For a core group among my friends, The Autobiography of Malcolm X was formative reading. We read it as teenagers and the book became foundational to the different ways we learned to live with the politics of race and culture. Malcolm and his life represented for us an education that we sensed only for its obvious absence in our regular schooling. Books and writers like these, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time being another example, made critical race theory important to us in profoundly pragmatic ways: it permeated our lives, our creative work, our activism. It continues to do so. This was not mere high theory; this is a practise of resistance that we live because this is the world we inhabit and the inequities we recognise.

I remember how thrilled I was when I first read the book. When I was younger, I badly wanted heroes. I wanted to read about people whose lives stretched further than my own. I wanted their energy, that surety of an early death preceded by a life that had been worth living, worth dying for. Malcolm possessed all the traits I wanted to find in myself: intelligence, charisma, force. And he was angry – a beautiful rage, sharp and disciplined.
We were all of us, this handful of people among my friends, angry adolescents, angry in specific ways. That anger stays with us still, making Malcolm X, or rather the memory of reading his life, integral to the ways we continue to relate to and function in a fundamentally fucked up world.

In a few weeks, I will be presenting on the book in class. I’m excited, but also nervous, because I’m not entirely prepared for the internal messiness that this subject threatens. Continue reading this entry »