If any of you have watched The Walking Dead, you know my problem...its addicting. The premise of the show is everyone is infected with this kind of disease that turns people into Zombies. The show focuses on one group of people and their saga trying to stay alive in the zombie infested world. There are alot of spoiler alerts if you want to watch this show someday so go comment on someone else's blog. In season one the group lives on a farm and fights zombies there. However the house gets overrun and the group is forced to go on the move. Finally they come across a prison. They kill all the inmate zombies. When they get in the prison building they find 5 inmates humans who have been living together held up in the kitchen for one year. Now when the groups meet each other they are threatened. They don't want to live together, instead they want to split the prison. Now the right choice in my mind would be for the groups to team up because in this world they are surely the minority. However the groups are different, they don't like each other so they don't want to be together. Many would say that Malcolm X wasn't searching for equality but the best life for black people. In an ideal world he wanted a separate state for African Americans. Now the difference between Malcolm X and the Walking Dead is millions of people. In
Walking Dead they don't even succeed. Three of the 5 inmates end up dead in the first few hours the groups meet. Now in America we didn't kill each other but we did discriminate and life for black people was very bad back in the early 60s. It was impossible to live separately, so people had to end up learning to live together. Many are still working on it to this day. In the Walking Dead they ended up taking the last two inmates in instead of killing them off. In the United States Whites and Blacks have mostly all the same opportunities today. In both the United States and The Walking Dead, they learned that well they just have to learn to get along. Now in The Walking Dead it made sense for the teams to join up and fight the zombies. In the U.S it would make sense for Black and Whites to live in a society to make the country better.
This is an interesting post. However, I believe that Malcom X was saying that it was not in the best interests of the White people to ensure equality for the Blacks. In The Walking Dead situation there were two minorities present, while in America it was only the Blacks who were the minority. This kind of reminds me of MLK, in which the way he defines/understands equality is in terms of inequality. There is so much inequality present for the Blacks as a minority that it makes one strive for equality. I do believe that, as you said, Malcom X, defines equality as the need for a separate place for African Americans, to escape Americanization (which he equates with oppression).
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting comparison. I believe that your point of view on Malcom X is some what true. He did seem to want what was best for black people. I do not believe that he wanted to be separate from everyone else in society, I believe that he recognized that black people were already forced into being separate from everyone else. This separation gave him a sense of survival skills to make him fight for his people, but did not make him feel like he wanted to work together with the people that had actually made it separate. I do agree that like the Walking Dead, more could get done if Whites and Blacks would join together to fight against injustice, but that seems to be more fictional because if everyone joined together to fight against the equality, who would they fight? Yes they could fight the system but the system is upheld by some race.
ReplyDeleteJeffrey,
ReplyDeleteI think you missed an opportunity to relate a very important part of X's speech to this situation in the show. In his speech Malcolm X says that he will not talk about things that cause African Americans to differ between themselves because they must unite as one group in their fight for equality. Therefore, Malcolm X would tell these groups of humans that no matter how they feel about each other they would need to unite as humans fighting for survival. Like mshair said though, I did like your point that Malcolm X discusses the need for a seperate place for African Americans to truly escape oppression.