"changed by reading Malcolm X"

[Otto]

What's interesting about this poor guy John Walker is that he had no reason
to complain about his upbringing. His parents were well off and not living
in what we have used to call "slums" in the 60s. He has never been "Red, the
Negro shoeshine boy" (GR 63) who went to prison to copy Webster's dictionary
from A to Z (beginning with Aardvark) to develop self-confidence & to learn
about all the negative connotations of the word *black* in the (white)
English language. Malcolm X had changed from being "a street punk and a
pimp" (as the linked article says), always striving to appear as light as
possible, to become a proud Black Muslim with a lot of self-esteem, quite a
different story.

What's further interesting about Pynchon including young Malcolm *and* JFK
in the same chapter is that they both got murdered in the Sixties after they
had become major figures from both sides of the Black & White-opposition in
times of great social changes:

Much later in the book Pynchon returns to the implications of the Roseland
Ballroom scene: Malcolm is "working off whiteman's penance on his sin being
born the color of Shit'n Shinola (688/802) and perhaps "caught the eye of"
Jack Kennedy.
(Douglas Fowler, A Reader's Guide to Gravity's Rainbow, Ann Arbor, Michigan,
1980, p. 105)

Malcolm X (Malcolm Little): "The Autobiography of Malcolm X". New York,
Grove, 1966.

Otto
http://www.itap.de/homes/otto/pynchon/gr10.htm


> Doug Millison
> "changed by reading Malcolm X"
> "Forty years later, we learn that John Walker was changed by reading
> Malcolm X. [...]  Americans are not, after all, in a romantic mood about
> Islamic militants, especially not the homegrown sort."
> from a Richard Rodriguez essay worth reading at:
> http://www.pacificnews.org/content/pns/2001/dec/1207suburbs.html
>
>
> Pynchon appears to have been "changed" by reading Malcom X, too -- at
least
> enough to include him as a character in GR.