X pt. 1

At this point in the autobiography, Malcolm's life is starting to get very eventful. He held a gun to a fellow gambler, and is continuously selling marijuana wherever he goes, and got into an altercation with one of his friends for hitting a woman. I still think the night he met Sophia is when his life spun out of control. It's strange that he continues to see her. It's as if ever since she's been around, nothing goes right for Malcolm. I can't help but thinking that his life would have been different if he never ditched Laura. However, the relationship between Malcolm and Sophia crumbles. He is convicted for stealing, but Malcolm noticed that the police wanted him in prison more for the reason that he had a relationship with a white woman. Interracial relationships really started to be looked down upon in Harlem at this time. Blacks started to look down on whites, as if they should be more superior. Maybe the fact that he was ripped away from Sophia, will be the beginning of a change and a road to redemption. 

I couldn't help but relate the relations between Malcolm and Sophia to the relations between Penny and Seaweed in Hairspray. Although Hairspray took place in the 60's and not the 40's, it still presents the terrible concept of segregation and many people opposing interracial couples. Here's a link to a picture from the recent version of Hairspray. The second link is how Penny's mom reacted once she heard her daughter was in love with a black man. The reaction Penny's mom had is just that of the reaction people had in the 1940's when a black man was walking around with a white woman or vise versa. 

http://www.visualhollywood.com/movies/hairspray/pics/hairspray-009.jpg

http://entimg.msn.com/i/gal/Hairspray/HS02589S.jpg

Malcolm

I'm shocked at how much Malcolm has changed ever since he left Lansing. Right after he left, he was exposed to things that were fairly new to him, but that was expected. Now he's living in a brothel and selling marijuana. I think there was one trigger to when his life started to spin out of control. This trigger was when he use to dance at the Roseland and after he met Sophia. At first, he was with Laura, who was a conservative almost perfect girl. Then one night when he saw Sophia he was love struck and he did whatever she said. He took Laura home and has been seeing Sophia ever since. It's as if he traded a life of purity to a life in the fast lane full of sex, drugs, and alcohol. I'm curious to see how crazy his life gets and when he realizes that he needs to get a hold of himself, that is if he wants to survive. 

Malcolm

The first few chapters of Malcolm X truly opened my eyes to a whole to view of things. I thought that African Americans during times of segregation took pride in who they were. I thought that they never wanted to be like the white people because they were cruel and the reason for segregation. I was proved wrong in chapter 3 of Malcolm X. Conking hair was one of the fads during this time. It was a hair straightening treatment to make African American hair look more like Caucasian hair. I really had no idea that black people during that time did things like this. The media today emphasizes the pride black people have in themselves and their race, but then again, there's integration now."This was my first really big step toward self- degradation: when i endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man's hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are 'inferior'- and white people 'superior'-that they will even violate and multilate their God-created bodies to try to look 'pretty' by white standards" (Haley 56). Even Malcolm admits that he was falling into the path of changing his appearance to look more like the "superior." I also agreed with him when he said,"It makes you wonder if the Negro has completely lost his sense of identity, lost touch with himself" (Haley 57). Things like this happen today too. People are changing the way they look drastically so they can look like the elite or celebreties. It seems though, that just as Malcolm X noticed, people are tending to lose touch of their true selves.