Race, Freedom

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Race, Freedom EqualityPoli 110J

• Never cross a man not afraid to die.

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• Adult language advisory

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Emmett Till, 1941-1955
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Emmett Till

• Born in Chicago, visiting family
  (sharecroppers)in Money, Mississippi.
• Mamie Carthan Till, mother, was worried that
  Emmett would not understand the differences
  between Chicago and the Mississippi Delta
• Mind your manners.
• Tensions on the rise after Brown v. Board of
  Education (1954)
• The permanent awareness of existing within an
  actively hostile majority

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Emmett Till

• Facts uncertain
• At local grocery store, Till probably dared by
  friends to flirt with Carolyn Bryant, a 21
  year-old white woman.
• Whistled? (most probable)
• Grabbed hand, asked for date?
• Said, Bye, baby. on leaving?

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Emmett Till

• One of friends runs off to tell Emmets cousin,
  Wheeler Parker, Jr.
• Advised to get away fast
• Parker on Till "He loved pranks, he loved fun,
  he loved jokes... in Mississippi, people didn't
  think the same jokes were funny."
• All Delta natives know what can happen
• The permanent threat of violence is a fact of life

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Emmett Till

• Word spreads quickly among towns whites
• Bryants husband vows to teach the boy a lesson
• At 1230am, the Bryants, half-brother J.W. Milam,
  one other man drive to house of Rev. Wright,
  where Till was staying, take him away in the back
  of a pickup

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Emmett Till

• Taken to a shed
• Beaten, skull fractured
• Eye gouged out
• Shot in the head
• Wrapped in barbed wire, bound to 70 lb. cotton
  gin fan, dumped in river
• Mother demanded open casket at funeral

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Emmett Till
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Emmett Till

• NAACP leader Medgar Evars arrives to help
  investigate in face of police indifference
• Murdered in Mississippi, June 12, 1963 by rifle
  shot to the head (Malcolm X 1965, Martin Luther
  King, Jr. 1968)
• At trial, positive identification by witnesses,
  other black witnesses not even called
• Some black witnesses arrested to prevent
  testimony
• All white jury acquits Bryants, others, in 67
  minutes
• "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't
  have taken us too long.

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Emmett Till

• After trial, Bryant Milam admit to murder
• Look magazine pays for interview.
• They had meant to just whip him... and scare
  some sense into him.
• Till "You bastards, I'm not afraid of you. I'm
  as good as you are. I've 'had' white women. My
  grandmother was a white woman.
• Milam Chicago boy, I'm tired of 'em sending
  your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam
  you, I'm going to make an example of you -- just
  so everybody can know how me and my folks
  stand.'
• He was killed because he wasnt afraid.
• Link to interview, subsequent letters to the
  editor on website

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The Autobiography of Malcolm X

• Read this text as an argument in the first
  person, not a personal affirmation
• The claim is not that Malcolm Xs experience is
  remarkable, but that it is not
• Malcolm Little ? Satan ? Malcolm X ? El-Hajj
  Malik El-Shabazz
• Atheist ? Nation of Islam ? Sunni Islam

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• Themes
• Systematic racism
• Degradation dehumanization
• Pervasive violence and domination
• Self-loathing
• Oppression of ideas
• Liberating power of truth
• Positive liberty
• Race consciousness
• Dignity, honesty order

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Systematic Violence

• When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me
  later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders
  galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one
  night. (3)
• From even before the beginning

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Systematic Violence

• Sundown Towns
• No blacks allowed on streets after dark
• Mother the product of rape by a white man
• Father murdered by white supremacist Black Legion
• Four of fathers six brothers killed by whites
• Home burned to the ground by Black Legion
• The white police and firemen cam and stood
  around watching as the house burned down to the
  ground. (6)

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Systematic Violence

• Example of systematized racism
• Fathers skull crushed, laid across streetcar
  tracks and cut almost in half
• Ruled a suicide
• How could my father bash himself in the head,
  then get down across the streetcar tracks to be
  run over? (14)
• Insurance wont pay off
• Family sinks into poverty

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Systematic Racism

• Mother must raise eight children alone
• Life of constant insult living on charity and
  passing as white
• Fired whenever it is discovered that she is black
• Constant humiliation degradation
• Stress shame causes mental illness
• Family broken up by welfare agency
• The monthly welfare check was their pass. They
  acted as if they owned us, as if we were their
  private property. (16)

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The oppressive power of names

• Soon, nearly everywhere my father went, Black
  Legionnaires were reviling him as an uppity
  nigger for wanting to own a store, for living
  outside the Lansing Negro district, for spreading
  unrest and dissention among the good niggers.
  (5)
• Good subservient
• To want to live as a free independent man is
  uppity, i.e. not to be permitted of black men.

