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Malcolm X (1925-1965) was born in a generation of black intellectuals whose lives and careers were all profoundly defined by the chaotic events of the Great Depression, the Second World War, the global struggle between Communism and capitalism represented by the Cold War, and the eruption of anticolonialist political movements and social revolutions throughout the Third World. Within Malcolm X's cohort, some of the most prominent black activist intellectuals were novelist/social critic James Baldwin, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Amilcar Cabral of Portuguese Guiné, Harold Cruse, Vincent Harding, and of course, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcolm X's closest counterpart in the post-World War II black diaspora was Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), born in Martinique, who became the leading theorist of the anticolonial revolution against French rule in Algeria, and author of The Wretched of the Earth (1963). Like Malcolm X, Fanon was a relentless critic of "whiteness," and rejected the philosophy of nonviolence. Fanon not only believed that the oppressed had the right to use violence to defend themselves against the colonizer, but that such violence was essential in purging the self hatred and cultural dependency which characterized the minds of non-whites within racialized societies. Any close reading of both The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Wretched of the Earth illustrates their remarkable similarities of theoretical analysis. Malcolm X, reflecting back to his first experience of straightening or "conking" his hair, admits, "how ridiculous I was...stupid enough to stand there simply lost in admiration of my hair looking 'white'." The psychological make-up of the colonized black mind leads to self-mutilation, and the assimilation of white standards of beauty. Similarly, Fanon sharply condemns the desire among non-Europeans, to achieve "whiteness at any price." The black colonized mind desired "all manner of possession: to sit at the settler's table, to sleep in the settler's bed, with his wife if possible." Both Malcolm and Fanon attempted to create new racialized subjects, black people who actively rejected the materialistic values and cultural traditions of the white world. Fanon believed that blacks "must leave our dreams and abandon our old dreams.... Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry...if we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe or America has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries.... We must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man." Both Malcolm X and Fanon also vigorously condemned the black bourgeoisie, the "House Negroes" who loyally supported the white power structure at the expense of the interests of the black masses. In his famous "Message to the Grassroots" address delivered in Detroit on November 10, 1963, Malcolm charged that black middle class leaders committed to racial integration were directly descended from the plantation "Uncle Toms" of a century before: "The slavemaster took Tom and dressed him well and even gave him a little education-a little education; gave him a long coat and a top hat and made all the other slaves look up to him. Then he used Tom to control them. The same strategy that was used in those days is used today, by the same white man. He takes a Negro, a so-called Negro, and makes him prominent, builds him up, publicizes him, makes him a celebrity. And then he becomes a spokesman for Negroes-and a Negro leader." Similarly, Fanon describes the black middle class in colonial societies as the "Western bourgeoisie's business agent": "the native intellectual has clothed his aggressiveness in his barely veiled desire to assimilate himself to the colonial world."
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