"The press, the radio, the television, and the newspapers are stacked against Negroes. The controlled press, the White press, inflamed the White public against Negroes. The police are able to use it to paint the Negro community as a criminal element. The police are able to use the press to make the White public think that 99% of the Negroes in the Negro community, are criminals. And once the White public is convinced that most of the Negro community is a criminal element, then this automatically paves the way for the police to move into the Negro community, exercising Gestapo tactics, stopping any Black man on the sidewalk whether he is guilty or whether he is innocent, whether he is well dressed or whether he is poorly dressed, whether he is educated or whether he is dumb, whether he is Christian or whether he is Muslim - as long as he is Black and a member of the Negro community, the White public thinks that the White police are justified in going in there and trampling on that man's civil rights and on that man's human rights."
"Once the police have convinced the White public that the so-called Negro community is a criminal element, they can go in and question, brutalized, murder unarmed innocent Negroes, and the White public are gullible enough to back them up."
As I listened to this speech which was given almost 60-years ago, I could not help but think about the infinite ways that Black people continued to be pathologized, violated, dehumanized, and remain under utter terror here in America. I thought about Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Oscar Grant, Walter Scott, Stephon Clark, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Jacob Blake, and so many others (unnamed Black people who are punching bags and continued subjects of mistreatment) in the United States of America - which is really the Divided States of America. This includes me and so many others that I know personally, who suffer and are in constant angst leaving our homes everyday and being subjected to anti-Blackness on public transportation (my ride to work every day on train and bus), at our jobs, shopping at the store, dropping our children off at school, trying to recreate. The mistreatment, degradation, and dehumanization of African Americans is fixture in American culture. Whether interpreted and/or perceived as suspicious, criminal, unfriendly, mad, angry, difficult, the majority of the people in this country have made up their minds that Black people deserve the unjust treatment we face each day in America. By doing this, such individuals have committed themselves to executing on the negative pathologies and projections that Anglo-Europeans (the White race), created and reinforced about Black people in America and around the world. The only difference today, than compared to 60-years ago, is that more Black people, and others from non-Black and non-White racialized groups, have adopted some of the same beliefs.
It is horrifying to see very clearly that What Malcolm X stated roughly 60 years ago, has materialized in America in 2021, and to see the realization of Black people in America, remaining under attack in roughly every facet of our lives.
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