's way of thinking, opening his eyes until he would never again look in the same fearful, worshipful way at the white man. I had participated in spreading truths that had done so much to help the American black man rid himself of the mirage that the white race was made up of "superior" beings. I had been a part of the tapping of something in the black secret soul (p. 333).

This paper will discuss how and why Malcolm X was driven to help change the black psychological perspective.

David Collins's biography of Malcolm X (1993) neatly encapsulates the civil rights leader's life:

Opening with a chapter that describes the subject's frame of mind and actions on the day of his assassination, Collins relates how violence and deprivation characterized Malcolm X's life. Crime and fast living seemed to be his life's choices until they were squelched at the age of 20, when he was sentenced to prison. Afterwards, his conversion to the Nation of Islam provided him with new direction for which he became famous (p. 110).

Malcolm X held no favor with blacks that tried to undermine their heritage in order to get along in a white world. He was of the opinion that no member of any race should sublimate their natural characteristics in order to

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have to do with the fact that whites have a tendency to accommodate blacks that display gravitation to imitating them since such blacks in their self-hatred or paranoid yearning for equal parlance with whites are the most subservient to whites. And in a society so stratified along race lines, the ethnic group in power will more likely accept or employ, where it happens, those of other ethnic groups that most resemble them anthropologically and socially. To Malcolm X, a black must endeavor by any means necessary to climb the sociopolitical ladder to the top. One of the means is through understanding the socioeconomic and political system of the dominating class such as through reading extensively about the system. This to Malcolm X is one of the avenues to constructing efficient means to destroy the walls that maintain the Negro in a state of subservience and seeming slavery. To Malcolm X, the problems, including those of black middle class alienation, are mostly the consequence of ethnic and social inequality that can only be alleviated through the determined will of the Negro, though the obstacles to liberation are undoubtedly numerous. Malcolm X did not advocate employment of violence as the remedy, but emphasized that th
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Approximate Word count = 1655
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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