The Autobiography of Malcolm X: Chapters 14–19

As Mr. Muhammad’s emissary, I went to Egypt, Arabia, to the Sudan, to Nigeria, and Ghana.

He loves himself so much that he is startled if he discovers that his victims don’t share his vainglorious self-opinion.

Today’s Uncle Tom doesn’t wear a handkerchief on his head. This modern, twentieth-century Uncle Thomas now often wears a top hat. He’s usually well-dressed and well-educated. He’s often the personification of culture and refinement.

It is a miracle that a nation of black people has so fervently continued to believe in a turn-the-other-cheek and heaven-for-you-after-you-die philosophy!

One odd ambivalence was how some letters, otherwise all but championing Mr. Muhammad, would recoil at the expression “white devils.”

But I will tell you that, without any question, the most bitter anti-white diatribes that I have ever heard have come from “passing” Negroes, living as whites, among whites, exposed every day to what white people say among themselves regarding Negroes — things that a recognized Negro never would hear.

And this time the British acquiesced and helped them to wrest Palestine away from the Arabs, the rightful owners, and then the Jews set up Israel, their own country — the one thing that every race of man in the world respects, and understands.

But I know that America’s five and a half million Jews (two million of them are concentrated in New York) look at it very practically, whether they know it or not: that all of the bigotry and hatred focused upon the black man keeps off the Jew a lot of heat that would be on him otherwise.

And we see again that not ideologies, but race, and color, is what binds human beings.

And in everything I said to them, as long as we talked, they were aware of the yardstick that I was using to measure everything — that to me the earth’s most explosive and pernicious evil is racism, the inability of God’s creatures to live as One, especially in the Western world.

The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities — he is only reacting to four hundred years of the conscious racism of the American whites.

He said that behind the “diplomatic front” of every African U.N. official was recognition of the white man’s gigantic duplicity and conspiracy to keep the world’s peoples of African heritage separated — both physically and ideologically — from each other.

I said, “All of Africa unites in opposition to South Africa’s apartheid, and to the oppression in the Portuguese territories."

I was, to hear him tell it, anti-American, un-American, seditious, subversive, and probably Communist.

Well, in the competitive American society, how can there ever be any white-black solidarity before there is first some black solidarity?