Malcolm X

In the very beginning (or the middle, wherever we started at) of Malcolm X, the narrator spends a great deal of time talking about books. While I myself am not much of a reader, I can understand his thirst for knowledge. He reads everything from German philosophers to black Spanish Jews, which surprised me to a certain extent. He seems to be very open and taking all kinds of different information and ideas and filtering out what is important, which is very impressive. He seems surprisingly literate for a negro who lives in the 1920s-1960s, and uses examples that include examples like British anthropologists and very clever theories.
The main point he begins to talk about is "the lie" that whites have been telling the blacks over so many years. Apparently, history has "been so 'whitened' by the white man" (1869) and he I get the sense of some real self power that the narrator is trying to express. I almost feel like I'm being yelled at when I read the lines of the text, as if the narrator is on top of a soapbox or behind a podium belting out his beliefs. In a way, I respect that about his work, he doesn't sugar coat anything and somehow makes me want to keep reading what he is trying to convey. It's a strange, but effective way to get a reader to feel engaged in the text.
From the beginning, it seemed as if the narrator only had one thing to teach, and that was "the white man is the devil." (1871) He continues this slaughter of Caucasians by saying this like "Negroes have never met one white man who didn't either take something from them or do something to them." (1871) At first, this shocked me, and, in a way, pissed me off a little bit. I guess this is because of my skin color, but then I thought how he must have been treated back then and how he was writing in a time where equality wasn't something that was easy to come by. The rest of the text seemed to be his experience with being a Muslim, which was intriguing and confused me a lot. This piece of writing wasn't your MLK speech, it feel like a kick to the teeth while I was reading it, which I hope the author was going for.