Jay wrote:
KEN-JENNINGS wrote:
"Educated black people think MLK is a sellout because they have Malcom X's autobiography on their bookshelf" is in the running for the dumbest statement of the week.
Is it? I don't think so ken. His views are extremist and they lead to hatred and distrust. They teach black people that white people are the enemy and will never be their friend. I know you love it, because it dovetails nicely with your hatred of anyone that owns more homes than you do, but it is hatred and polarizing nonetheless.
The problem is you are completely ignorant to both MLK and Malcom X - you demonstrated that with your "MLK embraced white middle class" quote - if you knew anything about the civil rights movement and MLK in particular, you'd understand how plain wrong that statement is. His Letter From Birmingham Jail is his second most famous work (behind the "I Have a Dream" speech...ever heard of that one either?).
Malcom X pivoted away from racial separation and the Nation of Islam in his later years. Did you also not know that it was a Nation of Islam member that killed him? Did you know that after his pivot away from the Nation of Islam that he embraced a more moderate form of protest? And did you also know that Malcom X's second most famous work (behind his Autobiography, which I'm positive you've never read), was a letter he wrote during his pilgrimage to Mecca after he broke from the Nation of Islam (due to what he inferred as being a mouthpiece for Elijah Muhammed) where he talked about his previous extremist view and new found perspective:
"America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white - but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective of their color."
"You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth."
"During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept on the same rug - while praying to the same God - with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the deeds of the white Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan and Ghana."
"We were truly all the same (brothers) - because their belief in one God had removed the white from their minds, the white from their behavior, and the white from their attitude."
The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities - he is only reacting to four hundred years of the conscious racism of the American whites.But as racism leads America up the suicide path, I do believe, from the experiences that I have had with them, that the whites of the younger generation, in the colleges and universities, will see the handwriting on the walls and many of them will turn to the spiritual path of truth - the only way left to America to ward off the disaster that racism inevitably must lead to.
So like, radical and extremist of him. That letter was also published in his autobiography, by the way. The one that sits on educated black people's bookshelfs while they sip tea and talk shit on MLK.
