Say Anything Blog

In relating his development at Punahou high-School, Obama singles out the impact
Malcolm X’s autobiography had on him.

“His repeated acts of self-creation poke to me,” Obama writes, “the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.”

Obama is quick to add that he rejected Malcolm’s “talk of blue-eyed devils and apocalypse” as baggage that Obama believes Malcolm X himself abandoned at the end of his life, when Malcolm X was seeking some distance from Elijah Muhammad and the Black Muslim movement.

But a key point in Malcolm X’s autobiography had a major impact on Obama:

“And yet, even as I imagined myself following Malcolm’s call, one line in the book stayed me. He spoke of a wish he’d once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged.”

The allusion is to chapter 12, “Savior,” in Malcolm X’s autobiography. Malcolm was relating one of the earliest speeches he gave in 1953 in Detroit, when he first became a minister in the Nation of Islam.

In the speech, Malcolm railed at the white man who had raped his grandmother on the Caribbean island of Antigua, fathering his mother, Louise.

“Turn around, look at each other!” Malcolm told the congregation. “What shade of black African polluted by devil white man are you?

You see me-well, in the streets they used to call me Detroit Red. Yes! Yes, that raping, red-headed devil was my grandfather! That close, yes! My mother’s father!”

Malcolm X was clearly preaching in a frenzy, angry that blacks had been polluted by white blood at one time or another in ancestral time.

Malcolm X detested miscegenation, consistent with his ideas that black Muslim women would and should be faithful and pure to their black Muslim husbands.

Then, Malcolm said, “If I could drain away his blood that pollutes my body, and pollutes my complexion, I’d do it! Because I hate every drop of the rapist’s blood that’s in me!”

The passage takes up one paragraph in Malcolm X’s autobiography, a book of 455 pages. Yet it is the one that stuck in Obama’s mind.

We are drawn back to the imagined Life magazine with the story Obama remembered of a black man who tried to rip off his black skin, or of Frantz Fanon’s imagination that a serum had been invented that would turn black skin white.

These are the images that have stuck in Obama’s mind. Yet it turns out not that Obama wants to become white, a classic African-American psychological issue, but rather the haunting image here is the reverse.

Obama wants to will all the white blood out of himself so he can become pure black.

Reflecting on the Malcolm X passage cited above, Obama wrote, “I knew as well that traveling down the road to my self-respect my own white blood would never recede into mere abstraction. I was left to wonder what else I would be severing if and when I left my mother and my grandparents at some uncharted border.”

At this point, Obama’s story of race and inheritance appears complete. His race, he self-determines, is African-American.

In making that determination, he rejects everyone white, including his mother and his grandparents.

We do not have to speculate about this. Obama tells this to us outright; his words are direct, defying us to miss his meaning.