On "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" by Alex Haley

I'd long wondered why Haley's name was on a so-called autobiography, but having now read this work, I understand. Haley really did write this book, which really is made up of Malcolm's words. The process was one in which Malcolm essentially ranted, and Haley wrote and then organized everything into an actual narrative. With time, Haley did draw out the stories of Malcolm's life to make the work possible—that is, more than a set of complaints. It must have been a huge amount of labor, but it is an incredible read.

What makes it so incredible is that one sees a man change not once but thrice. As a child, Malcolm was extremely smart. Alas, his father, a Garveyite, was killed by whites, leaving Mom with eight or so kids to raise on her own. Mom, in turn, was eventually taken away to a mental institute (something of a sham, one gets the feeling), and the kids were farmed out to relatives and foster homes. Malcolm ended up being raised by some kindly Christian white folks who sent him to a mostly white school. There, he excelled. He was among the tops in the class academically and was elected class president, but when he noted one day that he wanted to be a lawyer when he grew up, the teacher laughed at him. He should go for something appropriate for him—like a carpenter. It peeved Malcolm off. His white classmates, not nearly as smart, could say they wanted to be doctors or whatever, so why should Malcolm be laughed at? On one level, I can understand the teacher's point (not the laughter), because at the time, it likely would have been very difficult for a Black kid to become such a thing; there's something to be said for realism. On the other hand, why discourage a kid? Some black kids, even at that time, did grow up to be lawyers, after all.

This experience, in turn, made Malcolm give up on school. He fled to a relative in Boston. There, he learned to lindy hop, wore zoot suits, straightened his hair, and became a hipster. After a short bout in jobs that paid well to a kid but not to someone older, he also got into drugs and drug dealing, gambling, and various illegal activities. And he found himself a white girlfriend—a married woman. He moved on to New York, where he continued in the same activities—and added burglary to the mix. When the white girlfriend's husband found out about the affair, Malcolm knew the jig was up. The cops were after him after all, and he was likely going to end up dead, so he essentially allowed himself to be arrested.

In prison, another transformation would occur. (I'm reminded of Damon Wayans's skit about the man who educates himself in prison by reading and writing the dictionary; my guess is this was a parody of Malcolm's experience, who did that and read extensively.) Malcolm's siblings got into the teachings of Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam. Malcolm was skeptical, but after reading some of the material and then writing Elijah, who actually wrote back encouraging him, Malcolm found himself under Elijah's spell. He converted.

Now Malcolm became a straight-edged man. No drinking, drugs, or women. Out of prison, he went to help the Nation. A good speaker, he soon found himself as the main spokesman for the organization and one who helped to raise up several mosques. But in time, others grew jealous—and as Malcolm would discover, so would Elijah, who himself turned out to be something of a hypocrit, fathering two children by two different women in the organization. Malcolm defended Elijah even from that, making up some excuse for why it was okay for the leader to do things no one else would be allowed to. He was under the spell. But that broke when he was kicked out for a minor “infraction.”

This in turn caused him to go to Mecca, on the Hajj, where he discovered true Islam and the brotherhood of man. Rather than believing whites were the bad spawn of the original black man, he came to see that all people are brothers. The issue is with the racist system. In this, I saw a lot that is the current thinking in the fighting racism movement. Individual whites might be okay, but the system makes all whites racist, or so goes DEI theory. The book ends, here, of course, because Malcolm was killed. In the epilogue, Haley goes into that killing, which Malcolm knew was coming. It happened at a speech, three likely Black Muslims sitting on the front row raised guns and shot them.

Malcolm's idealization (indeed, the idealization of the whole Nation) of Elijah was fascinating. The Nation of Islam really does seem like a cult. In a sense, it reminded me of growing up in the church I grew up in, which had a leader people idealized. Unlike Elijah, I don't know if accusations about that man are true; so many people hate or love him that to this day, rumors are impossible to verify one way or the other. Are they made up to damage the man or are they real and hidden? But it's fascinating how even Malcolm's brothers pick Elijah over Malcolm, and Malcolm, until the break, justifies anything Elijah says or does. Yet, when he does break, he doesn't break from Islam; he just realizes that it's much deeper and profound than Elijah teaches. For Elijah, it's just a sham way to raise up a group. Likewise, I continue on in the faith of my birth, despite my uncertain feelings about the man who had so much to pushing out a lot of the faith's views, because there is truth in it, whether or not it was used by a man to make money.

On "Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity" by Kirsopp Lake ****

This short book based on a series of lectures tells the story of the early Christians in five cities--Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus, and Rome. Most of the book is about the development of Christology in the early church. Lake falls in line with a number of more secular-type scholars (not that he was a secularist) in pushing forward the theory that Jesus himself never identified himself as the son of God or the Messiah. This was, according to Kirsopp, a later development. Instead, Jesus was mostly a preacher in the tradition of John the Baptist, one who preached repentance and most important about the soon-coming Kingdom of God. The church then made his message about himself.

Lake believes this largely happened as Jewish Christianity came into contact with the Hellenist project. The hellenization of Christianity, in other words, turned Jesus divine. It did this through the intermixture of the faith with the mystery religions of ancient Greece. Many scholars believe such religions weren't really a thing until the late first or early second century, but Lake thinks of them as quite well developed with their man becoming a God and their promise of immortal life via one's soul wafting off after death. I'm inclined, after reading a few other books about the Artemis cult, to think that mystery religions were already a thing by the first century and well before that, though they did change with time. In this sense, the parallels that Lake draws up are intriguing.

In his final chapter, he turns to Ephesus and Rome. The former he sees as taking an adoptionist view of Jesus's divinity, one backed up by a reading of the Shepherd of Hermas. By contrast, Ephesus had a high view of Jesus's divinity, as a preexistent being, as seen in the Fourth Gospel. These two views, he contends, merged to forge the trinity a couple centuries later, largely through the efforts of Origen of Alexandria.

He makes some good arguments, though the simplicity and lack of depth with which he takes such big stands--he does after all accomplish all this in just one hundred pages--belies the fact that many of the ideas are actually not as sound as they sound.

On "The Wretched of the Earth" by Frantz Fanon ***

This work on the Black Panther Reading List focuses on colonialism more than on African American culture specifically--and most especially the effect of colonialism on the colonized.

Fanon is a skilled writer, full of bravura and wonderful words. Alas, much of the work, especially in the first half, is best read by someone with a background in the history of the cultures about which Fanon writes. Not knowing African colonial history, I felt lost for much of it.

Where Fanon shines most for a reader like me comes about midway through the book. Here, Fanon begins to focus on how colonial subjects react when they are finally given their freedom from the colonizing country. In essence, Fanon notes, they often fall into same traps that existed in the culture beforehand. A few take the lead and become, essentially, the colonizers, playing the roles that have been left vacant, while the rest continue in their colonized state. No real solution, as such, comes into being, despite national freedom. This seems almost a running them throughout the rest of the book, as Fanon examines cultural output and personal views of one's self.

The last chapter, indeed, talks of how colonizers often talk of the colonized people--that is, that such people have less intellectual capacity and a tendency toward violence rather than suicide. But Fanon shows clearly how these cultural projections of the colonizers onto the colonized are unfair and inaccurate, if not in part a response to the colonial state itself. Without the ability to act against the colonizer and reduced to low states, the colonized turn on each other, fighting for the few resources granted. "Crime," Fanon notes, drops in a revolutionary period, as people move against power rather than themselves.

The conclusion calls for people to build new models of government and existence. It is all good and well for the third world to thrive, but if it merely mirrors the first world, real gains to the human race will never be achieved.