After seeing Malcolm X, my perspective on the man changed. What I thought of him and how the media portrayed him is very different from the man he became before he died. Many of us, when we think of Malcolm X, think of a man who supported black supremacy and sparked hatred of the white man. However, the media has not been able to tell the end of his story, the part of his story where his prejudice was replaced by a brotherly embrace for all humanity. So I think it’s important to know the whole story of him, the beginning, the middle and the end, to learn the source of his mistakes, as well as the mistakes of the society that he worked so hard to change. To illustrate his journey, I’ll try to guide you through the events of his life and offer a perspective that may change the way you perceive Malcolm X.

“Each of us is loaded with prejudices; against the poor or the rich, the smart or the slow, the emaciated or the obese. It is natural to develop prejudices. It is noble to overcome them.” (Unknown author)

On May 10, 1925 in Omaha Nebraska a boy is born. No one could know the gravity that this child would have on society. Number seven of eight children born as Malcolm Little to mother Louise Little and self-sufficient father Earl Little; Malcolm would grow up to become Malcolm X, leader of the black power movement of the 1960s. Early in his life, Malcolm learns about the racism and prejudices of his environment, as his childhood is marked by the violent death of his father. at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. The result is a broken family; and Malcolm lands in a youth home. Malcolm then grows up to live the prejudiced stereotype of the white man, force-fed by mainstream society, and becomes a street hustler in Harlem who covets the opportunities of the racist white man. Still at this stage of his life, no one knows the gravity of his existence, at least not until he converts to the Nation of Islam, where he finds an “enlightened” structure to focus his disdain for the source of prejudice that permeates his life; the white man However, we learn in the documentary film, Malcolm X, that it is not the concentrated disdain for him or the racism he embraced as a member of the Nation of Islam that we should remember; but rather his eventual personal triumph over racism, a fact many of us are unaware of.

His father, a reverend, drew persecution from the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) early in Malcolm’s childhood due to his strong teachings of self-reliance to his congregation. Several attempts were made to scare Malcolm’s father, but to no avail. Eventually, his father’s defiance led to his brutal and violent death at the hands of the KKK. I suppose an event as horrifying as this would mark Malcolm as a child and permanently imprint on his mind the futility of opposing racism.

The resulting effect of his father’s death places Malcolm in a youth home. During this time, Malcolm excels in elementary school and becomes the top of his class. He seems like he wants to challenge the futile message from his father’s killer. Malcolm tells his teacher that his goal is to become a lawyer. But here, in a place where education should trump prejudice, Malcolm is told that he cannot aspire to the lofty ambitions of being a lawyer; that he should be a carpenter because being a lawyer is not a realistic goal for a “black”. Perhaps this is a marked point for a change in Malcolm’s goals and ambitions.

An older Malcolm takes on various shoe-shine, dish-washing, and soda jobs. Soon after he is exposed to the criminal underworld and finds himself on the streets of Harlem living the relentless life of a con man. Always on the move, always stalking victims, Malcolm lives perilously on the brink of becoming a statistic. Drugs, shoplifting, and partying with women are done at the expense of the white man. In fact, the white woman is a conquest for him, another indication of his ironic greed and resentment toward the white man. Paralyzed by his childhood trauma, Malcolm is still unable to productively filter information. All he does is a stubborn cry to the world, to the white man, to himself.

His crimes eventually land him in jail. This is where the culmination of his experiences marks his turn to become a black power leader. This is where he becomes the person the story portrays him to be. But this person is just another version of the same Malcolm in Harlem. His resentment for the white man is the same. All he changes is the way he expresses it.

The Nation of Islam invites Malcolm with enlightenment and spiritual structure. His teachings of separation or segregation are very attractive to Malcolm. Malcolm’s past trauma is perhaps the fuel for his unquestioning devotion to this ideology. As humans, we need a structure to ground our reality and give it shape and direction. The Nation of Islam seems to be the perfect ideological structure to shape Malcolm’s broken psyche. They preach some of the truth, but he is unaware of the cancerous manipulative nature of his childhood trauma, using his resentment of the white man. He sure as hell stopped having fun with women, he stopped using drugs and living the life of a criminal. But that bit of truth only made it easier for Malcolm to hold his resentment in and dedicate himself to his teachings, especially the separation teachings he fervently proclaimed. It seems that Malcolm is confusing this teaching with what he really needed to confront, his own prejudice.

How many of us confuse the truth due to repressed trauma? Why do things seem so attractive to us and arouse so much emotional devotion despite their obvious negative nature? The false therapy of shouting these supposed truths that have manipulated us is just a cry to heal our broken hearts or souls. Malcolm is unaware of this manipulation even to his own people; The Nation of Islam, the center of his existence and devotion, ostracizes him. He then realizes the mistake of his thinking.

In March 1964, Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam and made the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Here he sheds his controversial name for a new one, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz. From this point on he should be the Malcolm we remember, not the broken and manipulated Malcolm portrayed in the media, the one that feeds the common perception in society. His hajj is where he completely changes his perspective on white people and racism. Here is an excerpt from a letter that El Hajj Malik El Shabazz wrote about his experience with Hajj. Readers of this letter can learn, as Malcolm X did, that we are all fraught with prejudice and that it is noble to build bridges of cooperation instead of walls of segregation.

“For the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same bed (or on the same rug), while praying to the same God with my Muslim brothers, whose eyes were the same. bluest of blue, whose hair was the fairest of fair, and whose skin was the whitest of white.And in the words and in the actions and in the deeds of the ‘white’ Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt. among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan and Ghana. We are all truly equal brothers. All praise is to Allah, the Lord of the worlds.” (The Hajj Malik El Shabazz-1964)