BookTalk.org

Please use this thread to discuss the above referenced chapter.

In the piece he quotes Louis Farrakhan's description of X. I found this odd given the falling out between them and rather old rumors connecting Farrakhan to X's murder.

I enjoyed the essay about Malcolm X, as well as the comment on Coates' own back and forth shifting reactions over the years. Malcolm X is a divisive figure - we whites tend to think "all that" should be over, now that Jim Crow is dead, and so there seems to be little basis for maintaining any celebration of a life that was a response to a system now dead. But it's worth taking on board what Coates sees, which is that racism lives on, virulently, in Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and all of these dog whistle types (not to mention 45). Have you heard? Santa Claus is white.

I will freely admit that Malcolm X doesn't mean anything like the same thing to me that he does to Coates. I tend to think that is okay - just as Latino consciousness has no obligation to fit within "Coco" and Cesar Chavez, so black consciousness has some right to sprawl all over the place and encompass the various responses captured in the life of Malcolm himself.

But of course at some point we have to start drawing lines. If a black person on the job perceives unfairness because white people notice their color, interpreting frustrations and unfriendliness as residual racism, do we wave that by as understandable or do we insist on some sort of objective evaluation of the evidence?

Moving on is a real requirement. Morally, it is most on the shoulders of white people, but in practice, it is most on the shoulders of the victims. And that is one more extension of the injustice.

Louis Farrakhan spoke at the university I attended in 1994. Though it was still a college then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGdwwwS7iJ0

I covered this mess for the college paper.