This could be the beginning of an emotional and financial dependency, which Sammy knew how todevelop until she was his virtual slave.
that is such a terrible and manipulative thing to do... he would rob and mess up a random woman's life for money; I think Sammy was a terrible influence on Malcom
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
this racial stigma has been so ingrained that some were even willing to sell out against their own community to seek validation or acceptance from the perpetrators that were at fault of their oppression; fighting on the white side won't make her white (she won't get the same freedoms and liberties that caucasians got), she's just inconsiderate and is betraying her own heritage who needs all the support it can get now
they had looked at us as numbers and as a case in their book, not as human beings
they definitely had malicious intentions; they were a little too forceful and devoted to "helping them" break up the family - what were they trying to do? whatever did they have to gain from this? did they just want to see families collapse?
Eventually my mother suffered a complete breakdown
it's like the state welfare people were trying to break her; and now that they did, what do they have to gain? (they're the ones who kept meddling into her business after countless times of her telling them it was unwanted and that they should go away)
My mother threw a fit, though,
she has every right to; the state welfare people had interfered in the life that she is trying to desperately to control and fix, and now one of her sons might be taken away? - this also hurts her pride, because everything seems to be trying to force her to admit that she is an incompetent mother (she needs her family while she struggles - there is no way that the state welfare people truly feel that getting rid of her children will help anything)
"crazy" applied to her by them when they learned that the Negro fanner who was in the next house down the road from us had offered to give us some butchered pork-a whole pig, maybe even two of them-and she had refused.
why do the state welfare people think that she has to accept donations? if she does that, she knows that the people are pitying her, and she wants to be an independent provider for her children. this could be out of either a sexist and or a racist ideology, that the woman/black person must be gracious and accept from others while she is struggling (if it were a white/any color man, they probably would have encouraged him to "keep working hard" to keep ends meet and be successful > so why is Malcom's mother being unfairly criticized?)
This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling, he's cheating. Later on in life, if I were continuously losing in any gambling situation, I would watch very closely. It's like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time. He's a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.
this is a very ironic, but true analogy; even though it may not seem like the white men were cheating in society, they held way more privileges that gave them an unfair benefit that others didn't have; it is still an unfair game and the non-white will never win, since they're at a disadvantage and always will be because of systematic racism
Whites have always hidden or justified all of the guilts they could by ridiculing or blaming Negroes
hypocritical because they are doing the same thing, just one blames the other and refuses to take accountability it's also sad that Malcom was okay with this (maybe not okay, but he had experienced this treatment his whole life, so feels like it is normal and won't fight it)
until in some way or other it got to people who she was, whose widow she was. And then she would be let go.
it's terrible that that was what defined her; she got let down and fired no matter how good of a worker she had been prior to the homeowners finding out about her family. were fulfilling and maintaining racist feelings the most important thing in these people's lives?
So there we were. My mother was thirty-four years old now, with no husband, no provider or protector to take care of her eight children. But some kind of a family routine got going again. Andfor as long as the first insurance money lasted, we did all right.
she must have felt so terrified and utterly alone; even though she and her husband fought a lot, his spirit of braveness and not being afraid to speak his mind (and all his preaching towards empowerment and escaping the abuses of the white man), must have given her some sense of security and kept her going; so he wasn't just the financial supporter, but also mentally motivated her to continue this lifestyle; now without him, she has to face this scary world, where her children are just as likely to be violently killed
she treated me this way partly because of how she came to be light herself.
she hates him for what she hates of herself & her family/past
until I was a man in my twenties-and then in prison-could tell me anything. I had very little respect for most people who represented religion
probably because he associated Christianity with white men, the same that he thought were cruel and resented; also, since he was in Lansing, there was not much non-white representation in Christianity - Jesus was portrayed as fair-skinned and blue-eyed in the US - (so Malcom X was more inclined to stay away from something where he felt that he didn't belong)
so afflicted with the white man's brainwashing of Negroes that he inclined to favor the light ones, and I was his lightest child.
It's sad to hear how ingrained these terrible messages and ideologies are into everyone's minds. Racism has been taught and promoted for so long, that it will take a long time to fully get id of. Malcom's father, who hated this injustice and wasn't scared to stand up against it, still held the same prejudice in his own household towards his own children. It isn't his fault, but this exemplifies how terrible this issue is.
four of his six brothers die by violence, three of them killed by white men, including one by lynching. What my father could not know then was that of the remaining three, including himself, only one, my Uncle Jim, would die in bed,
these statistics are so sad and it was terrifying to think that their fates was already decided and inevitable; Malcom's father is extremely brave for staying, since he knew of how much he was risking not only his life, but the entire family
remember that my father was called in and questioned about a permit for the pistol with which he had shot at the white men who set the fire
why didn't the police go after the real perpetrators (the white men that had set his house on fire) than Malcom's father who was being more reasonable? or were they part of this unjust racist system too?
As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
literature really educated him and opened him to so many things like new ideas and feelings, and he learned about all the atrocities that had happened; reading all these books truly empowered him; he was motivated to do something about these issues & became very enriched/engaged into societal issues that needed to be solved
I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened.
this was a huge accomplishment & he must have been very proud, because he had spent so much time and effort to teach himself all these words and improve his literacy, which he didn't think was possible
always been brown and fat.
he is not happy with who he is & how he looks (doesn't match society's beauty/body standard which makes him resent himself more)
the terrible joy that he brought with him wherever he went
expresses how Oscar always delighted people and brought a bright, happy light ("terrible joy") to everyone