Malcolm X Quotes

In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks.

The United States was created for white people …. When a negro has learned to read, he ceases to work.

Your not black enough. If you are black, all you have to do is wear a dashiki and pump your fist, and you’ll get all the money you want.

There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

Every day in America, African Americans are reminded of their race in ways large and small. Every day.

The real nightmare resides in a society that hides behind the mutually informing and poisonous notions of colorblindness and a post-racial society, a convenient rhetorical obfuscation that allows white Americans to ignore the institutional and individual racist ideologies, practices and policies that cripple any viable notion of justice and democracy.

The logic behind white domination is to prepare the black man for the subservient role in this country.

The essence of White Supremacy is this: they are people who want to keep things as they are. That their children's children's children might be a different color is something very alarming to them - in short they are committed to the maintenance of the static image.

There were so few black men who were successful and who successfully conveyed black male fear - how America can make you feel crazy, and how America can create interesting levels of contradiction.

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn't as good as a white child.

As a person of color, you're in a PhD level racism class, every day. Every day, I'm in a deep racism seminar. And I'm not saying that white people aren't taking that class, but they don't show up that often and they're auditing it.

If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa

To avoid the consequences of posterity the mulattos give the blacks a first class letting alone. There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica's black mass.

We have to undo the millions of little white lies that America told itself and the world about the American Black man.

Racial oppression of black people in America has done what neither class oppression or sexual oppression, with all their perniciousness, has ever done: destroyed an entire people and their culture.

There was always resistance and there was always a counter-narrative, but we were told all through the early twentieth century that black people in the South don't want an education, they don't want to vote, they're simple people, they don't want this, they don't want that.

There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept *you*. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.

If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.

The system of white supremacy is intended to make folks of color doubt themselves, their intelligence, their abilities, their very sanity. And so it's important to remember that folks of color know their own realities.

The core of the culture is racism and how black men are viewed. They've always been demonized and seen as threats in our culture. Another holdover from slavery. We've got to deal with that core root of racism and demonization of the upbringing of black men. Black women are not exempt by any means.

The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation.

The present system under the control of the whites trains the Negro to be white and at the same time convinces him of the impropriety or the impossibility of his becoming white... the Negros will have no outlet but to go down a blind alley, if the sort of education which they are now receiving is to enable them to find the way out of their present difficulties.

The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.

Young black men in America have an identity ascribed to them that is a direct legacy of slavery.

There were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward.... I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racquet and my tennis racquet was me. It was my rod and my staff.