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The oppressive power of names

• The white kids didnt make any great thing abut
  us, either. They called us nigger and darkie
  and Rastus so much that we thought those were
  our natural names. But they didnt think of it
  as an insult it was just the way they thought
  about us. (12)
• Internalizing the contempt of the oppressor
• The contempt is casual, unthinking. So habitual
  that it isnt even thought of as an insult.
• Demonstrates the unquestioned systematization of
  white power
• Part of Malcolm Xs goal is to reveal this power
  strip it of its legitimacy

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The oppressive power of names

• From his favorite teacher Malcolm, one of
  lifes first needs is for us to be realistic.
  Dont misunderstand me, now. We all here like
  you, you know that. But youve got to be
  realistic about being a nigger.
• Systematic racial oppression seen as just the way
  it is.

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The oppressive power of names

• A lawyerthats no realistic goal for a nigger.
  You need to think about something you can be.
  Youre good with your handsmaking things.
  Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why
  dont you plan on carpentry? (43)
• Dont be what you are or what you can be, be what
  the system of racist oppression wants to make of
  you.

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The oppressive power of names

• Where nigger had slipped off my back before,
  wherever I heard it now, I stopped and looked at
  whoever said it. And they looked surprised that
  I did.
• I quit hearing so much nigger and Whats
  wrong?which was the way I wanted it. (44)

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Internalizing Contempt

• For Malcolm X, the problem is not only oppression
  by white society, but its acceptance by blacks
  themselves.
• I actually believe that as anti-white as my
  father was, he was subconsciously so afflicted
  with the white mans brainwashing of Negroes that
  he inclined to favor the light ones, and I was
  his lightest child. (7)

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Internalizing Contempt

• I was among the millions of Negroes who were
  insane enough to feel that it was some kind of
  status symbol to be born light-complexionedthat
  one was actually fortunate to be born thus. (5)

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Internalizing Contempt

• How ridiculous I was! Stupid enough to stand
  there lost in admiration of my hair now looking
  white, I vowed that Id never again be without
  a conk, and I never was for many years.
• This was my first really big step toward
  self-degradation when I endured all that pain,
  literally burning my flesh to have it look like a
  white mans hair. (64)

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Internalizing Contempt

• In any black ghetto in America, to have a white
  woman who wasnt a known, common whore wasfor
  the average black man, at leasta status symbol
  of the first order. (78)

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Internalizing Contempt

• They prided themselves on being incomparably
  more cultured, cultivated, dignified, and
  better off than their black brethren down in the
  ghetto, which was no further away than you could
  throw a rock. Under the pitiful misapprehension
  that it would make them better, these Hill
  Negroes were breaking their backs trying to
  imitate white people. (48)

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Internaliz Contempt

• So many of those so-called upper class Negroes
  are so busy trying to impress on the white man
  that they are different from those others that
  they cant see they are only helping the white
  man to keep his low opinion of all Negroes.
  (123)
• Division of the black community against itself
• Identification with the oppressor
• White understood to mean better, black to
  mean worse

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Dehumanization

• In the ghettoes the white man has built for us,
  he has forced us not to aspire to greater things,
  but to view everyday living as survivaland in
  that kind of community, survival is what is
  respected. (105)
• A life of oppression and brutality leaves the
  individual brutalized
• In the absence of even the possibility of better
  things, Malcolm X at this point in his life
  embraces a form of nihilism. He sees his life of
  self-loathing, drugs, sex, and crime as
  self-degradation.
• This is due in part to a lack of self-knowledge
  and self-respect

