Malcolm X Movie

Last week I viewed the Malcolm X Movie with Denzel Washington. Other than the fact that it was three hours long, I enjoyed the movie. It did a good job of giving viewers a visual idea of what life was like in that time period. The amount of racism by both whites and blacks was astonishing! I expected to see a great deal of White hate Blacks, but did not realize that the hatred also goes the other way.

Many of the tenets of the critical race theory were demonstrated in the movie. Tenet three, "Race is a social thing, not a biological thing", was clearly shown when Malcolm visited Mecca. He saw Muslims of all different colors brought together by their common belief in Islamic teachings. This showed him that the color of a man's skin does not effect the way his mind or heart works. Another way that this tenet was shown was at the very beginning of the movie in the barber shop. Malcolm is getting his hair straitened to "look white". The group who did the presentation on the movie, during our presentation day on Malcolm X, recognized and described this also. Tenet five was also shown, "Every person is complex and can not be easily described". This Tenet was shown in the wide variety of views that are demonstrated in the characters in this story. There are whites and blacks that range all across the scale on racist issues. This shows that a person does not simply have a preordained agenda simply because of their skin color.