The Black And White Lines Of Racism

8 Pages 2080 Words

WALKING THE BLACK AND WHITE LINE OF RACISM
Forty years ago today, Malcolm X, one of the most influential voices in the Civil Rights Movement was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, by members of the Nation of Islam. While Malcolm X is often seen as one of the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, he is also often seen as having been an extremist and a racist. This essay seeks to prove that Malcolm X was, indeed, a racist, but that the term racist does not necessarily mean what most people think that it does.
The term “racism” means many different things to people. To me it can be summed up as simply denying any person an inherent right due to their ethnicity. Racism is more than just skin tone, because it applies to people who are different in cultural ways. It is more than comparing apples and oranges; it is more like a comparison of different varieties of apples. People tend to focus on skin color because it is the most obvious sign that someone is different than they are, but racism is not just skin-deep. It is based on the overall belief that one culture or group of people is superior to another
Malcolm X was a racist in the fact that, during the course of his life, he often believed that one race was superior to another. While most of his racist views were based on skin color, toward the end of his life, it became a cultural, when racism became more of an issue between religions than it was between colors.
As a child, Malcolm was taught that being black was inferior to being white. As he grew older, he came to believe that being black was superior to being white. It was not until the end of his life that he finally started to believe that no race was superior to any other, but even then, he had spent so much of his life only seeing only in terms of color that it was not fully out of his system. In order to understand the complexities of the race issue in Malcolm’s mind, one must see how it was bui...