my recollection from reading Autobiography of Malcom X aaaages ago was that X never met a respectable white person prior to going on hajj (1964). He first met Castro in 1960. And for context was assassinated in 1965. Autobiography was of course a work intended to propagandize, in the best sense of that term, and I don’t think it necessarily think it would represent the totality of X’s thoughts on any matter. here is what I found when I searched it up.

Before I get involved in anything nowadays, I have to straighten out my own position, which is clear, I am not a racist in any form whatsoever. I don’t believe in any form of racism. I don’t believe in any form of. discrimination or segregation. I believe in Islam. I am a Muslim and there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim, nothing wrong with the religion of Islam. It just teaches us to believe in Allah as the God. Those of you who are Christians probably believe in the same God, because I think you believe in the God who created the universe. That’s the one we believe in, the one who created the universe—the only difference being you call him God and we call him Allah. The Jews call him Jehovah. If you could understand Hebrew, you would probably call him Jehovah too. If you could understand Arabic, you would probably call him Allah. But since the white man, your friend, took your language away from you during slavery, the only language you know is his language. You know your friend’s language, so when he’s putting the rope around your neck, you call for God and he calls for God. And you wonder why the one you call on never answers…

Elijah Muhammad had taught us that the white man could not enter into Mecca in Arabia and all of us who followed him, we believed it… . When I got over there and went to Mecca and saw these people who were blond and blue-eyed and pale-skinned and all those things, I said, “Well,” but I watched them closely. And I noticed that though they were white, and they would call themselves white, there was a difference between them and the white ones over here. And that basic difference was this: In Asia or the Arab world or in Africa, where the Muslims are, if you find one who says he’s white, all he’s doing is using an adjective to describe something that’s incidental about him, one of his incidental characteristics; there is nothing else to it, he’s just white.

But when you get the white man over here in America and he says he’s white, he means something else. You can listen to the sound of his voice— when he says he’s white, he means he’s boss. That’s right. That’s what white means in this language. You know the expression, “free, white and twenty-one.” He made that up. He’s letting you know that white means free, boss. He’s up there, so that when he says he’s white he has a little different sound in his voice. I know you know what I’m talking about…

Despite the fact that I saw that Islam was a religion of brotherhood, I also had to face reality. And when I got back into this American society, I’m not in a society that practices brotherhood. I’m in a society that might preach it on Sunday, but they don’t practice it on any day. America is a society where there is no brotherhood. This society is controlled primarily by the racists and segregationists who are in Washington, D.C., in positions of power. And from Washington, D.C., they exercise the same forms of brutal oppression against dark-skinned people in South and North Vietnam, or in the Congo, or in Cuba or any other place on this earth where they are trying to exploit and oppress. That is a society whose government doesn’t hesitate to inflict the most brutal form of punishment and oppression upon dark-skinned people all over the world.

archive.org: plain html file main item