Автобиография Малкольма Икс

All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.

Getting greedy is the quickest road to prison.

The white man’s emotions superseded his intelligence. He will commit against non-whites the most incredible spontaneous emotional acts, so psyche-deep is his “white superiority” complex.

Nobody wanted to know anything at all about the robberies. All they could see was that we had taken the white man’s women.

They were still white—burglars or not. Their worst crime was their involvement with Negroes.

A white woman might blow up at her husband and scream and yell and call him every name she can think of, and say the most vicious things in an effort to hurt him, and talk about his mother and his grandmother, too, but one thing she never will tell him herself is that she is going with a black man. That’s one automatic red murder flag to the white man, and his woman knows it.

Sometimes, recalling all of this, I don’t know, to tell the truth, how I am alive to tell it today. They say God takes care of fools and babies. I’ve so often thought that Allah was watching over me. Through all of this time of my life, I really was dead—mentally dead. I just didn’t know that I was.

Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.

The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.

Most Negro parents in those days would almost instinctively treat any lighter children better than they did the darker ones. It came directly from the slavery tradition that the “mulatto,” because he was visibly nearer to white, was therefore “better.”

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.

Sometimes my father would beat her. It might have had something to do with the fact that my mother had a pretty good education. Where she got it I don’t know. But an educated woman, I suppose, can’t resist the temptation to correct an uneducated man. Every now and then, when she put those smooth words on him, he would grab her.

Four hundred years of black blood and sweat invested here in America, and the white man still has the black man begging for what every immigrant fresh off the ship can take for granted the minute he walks down the gangplank.

Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the world’s black, brown, red, and yellow peoples every variety of the sufferings of exploitation.

History had been “whitened” in the white man’s history books.

Almost everyone in Harlem needed some kind of hustle to survive, and needed to stay high in some way to forget what they had to do to survive.

Every day I listened raptly to customers who felt like talking, and it all added to my education. My ears soaked it up like sponges when one of them, in a rare burst of confidence, or a little beyond his usual number of drinks, would tell me inside things about the particular form of hustling that he pursued as a way of life.

I was really a clown, but my ignorance made me think I was “sharp.”

I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are “inferior”—and white people “superior”—that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look “pretty” by white standards.