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The color line

• We laughed about the scared little Chinese whose
  restaurant didnt have a hand laid on it, because
  the rioters just about convulsed laughing when
  they saw the sign the Chinese had hastily stuck
  on his door Me Colored Too. (131)

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The color line

• Hymie really liked me, and I liked him. He
  loved to talk. Half his talk was about Jews and
  Negroes. Jews who had anglicized their names
  were Hymies favorite hate. Spitting and curling
  his mouth in scorn, he would reel off names of
  people he said had done this. (143)
• The race card Who in the worlds history has
  ever played a worse skin game than the white
  man? (206)

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• She knew from personal experience how crime
  existed only to the degree that the law
  cooperated with it. She showed me how, in the
  countrys entire social, political and economic
  structure, the criminal, the law, and the
  politicians were actually inseparable partners.
  (134)
• No legitimate authority Law, religion, society
  all complicit in racist oppression hypocrisy
• The curse of Ham

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Being toward death

• I believed that a man should do anything that he
  was slick enough, or bad and bold enough, to do
  and that a woman was nothing but another
  commodity. (155)
• Deep down, I actually believed that after living
  as fully as humanly possible, one should then die
  violently. (159)
• I lived and thought like a predatory animal.
  (155)

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• The white man is the devil.
• My mind flashed across the entire spectrum of
  white people I had ever known and for some
  reason it stopped upon Hymie, the Jew, who had
  been so good to me.
• I said, Without any exception?
• Without any exception.

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• Black Legion
• Welfare officials
• Judges
• Teachers
• Cops
• Johns
• Customers
• Sophia
• Etc.

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• Here is a black man caged behind bars, probably
  for years, put there by the white man. Usually
  the convict comes from among those
  bottom-of-the-pile Negroes, the Negroes who
  throughout their entire lives have been kicked
  about, treated like childrenNegroes who have
  never met one white man who didnt either try to
  take something from them or do something to
  them. (211)

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• You dont even know who you are, Reginald had
  said. You dont even know, the white devil has
  hidden it from you, that you are from a race of
  people of ancient civilizations, and riches in
  gold and kings. (186)
• History education
• Slavery
• Opium war
• History had been whitened (187)
• This Negro had been taught to worship an alien
  God having the same blond hair, pale skin, and
  blue eyes as the slavemaster. (188)

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This History of Yacub

• Muslim used to refer both to members of the
  Nation of Islam and followers of orthodox Islam
• The humans resulting, he knew, would be, as they
  became lighter, and weaker, progressively also
  more susceptible to wickedness and evil.
• Affirmation of blackness
• Devaluation of whiteness

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Conversion

• If you will take one step toward AllahAllah
  will take two steps toward you. (181)
• I was going through the hardest thing, also the
  greatest thing, for any human being to do to
  accept that which is already within you, and
  around you. (189)
• The very enormity of my previous lifes guilt
  prepared me to accept the truth. (189)

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Ordering

• I had never dreamed of anything like that
  atmosphere among black people who had learned to
  be proud they were black, who had learned to love
  other black people instead of being jealous and
  suspicious
• Prayer, ablution, family order
• Even the children spoke to other children with
  mutual respect and dignity. Beautiful! (224)
• Order, cleanliness, respect
• The problem is not with us...

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A new self

• For me, my X replaced the white slavemaster
  name of Little which some blue eyed devil named
  Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears.
  (229)
• Break with the past
• Rejection of whiteness

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• Think of hearing wives, mothers, daughters being
  raped! And you were too filled with fear of the
  rapist to do anything about it? (232)
• Fear, power, violence

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The whole point in a joke

• Do you know what white racists call black
  Ph.Ds? He said something like, I believe I
  happen to not be aware of thatyou know, one of
  these ultra-proper talking Negroes. And I laid
  the word down on him, loud Nigger! (327)

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• If Malcolm X were not a Negro, his autobiography
  would be little more than a journal of abnormal
  psychology, the story of a burglar, dope pusher,
  addict, and jailbirdwith a family history of
  insanitywho acquires messianic delusions and
  sets forth to preach an upside-down religion of
  brotherly hatred. Saturday Evening Post, Sept.
  12, 1965

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• 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? The white man is in no moral position to
  accuse anyone else of hate! (277)

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• The Jew will never forget that lesson of the
  Holocaust they used violence to force the
  British to help them take Palestine, and then
  the Jews set up Israel, their own countrythe one
  thing that every race of man in the world
  respects, and understands. (320)
• Why is this something universally understood?

