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Malcolm X, both beloved and feared was often called, “the angriest black man in America” murdered in 1965 he spent years wanting “to change the world”, and can be considered one of the brightest revolutionary thinkers of the twentieth century, a political leader of world stature and a charismatic. Once a drug addicted criminal living in the ghetto, after being “fallen touching the fund of the society of the American white”, Malcolm became a critical spirit, a great orator, and with his political ideologies gained international fame. It is difficult to say once and for all who Malcolm X was, all we can say is he was an extremely complex character. He has lived and suffered transformation of his own vision of the world, and has grown toward an increasingly more mature political conscience. In all the phases of his life, from the hate to the reconciliation, every time he was convinced and sincere, only in the last two years of life was he able to reason in an autonomous way and to go out of the boundaries of the mind that had made him. The matter of the identity During the years of slavery the spirit of the African American was broken, their “pride of race”, their dignity and self respect were destroyed; the consequence was that they started to behave in a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts and were seen by whites: as inferior and immoral, being “less than human.” One of the consequences of this state of things was the loss of the true identity of Africans Americans, without an earth of origin, a history, a culture. The false identity of so-called “Negroes” and the identification with a society that excluded damned them. According to Elijah Muhammad, spiritual head of the Nation of Islam - the sect inside which Malcolm X served in the military for twelve years, preached “to put again standing this mighty race”, the blacks would have to take conscience of their poverty, abandon the immoral life that they conducted and, above all, identify the responsibility of their conditions. The white man was to blame and considered “the devil”. To raise physical, moral, social and political conditions of the Afro-Americans, the Nation of Islam proposed a solution that was articulated in two moments to destroy the false definitions of identity and to build an authentic identity. Through the hate, it was intended to destroy the false identity of the blacks. To push them to react to the oppression transforming them from subdued, passive subjects into fearless warriors. Through the antagonism and the conflict with a hostile group, in fact, it also increases the sense of solidarity, of cohesion and above all it increases the identification with ones own group. In a second movement he would have been able to reconstruct, and in the void, formed an authentic identity. Identity and identification they are trials that are implicated to circumstance. Identity is given neither subjective nor objective without the reference to some form of identification. The question is which strong ideology should one choose to believe? The Islam, “the natural religion of the blacks” considered today from some as “the last ideology” a religion that nourishes enough position of hate toward the unfair ones and the oppressors, was the answer to their necessities. Through the identification with a religion, the Nation of Islam offered an identity suitable to the aspirations of the oppressed, the identity of Muslim. Muslims found association of their historical memory and their roots in the native earth, Africa. During the years when he was spokesman of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X influenced the minds of the blacks through a strong antagonistic opposition with the whites. He preached extremist positions, religious fanaticism and ideal separation. In this sense the hate was a tool to refuse the definitions of the reality given by the whites. “The natural religion of the blacks”: the Islam The apparition of the Islam was again something for America. In the complex and variegated black and white religious tradition of the United States you can trace. In 1913 it was Noble Drew Wings, founder of the social-religious movement of the Moors. Islam, was not the religion of their Fathers, it entered all of a sudden making numerous enlightenments in the community of the Afro-American because of its fundamental principle, responded to their more urgent appeals in that particular historical moment. More than the others Islam was suited for the situation of the Afro-Americans. An exclusive and antagonistic religion, Islam spiritually made the blacks feel free from the whites; anti-bourgeois and revolutionary; the purpose of its religious structure was to make better, social, economic and political standings for themselves in the United States of America. Islam, one of the most diffused religions on the continent Africa and in the countries of the South of the world, it spiritually reunified the Afro-Americans with their brothers in Africa, Asia and Latin America in name of a demand of liberation from the same imperialistic oppression.
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