ABSTRACT
Malcolm X is generally and properly thought of as a person concerned primarily with issues affecting Black people. Yet his universal appeal has long been recognized. For several years authuor included the autobiography in the readings assigned to students in predominantly white, undergraduate classes at an Ivy League university. The relations between Black and white are so bitter precisely because they are so intimate, each people recognizing on some level that it is locked in mortal embrace with the other. White readers of the autobiography have been wont to see the crucial turning point in Malcolm's life as the break with Elijah Muhammad and the accompanying repudiation of what they like to call 'Black racism'. Malcolm X wrote that, in the Muslim world, he had encountered people who in America would have been considered white but whose 'white' had been removed by their belief in Islam, people who did not have a white attitude.
