Trevor's Reviews > The Autobiography of Malcolm X

I’m going to be fairly critical of this Malcolm X in this review – although that makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, because I really think you should read this book and reflect on his life. And I think you should read this because this book is a great read. I mean, it’s a fast-paced story told extremely well by someone I think is being often painfully honest about his own life. Now, obviously, the fact this is well-told would have been helped along by it being co-written by Alex Haley. But while that could hardly have hurt, it is also clear that Malcolm X was no Donald Trump in the writing of this book – this is a book, I am certain, that is much more an autobiography than many books that go by that name on the lives of other significant figures. This book is told with candour, sometimes painfully so, and with the kind of dispassion that I guess only someone who has experienced a number of epiphanies and significant reversals in how they understood their life can muster.

Oh, I’ve just learned (in double-checking I had the spelling right) that ‘candour’ is from the Latin for ‘whiteness’ – and since Malcolm spends quite a bit of time in this book discussing etymology, it really is impossible for me to not mention that now that I know. The reason candour has its current sense, meaning being open and honest, is much the same reason why candid (also from the same Latin root) means truthful and straightforward – because ‘white’ is associated in our society with purity and with being ‘unmarked’. This digression on the origins of a word helps to confirm many of the things that Malcolm X had to say. That every aspect of the white man’s society is constructed to valorise whiteness and to degrade blackness. That every aspect of white society is designed to make black people feel uncomfortable in their own skins and to loath themselves. The discussion of this self-loathing, and particularly how this eats away at the very soul of those constructed as not fitting the social ideal whiteness, is powerfully told in this book. So much so that it seems hard to imagine someone could read this book and not be moved by the horror our society imposes upon people due to the arbitrary quantity of melanin in the skin of some. The utter absurdity of such a distinction seems only matched by the absolute horror piled upon horrors that have been perpetrated against black people by white people throughout history. That Malcolm X should call us ‘white devils’ could hardly surprise anyone – that over fifty years since his death some of us are still surprised that he might have thought of the ‘white race’ in such terms, goes a long way to confirm that history is written for and by the victors.

I think what I found hardest to read in this book wasn’t so much the horrors of white treatment of blacks documented here – I don’t think he actually told me anything I didn’t already know – but rather his own surprise at learning for the first time what had been done to his people over centuries. Of how hard it had been to convince fellow black people of the savage barbarism that was slavery. I’ve read this before, in Du Bois and in bell hooks, but I doubt there will ever come a time when reading a black person talking about this will not affect me. The terror for me lies in how it becomes clear that black people have been conditioned to love their oppressor, to cheer-on the white couple in a film, even while the black character is sacrificed as a pawn towards the greater drama. The whole thing is sickening.

I never know how to respond to books by religious figures who tell me how bad they were in their ‘pre-conversion’ lives. There is a natural tendency for such figures to want to make their early life sound as depraved as possible so as to support the true miracle that God, or Elijah Muhammad, wrought on their lives. So, a grain of salt is often recommended when reading the exploits of the early lives of most converts. Again, I suspect this concern could be overstated in this case. There is a ring of truth about Malcolm’s early life that is hard to ignore. I’ve a horrible feeling that Malcolm X is pretty much exactly what he says he was – a man in search of the truth, and I think he may have proved that rarest of all things, a man prepared to change his mind when he found the truth did not match his system of beliefs. He does this at least three times in the book – and each time the consequences to him in these conversion experiences were not only life altering, but life threatening. It is hard to not feel awe reading this man’s life.

Now, I started this review by saying I was going to be critical of Malcolm X – and I’m going to be, it’s just taken me some time to get here. One of the things Haley says that helped to break down the barriers that stood between him and Malcolm, and that were killing the book as he was interviewing Malcolm, was getting him to speak about his attitude to women. And this attitude was anything but progressive. He says, ‘Suddenly, between sips of coffee and further scribbling and doodling, he vented his criticisms and skepticisms of women. “You never can fully trust any woman,” he said. “I've got the only one I ever met whom I would trust seventy-five per cent. I've told her that”.’

I found Malcolm X’s attitude to women quite confronting. Firstly, I would dearly love to believe that someone so keenly aware of the harm done by defining away entire populations upon an arbitrary feature of their physical construction, would get that this is always a problem. That he would see that defining women as less than fully human would be something he would be damn careful not to do himself purely because he could see the harm precisely this had cause the people he’s seeking to free. So, while reading his rants on how women need to be kept under a firm hand or need to be ruled over by men as the head and so on – I found it impossible not to wonder how a clearly intelligent man who had been surrounded and supported by any number of insanely capable and strong women could possibly hold such clearly foolish ideas. Particularly when those ideas simply condemn half of the world’s population to servitude.

I also found much of the history he quoted that supposedly proved the superiority of pre-European African societies to be all a bit daft. I also found his calls for segregation a dead alley – and I think he come to this conclusion too at the end of his life. At one point in this Haley says “Nazi Party Commander George Lincoln Rockwell, who frankly stated that he admired the courage of Malcolm X, and he felt that the two of them should speak together across the United States”. Malcolm rejects this suggestion out of hand, but it is clear Haley is making a valid comparison here. I want to start by stressing that I feel it is a significantly different thing for a black man to speak of segregation compared to a white man speaking of the same thing – even if the outcome of them getting their way would be the same. In a society that sees black men purely in terms of the threat they pose, a black man saying black people need to be segregated from white people for their own protection tells us a truth about our society that is usually shrouded when a white man says he needs to be protected from black people.

All the same, I do not feel segregation is the answer, for much the same reason as James Connolly said that Ireland wouldn’t be free if all that happened with the establishment of a republic was that people were turned out of their homes by police wearing uniforms with a harp, rather than a crown emblazoned upon it. Being exploited by a black man, rather than a white man, is ultimately of little comfort.

As someone who is not religious at all, I found this book incredibly interesting for the passion his religious convictions brought to his ability to focus his energies. But I also think his devotion, especially to Elijah Muhammad, was problematic on too many levels to be ignored. I know he comes to this same conclusion shortly before he is murdered, and it is possible this might otherwise have resulted in another major shift in his thinking – I was left feeling that whatever good had come out of his religious convictions was ultimately overcome by the negatives.

I’m giving this book five stars – it is a classic and will continue to be read as such long after I’m dead and I was only just born when Malcolm died. But I also want my reservations noted. I think it would be very hard to read this book and come away not liking Malcolm X – you might not come away agreeing with him on everything, but there is a naked honesty about him that it would be inhuman to not respect and to like. But his sexism troubled me more than I was expecting – and I get it, he was a religious person, I really have no excuse for being surprised at his sexism, but it did surprise, as much as it also sadden me.