The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.

Mine was the same psychology that makes Negroes even today, though it bothers them down inside, keep letting the white man tell them how much “progress” they are making. They’ve heard it so much they’ve almost gotten brainwashed into believing it—or at least accepting it.

“The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle.

I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are “inferior”—and white people “superior”—that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look “pretty” by white standards.

All of us—who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries—were, instead, black victims of the white man’s American social system.

almost everyone in Harlem needed some kind of hustle to survive, and needed to stay high in some way to forget what they had to do to survive.