Why I Love Malcolm X

So I opened The Colonized Collective with a founder post about how much I loved Malcolm X, but I thought I should explain why. He is literally my coffee table book. I actually don’t own his biography anymore because I give them away on dates.

First—he was so cute. Joking. Kind of.
But I also think that’s a broader commentary on how beauty affects
who we choose to listen to. But again, that’s another essay.

As a light-skinned Black man in the ’40s–’60s, his observations about men, women, and the world are remarkably similar to those of this millennial Indian woman.

I think I found him when The Autobiography of Malcolm X was mentioned in Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime (which is also incredible). That’s how I happened to pick it up—because having gone to conservative Christian schools most of my life, I would never have encountered hot, educated Black men, unfortunately— either in literature or in real life. Anyway, I think he was the first person I read who observed the world in the same way I did—with the same conclusions and observations. And as someone raised mostly reading white men, this was so eye-opening. He was so blunt and honest about his experience, in what he saw, and he had a conviction that was not cloaked in performance.

I personally think it’s because Black men and South Asian women live with a baseline fear, because their existence is constantly threatened by broader society: Black men fear the entirety of society in the U.S., and South Asian women fear the entirety of society always—whether that’s the threat of bodily harm or judgment—similar to Black men. These are generalizations, obviously—but think with me in a nuanced way, will you?One of the stories that really hooked me in his autobiography was when he described his initial interest in a Black woman, but then abandoned her for a white woman. He’s remarkably honest about why he did this (he got more clout with other men) and how he was partly responsible for the dark turn the Black woman’s life eventually took. I found his description of the dynamics of his choice echoed my own feeling of being second-class, like the woman he abandoned—not in a way I could’ve articulated, because brown people in America are this weird middle class—but in a way that resonated. I felt dismissed by men and women in my own community, and pushed into competition with women in the broader community.

Maybe it’s so profound to me because it’s a man taking responsibility for his behavior in the current age of men who are passive to the point of seeming oblivion.

But I digress. In another one of his biographies, the author described Malcolm (we’re on a first-name basis in my mind) as one of the first people who viewed God—or the divine—as not white. And as someone raised in a colonized Baptist Christian tradition, this was earth-shattering. Again, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate that on any level then, because our idea of reality is so ingrained from childhood—and questioning it is an anathema in this poorly educated society designed to control. But this began my journey to an understanding of the transcendent that is truer than anything I had been taught.
It is wild that I once believed the truly divine could be reduced to a tome titled Systematic Theology. None of what I’m trying to build would have been possible without the understanding I found in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. So a special thanks to Malcolm, to Alex Haley, and to the women who were the backbone of them.

Here’s to taking out the knife.

“I will never say that progress is being made. If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that's not progress.
The progress is healing the wound that the blow made.
And they haven't even begun to pull the knife out, much less heal the wound... They won't even admit the knife is there.”

— Malcolm X