In Chapter Seven of his autobiography, Malcolm X explains how it was in prison that he first discovered that he loved the art of debate. X discovers this after he has embraced the path of Elijah Mohammed, and explains that “debating, speaking to a crowd, was an exhilarating to me as the discovery of knowledge through reading had been…I’d track down and study everything I could find on it. I’d put myself in my opponent’s place and decide how I’d try and win if the I had the other side; and the I’d figure a way to knock down those points. And if there was any way in the world, I’d work into my speech the devilishness of the white man.” (187-8)
It’s not surprising that X’s fellow debaters grew tired of him of turning to this point again and again, and would apparently attack him in debates when he would introduce this subject. X’s discussion on Homer is a good example of how he approached this topic:
“In a debate about whether or not Homer had ever existed, I threw into those white faces the theory that Homer only symbolized how white Europeans kidnapped black Africans, then blinded them so that they could never get back to their own people. (Homer and Omar and Moor, you see are related terms; it’s like saying, Peter, Pedro and petra, all three which mean rock.) these blinded Moors the Europeans taught to sing about the Europeans’ glorious accomplishments. I made it clear that was the devilish white man’s idea of kicks. Aesop’s Fables – another case in point. “Aesop” was only the Greek name for an Ethiopian.” (188)
I should immediately point out that that while X is exactly right about the etymology of Peter, Pedro and petra, he is wrong about the etymology of Moor and Homer. It is also worthwhile to examine X’s response to the question of Homer’s existence; he doesn’t say so explicitly, but he appears to have argued that Homer was not an author but a symbol. More specifically, X reads Homer as a symbol of the Europeans’ enslavement of Africans, and furthermore builds upon this reading by adding the common story that Homer was blind. What I find very interesting about this is that X’s argument sounds much less like a debate that one hears at a debate society and more like a spiritual exegesis, that is, a discarding of the obvious nature of symbols in order to get at deeper truth that they cannot in themselves express. X may have been in a prison debate team, but he was using the skills that he was developing to read sacred texts.
Elsewhere in his autobiography, X reveals that he relied on JA Rogers Sex and Race for his information on Aesop (he doesn’t reveal where he got his information on Homer). Rogers’ was one of the autodidacts who powered the Harlem Renaissance, and who initially became famous for his book From “Superman” to Man, which was a fictional dialogue between a Pullman Porter and a white, southern politician. The thesis of Sex and Race is really two fold: first, that people have tended to have had sex with many different people, regardless of race. Second, that the people that he identifies as Negroes have contributed to a great deal more to the development of philosophy and literature than contemporary people give them credit for.
For example, in his chapter titled “Race-Mixing in Greece”, he writes:“Two of the most illustrious writers of Greece are mentioned as Negroes: Esop [Aesop] and Sappho. Socrates, too, might have been of Negro origin. He has the small, flat nose and bullet head of the Bushman. His features are most certainly not Grecian.”(84)
Notably, unlike X, Rogers does not describe Aesop as a slave, a choice that signals the different conceptions of history the two men had: for X, the ancient world was a mirror of the present, in that it too was a conflict between white and black, what he writes as European and African. For Rogers, the past was a time prior to such a conflict.
It’s not surprising that X’s fellow debaters grew tired of him of turning to this point again and again, and would apparently attack him in debates when he would introduce this subject. X’s discussion on Homer is a good example of how he approached this topic:
“In a debate about whether or not Homer had ever existed, I threw into those white faces the theory that Homer only symbolized how white Europeans kidnapped black Africans, then blinded them so that they could never get back to their own people. (Homer and Omar and Moor, you see are related terms; it’s like saying, Peter, Pedro and petra, all three which mean rock.) these blinded Moors the Europeans taught to sing about the Europeans’ glorious accomplishments. I made it clear that was the devilish white man’s idea of kicks. Aesop’s Fables – another case in point. “Aesop” was only the Greek name for an Ethiopian.” (188)
I should immediately point out that that while X is exactly right about the etymology of Peter, Pedro and petra, he is wrong about the etymology of Moor and Homer. It is also worthwhile to examine X’s response to the question of Homer’s existence; he doesn’t say so explicitly, but he appears to have argued that Homer was not an author but a symbol. More specifically, X reads Homer as a symbol of the Europeans’ enslavement of Africans, and furthermore builds upon this reading by adding the common story that Homer was blind. What I find very interesting about this is that X’s argument sounds much less like a debate that one hears at a debate society and more like a spiritual exegesis, that is, a discarding of the obvious nature of symbols in order to get at deeper truth that they cannot in themselves express. X may have been in a prison debate team, but he was using the skills that he was developing to read sacred texts.
Elsewhere in his autobiography, X reveals that he relied on JA Rogers Sex and Race for his information on Aesop (he doesn’t reveal where he got his information on Homer). Rogers’ was one of the autodidacts who powered the Harlem Renaissance, and who initially became famous for his book From “Superman” to Man, which was a fictional dialogue between a Pullman Porter and a white, southern politician. The thesis of Sex and Race is really two fold: first, that people have tended to have had sex with many different people, regardless of race. Second, that the people that he identifies as Negroes have contributed to a great deal more to the development of philosophy and literature than contemporary people give them credit for.
For example, in his chapter titled “Race-Mixing in Greece”, he writes:“Two of the most illustrious writers of Greece are mentioned as Negroes: Esop [Aesop] and Sappho. Socrates, too, might have been of Negro origin. He has the small, flat nose and bullet head of the Bushman. His features are most certainly not Grecian.”(84)
Notably, unlike X, Rogers does not describe Aesop as a slave, a choice that signals the different conceptions of history the two men had: for X, the ancient world was a mirror of the present, in that it too was a conflict between white and black, what he writes as European and African. For Rogers, the past was a time prior to such a conflict.