The Autobiography of Malcolm X Prejudice Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Chapter. Paragraph)

Quote #7

Similarly, just let some mayor or some city council somewhere boast of having "no Negro problem." [...] I'd say they didn't need to tell me where this was, because I knew that all it meant was that relatively very few Negroes were living there. That's true the world over, you know. Take "democratic" England—when 100,000 black West Indians got there, England stopped the black migration. Finland welcomed a Negro U.S. Ambassador. Well, let enough Negroes follow him to Finland! (15.30)

Why do you think the only areas that had no problem with black people were ones that hardly had any black people living there? What changes when the black population increases?

Quote #8

The white Southerner was always given his due by Mr. Muhammad. The white Southerner, you can say one thing—he is honest. He bares his teeth to the black man; he tells the black man, to his face, that Southern whites never will accept phony "integration." The Southern white goes further, to tell the black man that he means to fight him every inch of the way-against even the so-called "tokenism." The advantage of this is the Southern black man never has been under any illusions about the opposition he is dealing with. (15.34)

Malcolm makes it seem that there are only two options: obvious racists, and covert racists. This leaves us wondering whether it's possible to simply not be racist. What do you think?

Quote #9

Constantly, wherever I went, I was asked questions about America's racial discrimination. Even with my background, I was astonished at the degree to which the major single image of America seemed to be discrimination. (18.10)

At the time the major news in the United States was the Civil Rights Movement. So international television stations were probably filled with images of the brutality shown to peaceful protesters. No wonder discrimination is the first thing that all of these people ask about.