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The Transformative Power of Truth

• Marcuse and the destructive soteriological
  potential of the Truth over fact
• Asceticism
• Order
• Transformation
• Nation of Islams 6-step recovery program
• 1. Admit youre a junkie
• Usually fished by a converted friend former
  junkie, overcoming distrust suspicion

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• 2. Understand why youre a junkie
• Narcotizing themselves against being a black man
  in the white mans America. Helps to prove
  inferiority of the black man. (300)
• Whats a black man buying Whiteys dope for but
  to make Whitey richerkilling yourself!
• The Muslim often collects audiences of junkies.
  They listen only because they know the clean-cut
  proud Muslim had earlier been like them. (299)

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• 3. The way to quit drugs is through the message
  of the Nation of Islam
• Brought to a Muslim restaurant, the addict hears
  himself called, genuinely, Brother, Sir, and
  Mr. No one cares about his past.

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• 4. The message of the Nation gives lets the
  addict realize that he has the inner strength to
  change.
• For the first time he is feeling the effect of
  black self-pride. Thats a powerful motivation
  for a man who has been existing in the mud of
  society. In fact, once he is motivated no one
  can change more completely than the man who has
  been at the bottom. I call myself the best
  example of that.

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• 5. Voluntarily go cold turkey
• When the ordeal is over, he will never forget
  these brothers who stood by him during this time.
  He will never forget that it was the Nation of
  Islams program which rescued him from the
  special hell of dope. (301)

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• 6. The convert in turn goes fishing
• The ex-addict, when he is proud, clean, renewed,
  can scarcely wait to hit the same junkie jungle
  he was in, to fish out some buddy and salvage
  him! (301)

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• The only thing that anybody could ever find me
  guilty of, was being open-minded. I said I was
  seeking for the truth (428)
• Deep commitment to truth
• His faith in the Hon. Elijah Muhammed was the
  core of his being
• It felt as though something in nature had
  failed, like the sun, or the stars. (351)
• Who is he now?

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The last conversion

• Takes the Hajj
• On the Hajj, You could be a king or a peasant
  and no one would know.
• Everything about the pilgrimage atmosphere
  accented the Oneness of Man under one God (380)
• Kindness brotherhood with all Muslims, even
  those who would be white
• The holy city of Mecca had been the first time
  that I had ever stood before the Creator of All
  and felt like a complete human being. (420)
• Double consciousness

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• White black people not the problem, whiteness
  and blackness are the problem
• That morning was when I first began to
  reappraise the white man. It was when I first
  began to perceive that white man, as commonly
  used, means complexion only secondarily
  primarily it described attitudes and actions. In
  America, white man meant specific attitudes and
  actions toward the black man, and toward all
  other non-white men. (383)
• Whiteness is essentially defined in US by
  rejection of dominance over non-whites

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• While approach to race changes, militancy does
  not
• Racial cooperation
• I dont mind shaking hands with human beings.
  Are you one? (418)
• Black militancy
• Not black nationalism, but black
  inter-nationalism.

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• To come right down to it, if I take the kind of
  things in which I believe, then add to that the
  kind of temperament that I have, plus the one
  hundred percent dedication I have to whatever I
  believe inthese are the ingredients which make
  it just about impossible for me to die of old
  age. (435)

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• If I cant be safe among my own kind, where can
  I be? (497)

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Ossie Davis Eulogy

• Malcolm said to hell with that! Get up off your
  knees and fight your own battles. Thats the way
  to win back your self-respect. Thats the way to
  make the white man respect you. And if he wont
  let you live like a man, he certainly cant keep
  you from dying like one!

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Ossie Davis Eulogy

• Malcolm X, John Brown, and responsibility

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Ossie Davis Eulogy

• It was impossible to remain defensive and
  apologetic about being a negro in his presence.
  He wouldnt let you. And you always left his
  presence with the sneaky suspicion that maybe,
  after all, you were a man!