Race, Freedom, & Equality
Poli 110J 14
Never cross a man not afraid to die.
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Essays
5-7 pages
Due Thurs. Nov. 18
Additional TA office hours.
• 1. Does Malcolm X’s Autobiography support or
contradict Du Bois’ theory of the “talented
tenth”? How, and to what extent?
• 2. “Ginsberg’s poems ‘Howl’ and ‘Footnote to
Howl’ are perfect illustrations of what
Marcuse describes as Western
totalitarianism.” To what extent, if any, is this
statement true?
• 3. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a
perfect illustration of what Marcuse describes
as Western totalitarianism.” To what extent, if
any, is this statement true?
• 4. Using Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man as your
source, critique one of the following texts:
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Front section of New York Times or Wall Street Journal
An episode of America’s Next Top Model
Next episode of Gossip Girl
One NFL game airing this Sunday
Two hours of one cable news network (CNN, FOX,
MSNBC)
– Citations, sources, ads
• Adult language advisory
Emmett Till, 1941-1955
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
Emmett Till
• Facts uncertain
• At local grocery store, Till probably dared by
friends to flirt with Carolyn Bryant, a 21 yearold white woman.
– Whistled? (most probable)
– Grabbed hand, asked for date?
– Said, “Bye, baby.” on leaving?
Emmett Till
• One of friends runs off to tell Emmet’s 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
Emmett Till
• Word spreads quickly among town’s whites
• Bryant’s husband vows to “teach the boy a
lesson”
• At 12:30am, 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
Emmett Till
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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
Emmett Till
• Mother demanded open casket funeral
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.”
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 wasn’t afraid.
– Link to interview, subsequent letters to the editor on website
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
X’s experience is remarkable,
but that it is not
• Malcolm Little  Satan 
Malcolm X  El-Hajj Malik ElShabazz
• Atheist  Nation of Islam 
Sunni Islam
• Themes
– Systematic racism
– Degradation & dehumanization
– Pervasive violence and domination
– Self-loathing
– Oppression of ideas
– Liberating power of truth
– Race consciousness
– Dignity, honesty & order
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
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 father’s 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)
Systematic Violence
• Example of systematized racism:
• Father’s 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 won’t pay off
– Family sinks into poverty
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)
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.
The oppressive power of names
• “The white kids didn’t 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 didn’t 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 isn’t
even thought of as an insult.
– Demonstrates the unquestioned systematization of white
power
– Part of Malcolm X’s goal is to reveal this power & strip it of
it’s legitimacy
The oppressive power of names
• From his favorite teacher: “Malcolm, one of
life’s first needs is for us to be realistic. Don’t
misunderstand me, now. We all here like you,
you know that. But you’ve got to be realistic
about being a nigger.”
– Systematic racial oppression seen as just the way
it is.
– As part of the racist system of oppression, things
are
The oppressive power of names
• “A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger.
You need to think about something you can
be. You’re good with your hands—making
things. Everybody admires your carpentry
shop work. Why don’t you plan on
carpentry?” (43)
– Don’t be what you are or what you can be, be
what the system of racist oppression wants to
make of you.
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 ‘What’s
wrong?’—which was the way I wanted it.” (44)
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 man’s brainwashing of Negroes
that he inclined to favor the light ones, and I
was his lightest child.” (7)
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 lightcomplexioned—that one was actually
fortunate to be born thus.” (5)
Internalizing Contempt
• “How ridiculous I was! Stupid enough to stand
there lost in admiration of my hair now
looking ‘white,’… I vowed that I’d never again
be without a conk, and I never was for many
years.
• This was my first really big step toward selfdegradation: when I endured all that pain,
literally burning my flesh to have it look like a
white man’s hair.” (64)
Internalizing Contempt
• “In any black ghetto in America, to have a
white woman who wasn’t a known, common
whore was—for the average black man, at
least—a status symbol of the first order.” (78)
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)
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 can’t 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”
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 survival—and 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 selfrespect
The color line
• “We laughed about the scared little Chinese
whose restaurant didn’t 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)
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
Hymie’s 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 world’s history has
ever played a worse ‘skin game’ than the white
man?” (206)
• “She knew from personal experience how
crime existed only to the degree that the law
cooperated with it. She showed me how, in
the country’s 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
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)
• “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.