Living Faith
Malcom X: "Recognizing Every Human Being as a Human Being"
"I believe in recognizing every human being a human being, neither white, black, brown nor red. When you are dealing with humanity as one family, there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being, or one human being living around another human being."
His society did not fully recognize his humanity because of the color of his skin, even before he was born.
"What I am trying to say is that it just never dawned on them that I could understand, that I wasn't a pet, but a human being. They didn't give me credit for having the same sensitivity, intellect, and understanding that they would have been ready and willing to recognize in a white boy in my position. But it has historically been the case with white people, in their regard for black people, that even though we might be with them, we weren't considered of them. Even though they appeared to have opened the door, it was still closed. Thus they never did really see me."
"I was in prison before entering here... The solitude, the long moments of meditative contemplation, have give me the key to my freedom."
"It is not possible for you to love a man whose chief purpose in life is to humiliate you and still be considered a normal human being: How can anybody ask us do we hate the man who kidnapped us four hundred years ago, brought us here and stripped us of our history, stripped us of our culture, stripped us of our language, stripped us of everything you could use today to prove that you were ever part of the human family, brought you down to the level of an animal, sold you from plantation to plantation like a sack of wheat, sold you like a stack of potatoes, sold you like a horse and a cow, and then hung you up from one end of the country to the other, and they you ask me do I hate him? Why, your question is worthless!"
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole."
"...And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America-then, all of the credit is due to Allah."
How Can I Help?
Helping Prison
“To view the world only in terms of concepts strips it of
its mysterious beauty, its power to refresh.” We are quick to label, to give a
prognosis, but what we are really doing is lessening a person and making their problem(s) insignificant and
belittling them. We should be looking at people for who they are and more than
just seeing them as troubled, broken people. They are human like us though they
are suffering through something we may not truly understand, but we must always
remember to have compassion and remember that they are more than their illness
or what society has classified them as. In truth they often have more to show
us about love and life than we ‘normal’ people do.
“The philosopher Gurdjieff pointed out that if we wish to
escape from prison, the first thing we must acknowledge is that we are in
prison. Without that acknowledgement, no escape is possible.”
“You can meet as friends, both of whom have known pain. What’s
interesting when this happens is that we realize that the opportunity to meet
behind the roles was present all along.”
“You don’t suffer from the truth, the truth sets you free.”
“But when you begin to see with that inner eye, that inner
eye everyone has, it all changes. Everyone is human, everyone is God’s child.
Everyone is helpless, one way or another, and everyone is helpful too. We’re
all here for each other… that’s how it is. And we all have something to give,
no matter our condition.”
“The minute we accept the place where we may seem helpless,
it can cease to be the deepest truth about us. The part of us that’s accepting
it isn’t the part of us that’s lost in it.”
