CHAPTER FIFTEEN

ICARUS

The more places I represented Mr. Muhammad on television and radio, and at colleges and
elsewhere, the more letters came from people who had heard me. I'd say that ninety-five per cent
of the letters were from white people.
Only a few of the letters fell into the "Dear Nigger X" category, or the death-threats. Most of my
mail exposed to me the white man's two major dreads.The first one was his own private belief
that God wrathfully is going to destroy this civilization. And the white man's second most
pervading dread was his image of the black man entering the body of the white woman.
An amazing percentage of the white letter-writers agreed entirely with Mr. Muhammad's analysis
of the problem-but not with his solution. One odd ambivalence was how some letters, otherwise
all but championing Mr. Muhammad, would recoil at the expression "white devils." I tried to
explain this in subsequent speeches:
"Unless we call one white man, by name, a 'devil,' we are not speaking of any individual white
man. We are speaking of the collective white man's historical record. We are speaking of the
collective white man's cruelties, and evils, and greeds, that have seen him act like a devil
toward the non-white man. Any intelligent, honest, objective person cannot fail to realize that this
white man's slave trade, and his subsequent devilish actions are directly responsible for not
only the presence of this black man in America, but also for the condition in which we find
this black man here. You cannot find one black man, I do not care who he is, who has not been
personally damaged in some way by the devilish acts of the collective white man!"
Nearly every day, some attack on the "Black Muslims" would appear in some newspapers.
Increasingly, a focal target was something that I had said, "Malcolm X" as a "demagogue." I would
grow furious reading any harsh attack upon Mr. Muhammad. I didn't care what they said about
me.
Those social workers and sociologists-they tried to take me apart. Especially the black ones, for
some reason. Of course, I knew the reason: the white man signed their paychecks. If I wasn't
"polarizing the community," according to this bunch, I had "erroneously appraised the racial
picture." Or in some statement, Ihad "over-generalized." Or when I had made some absolutely
true point, "Malcolm X conveniently manipulated... ."
Once, one of my Mosque Seven Muslim brothers who worked with teenagers in a well-known
Harlem community center showed me a confidential report. Some black senior social worker had
been given a month off to investigate the "Black Muslims" in the Harlem area. Every paragraph
sent me back to the dictionary-I guess that's why I've never forgotten one line about me. Listen to
this: "The dynamic interstices of the Harlem sub-culture have been oversimplified and distorted by
Malcolm X to meet his own needs."
Which of us, I wonder, knew more about that Harlem ghetto "sub-culture"? I, who had hustled for
years in those streets, or that black snob status-symbol-educated social worker?
But that's not important. What's important, to my way of thinking about it, is that among America's