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I should not read excerpts from Malcolm X’s speeches while drinking

thisgenderedlife:

douglass-forgot-the-chitterlings:

because it does nothing but irritate the hell out of me. Not his speeches, mind you, but the way history has set him up against MLK as if they were two men working for different ends. 

I hate what history has done to MLK, taking the fire out of him, reducing him to a single speech, a single sappy story of a man who never grew angry (false), never lost his temper (fucking false), a paragon of “give me my right’s y’all, please?” virtue. Something that is just, disgusting in that it’s drawing a picture of the man as if it were a whole, when it’s only parts of that whole. MLK, from the books I’ve read, rarely let his anger show in public…but to look into his eyes, in his mugshot, and believe he wasn’t furious, is borderline absurd.

Then, Malcolm X. I cannot stand to hear the majority of white people talk about him. They speak as if he’s evil, as if he were a man who would slit their throats in their sleep, and I’m always sitting there, glowering seconds before I lay into them, wondering, “Have any of you ever read his speeches? Have you ever read the multiple biographies written on him? Alex Haley has a damned good one. Have you ever investigated beyond what you’ve been told?”

And the answer is always a thunderous silence.

It’s no accident that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X have been set up as dueling dichotomies, because if MLK scared white people, if he got other Blacks to shame whites into admitting, “okay, maybe we were kinda sorta wrong”, then Malcolm X was terrifying. Here he was saying, “I’m going to give you a chance to do this Martin’s way. I’m going to give you a chance to do what you know is right, but know that we are not asking to be removed from second-tier citizenship, we are demanding it. We are demanding equal treatment. We are demanding that we be given all the rights promised to everyone in this country, and if you do not comply, well, essentially, we’re gonna set this motherfucking place on fire.”

And I cannot fault him for that. 

It always kills me, that when I hear white people talk about Malcolm, they think he should have come bearing doves, waving white flags, with a peace symbol pinned to his lapel. But why? It is the height of fucking arrogance to think that a people who have been beaten, shamed, degraded, enslaved, given vastly fewer opportunities, hanged from trees, prevented from voting, and told that this was the lot of their race, should ask for rights. Should come timidly to beseech those in power for just treatment.

So, they set MLK up as the standard to which all blacks should set their eyes upon, and cast Malcolm X to the wolves. It’s amazing the difference in opinion when white people are asked about Malcolm X, and when black people are asked. Malcolm X is still a threat. He was a man, who went from the prisons, to being one of the spoke persons of a people. He was a man who was self-educated, and he would make, and does make, one hell of a role model. If you can point to black youth and say, “look, it’s not the end of your life. People make mistakes, and they turn it all around,” and then point to Malcolm X? That’s terrifying. 

He recognized the injustices of the system the more he taught himself, and if too many black people begin to see how the system is working against them, no, the vast majority of us know how the system is set up to make us fail, but if they can begin to see how, and not that it just is, then it becomes something that can be dismantled, and the more that we begin to learn, the angrier we become.

And angry people don’t ask, they say, “You can give it to me now, or I can come and take it.” I’m sorry, but I’m with Malcolm. I’m not going to let you humiliate me, and beat me, and then kindly ask you, while you are steady raining blows down upon my head, to “please, stop hitting me.” Yeah. No.

If you hit me, I’m knocking you ass clean out.

Read this.

(via allbecauseilostmytemper)