Will Shetterly
2 min readMar 12, 2023

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Celebrating the deaths of strangers because of their race seems pretty hateful to me. While Malcolm X was under the influence of Elijah Muhammad, he said, “I would like to announce a very beautiful thing that has happened…I got a wire from God today…well, all right, somebody came and told me that he really had answered our prayers over in France. He dropped an airplane out of the sky with over 120 white people on it because the Muslims believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But thanks to God, or Jehovah, or Allah, we will continue to pray, and we hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky.”

So far as I know, Muhammad never rebuked him, as he did when he made his “chickens coming home to roost” comment.

By the end of his life, Malcolm X was saying things like this:

“I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don’t think that it will be based upon the color of the skin.”

and

“I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being, neither white, black, brown nor red. When you are dealing with humanity as one family, there’s no question of integration or intermarriage. It’s just one human being marrying another human being, or one human being living around and with another human being.”

I tried to chart the evolution of his thought here: https://medium.com/comrade-morlocks-journal/identitarians-love-malcolm-x-before-mecca-universalists-love-him-after-8ebbc80b1f5d

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Will Shetterly
Will Shetterly

Written by Will Shetterly

If you’re losing an argument with me and are too proud to admit defeat, please feel free to insult me instead.

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