Classics Club #14: The Autobiography of Malcolm X

People kept telling me that I absolutely have to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley because it’s crucial reading for anybody who lives in the US. It is constantly assigned to students, and I see them reading it on campus every day. I researched Malcolm X online before reading the book and discovered that he is considered one of the most influential (or simply, THE most influential) African-American thinkers and a champion of the civil rights in the 1960s.

So now I’ve read the book and I’m kind of confused. This Malcolm fellow is a rabid woman-hater, a vicious anti-Semite, and a pathological narcissist. The book is valuable as a study in the mechanisms of narcissism but, outside of that, I’m not sure why anybody would want to read it or assign it in class. 

Malcolm Little makes a show of being bothered by racism but it’s obvious that racism is not what he really cares about. He becomes embarrassingly obsequious with the white people who make him feel important and reserves his greatest hatred for African-Americans who dare to attract more attention than he did. Malcolm detests Martin Luther King Jr but is very careful never to mention Dr. King’s name among all the vitriol he heaps on him. The very idea that somebody else’s name should be known is intolerable to Malcolm. 

Malcolm’s denunciations of the Civil Rights movement are classic narcissism. The movement is stupid, he says, because it concentrates on the Southern blacks. But the Southern blacks don’t even have things that bad! Malcolm exclaims. And if you need any proof of that, it’s right here: “Me!” Malcolm says. Malcolm is from Michigan and never lived in the South. That is supposed to be all the proof anybody ever needs that things in the Northern states are worse than in the South. Because, obviously, Malcolm’s suffering is bigger than anybody else’s and is the measure of all things everywhere. He dismisses the plight of the Southern blacks by saying that Southern whites “paternalistically help them.”

As any narcissist, Malcolm is completely unaware of his condition. He goes on and on for hundreds of pages, talking himself up in an embarrassing show of extreme self-aggrandizement, only to come out with the hilarious, “And this was the first time in 12 years that I thought of myself.”

The whole book is a litany of people and institutions that recognized Malcolm’s importance. Whenever somebody stops offering recognition and ego strokes, Malcolm discards them like used Kleenex. For instance, there is Malcolm’s brother who supported him when he was in jail, came to visit him all the time, and – in Malcolm’s own words – saved his life. Then the brother succumbs to mental disease (which runs in the family for generations) and Malcolm simply dismisses him. He reckons that the sick brother’s only purpose was to help out Malcolm, and once that task was achieved, the brother lost all importance. This isn’t my reading, folks. This is what Malcolm actually says. 

In order to make himself look as good as possible, Malcolm heaps as much opprobrium as he can (and he can a lot) on other African-Americans. He uses the nastiest racist stereotypes as if they were “a truth universally acknowledged.” I suspect the book might be very popular with white supremacists who have got to enjoy the stories about blacks who are all “like animals” and the Jews who are guilty of the Holocaust. I’m sure that the endless discussions of how women need to be slapped around and controlled for their own good are also hugely popular among the Aryan Brotherhood.

The book is valuable in that it offers a glimpse into how narcissists think. Other than this very clinical use, I don’t see a huge value in it. If you are still planning to read the book, I won’t spoil it for you or tell you the ending. Suffice it to say, that people who are forced to spend many years by Malcolm’s side finally freak and react in a way that victims of particularly vicious narcissists sometimes do.

If you have a family member, a co-worker or a close friend who is a narcissist, please seek help as soon as possible.