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"PURSUIT OF LONELINESS, THE" (PHILIP SLATER) & "AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X" (ALEX HALEY).
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Compares authors' views on failures & broken promises of Amer. society & culture.... More...
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Paper Abstract:
Compares authors' views on failures & broken promises of Amer. society & culture.
Paper Introduction:
Different writers illuminate aspects of American society from different perspectives, sometimes personal, sometimes empirical, sometimes speculative, and sometimes analytical. Often, commentators find that American society is wanting in some respect and failing to provide the nurturing and supportive social environment people need. In some cases, as with the analysis by Philip E. Slater in his book The Pursuit of Loneliness, the writer finds that American society has developed in a way that undercuts certain important values even as it substitutes others, while in other instances, as with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the author shows how American society fails to deliver on certain of its promises to an entire class of citizens.
Slater finds that there are certain deeply-seated human desir
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The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Malcolm X was able to break this cycle with his reading,but the formal education he received in school had not broken it--it hadcreated it. He dressed like other young men of hisgeneration and behaved as they did. Boston: BeaconPress, I had so loved being around the white man that in prison I really disliked how Negro convicts stuck together so much (Haley 182).This is part of the problem of black identity that he sees as being imposedon blacks by white society. The attitudes that had been engendered in the young man were takenwith him into prison and would be broken only when he read widely andlearned the truth: I hate to admit a sad, shameful fact. Slater in his book The Pursuit ofLoneliness, the writer finds that American society has developed in a waythat undercuts certain important values even as it substitutes others,while in other instances, as with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, theauthor shows how American society fails to deliver on certain of itspromises to an entire class of citizens. He talks of this distinction as the old culture and the new, adistinction he makes "between the old scarcity-oriented technologicalculture that still predominates and the somewhat amorphous counterculturethat is growing up to challenge it" (Slater 97). More fundamental differences are the central issue in TheAutobiography of Malcolm X, which not only shows how the black and whitesocieties remain far apart but indicates the need for a betterunderstanding of the development of a black identity in American society.Malcolm X grew up in a world where being black was a handicap, and indeedwhere being black was denigrated. Hewore his hair straight because white people had straight hair, making himashamed of his natural hair. The crimes Malcolm X discovered could be attributed towhite society meant that that society had to be cast out of the world'scivilized society, and integration with whites was unthinkable. (197 ). Like many other young black men of his generation, hefell into a certain stereotypical mold imposed on him by the view whitesociety had of black people. Slater also finds American society divided by generationalissues related to technological change and shifting cultural opportunities,and the lack of a strong community contributes so that the youngergeneration in effect is freer to create its own "new" social order everyfew years. Slater writes at a time when thecounterculture of the sixties was growing and the generation gap wassomething much under discussion, and he is reacting to these new divisionsand trying to explain how they came into being. It is in these readings that he learns a lesson about the education henever received in the white schools. They act out fantasies set by thewhite and participate in their own virtual slavery to false ideas and afalse identity. In time,though, this view would prove too harsh for Malcolm X, and he broke withthe Nation of Islam in 1963 and reevaluated his perception of all whitepeople as blue-eyed devils. Hecopied the dictionary page by page, learning by doing, and he readcopiously as he became better at understanding what he read, reading to thepoint of straining his eyes badly. Often, commentators find thatAmerican society is wanting in some respect and failing to provide thenurturing and supportive social environment people need. (1965). He came to embody this sense of anger for anentire generation, standing in contrast to the message of Martin LutherKing and thus representing one of the two major strands of black politicalphilosophy to this day. Blacks are made ashamed of themselves, theirpeople, their history, their culture. Each of these isreduced in power because we willingly seek its opposite as part of theAmerican character. Malcolm remembers when he was a child in Mason and had studied history,with all the history of the Negro covered in one paragraph: You can hardly show me a black adult in America--or a white one, for that matter--who knows from the history books anything like the truth about the black man's role (Haley 174).Reading opens his eyes to the reality of the situation of the black man inthe world, a reality he had always ignored as he lived out the role societyseemed to have set for him, a role that was negative, destructive, and thatprevented him from achieving anything positive in his life. Clearly, hesaw that the same effect applied to other young black men as well. he preferred women who were lighter incolor because white society had made him ashamed of his color. Slater says the distinction he makes is not between rich and poor orblack and white, but in fact those divisions also existed when he waswriting and continue to exist to this day. Slater states that "Americans have voluntarily createdand voluntarily maintain a society which increasingly frustrates andaggravates these secondary yearnings, to the point where they threaten tobecome primary" (Slater 5). Slater suggests that the university is not a placewhere people are brought together, while Malcolm X finds the universitynecessary if the black man is to have any chance at all of competing withthe white or uniting with him in the future. On the one side was King's vision of peacefulcooperation and integration into American society. He fellinto crime as an easy way to make a living, and in any case society askednothing more of him and expected even less. In some cases, aswith the analysis by Philip E. New York:Ballantine Books, Slater, Philip. Slater seems less to ignorethan to undercut the value of these divisions as creators of alienation andloneliness in American society, though there is ample evidence that they docontribute to it. It could lead to one's death at thehands of an angry mob, something he knew from his childhood. At the time,this implanted in his mind a subtle sense of shame at his blackness,something he could not have articulated but which influenced hisdevelopment as a human being and his choices as a young man. References Haley, Alex. Different writers illuminate aspects of American society fromdifferent perspectives, sometimes personal, sometimes empirical, sometimesspeculative, and sometimes analytical. It is also not clear if the sort of non-individualisticcommunity he describes would be any better about bringing together certainracial or economic opposites, though it might have that potential. Slater finds that there are certain deeply-seated human desires whichare frustrated by American culture: 1) the desire for community; 2) thedesire for engagement; and 3) the desire for dependence. He tried tobe as white as he could be both culturally and physically, a route whichled him into criminal that only emphasized his lack of a positive identityin the white world. He refers, for instance, to "the compulsiveAmerican tendency to avoid confrontation of chronic social problems"(Slater 12). On the other was thevision adopted by Malcolm X from the writings of Elijah Muhammad of theNation of Islam in which the white man was not a brother but an antagonistto be overcome. Slater's thesis is that the emphasis on individualism in Americansociety has contributed to a sense of loneliness, alienation, and a lack ofcommunity, yet his argument also hangs on the view that Americans do notact truly independent but instead repeat the same sorts of behaviors andattitudes over and over again. It was then that he began to link thestruggles of African-Americans with those of Africa and other Third Worldcountries and created a new activist organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity. One result of Malcolm X's learning about this as he did was to awakenfeelings of anger against white society that had been building but that hadnot yet fully developed. As he emphasizes in the story of his life, heacted out that stereotype and put on the mask society had made for him. He seescertain differences working themselves out in academic circles, for he saysthe "university is no longer one society with shared norms of properbehavior, fair play, tolerance and so on, as university administrators tryto pretend" (Slater 99-1 ). He reads books by Elijah Muhammadthat "stressed how history had been 'whitened' -- when white men hadwritten history books, the black men simply had been left out" (Haley 174). It is while he is in prison that he begins to see the fallacy of thisway of life and the way it has been imposed on him without his awareness.He also becomes ashamed of his ignorance as another inmate, Bimbi, makeshim see how little he knows and how much he needs to learn: But every book I picked up had few sentences which didn't contain anywhere from one to nearly all of the words that might as well have been in Chinese (Haley 171).He gets hold of a dictionary and learns the words one at a time, learningboth to read and to write them as he goes through the dictionary. The Pursuit of Loneliness.
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