Most people do not read to the end of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Many people do not know that Malcolm predicted his death and even said that he might not live to see the book published. He talked about how his decision to move away from the Nation of Islam caused a great deal of animosity toward him. He also made it clear that he was no longer the man readers encountered at the beginning of the book.
Earlier in his life, Malcolm was known for living a life of crime and violence. He described himself as being so full of hatred and anger toward everyone that, while he was in prison, he was nicknamed “Satan.” Then his siblings introduced him to the Nation of Islam, where he found some inner peace and developed a deep love for his own people.
After prison, Malcolm directed that same fire toward fighting for Black people. He spoke with passion about the injustices his community suffered and became known for his fierce commitment to Black freedom and self-defense. When a White college student once approached him after a speech and sincerely asked what she could do to help, he coldly answered, “Nothing.” He watched her leave in tears.
However, in the second part of his autobiography, Malcolm expressed regret for how he had treated her. He wished that he knew her name or how to contact her so that he could tell her what he now told sincere White people who asked how they could help. He wanted her, wherever she was, to know that he was no longer the same man.
By the end of his life, Malcolm had changed. The man once called “Satan” had left the Nation of Islam and become a devout Muslim. He remained committed to telling the truth, fighting for equality, and defending Black people “by any means necessary,” but he no longer wanted hatred and violence to define him. His faith was teaching him to see the humanity in everyone, even the people he had once hated.
His pilgrimage to Mecca profoundly changed him. There, he worshiped alongside Muslims of many races and complexions, including people with blue eyes and blond hair. The experience caused him to reconsider his judgments about White people. He publicly apologized for calling the White man the devil and acknowledged that it was wrong to label all White people as racist. He was beginning to understand that people must be judged by what is in their hearts.
In this respect, Malcolm was moving closer to the vision articulated by Martin Luther King Jr., who dreamed of a society in which people would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Yet people rarely discuss this part of Malcolm’s life. They remain stuck on the earlier Malcolm because the angry Malcolm is easier to use.
Malcolm knew that the public still associated him with anger, hatred, and violence, so he began speaking with reporters in an effort to change that image. He still wanted to be known as a man who told the truth and fought for equality, but he did not want violence and hatred to define him. He was not abandoning the fight for Black freedom. His heart and his understanding of that fight were changing. Tragically, he was assassinated before we could see where that transformation might ultimately have led him.
When Dr. King died, his public approval was lower than many people realize. This knowledge was a great source of discouragement for him, but he could not shake what God was telling him about speaking the truth in love and standing for equality through nonviolence. When Dr. King was assassinated, my father was driving home through Washington, D.C. Riots were raging all around him. My father was grieving too. Dr. King was his hero. As my father sat at a traffic light, he saw a White man being chased by a group of Black people. Desperate to escape, the man opened my father’s car door and jumped inside. My father had a choice to make in that moment. He could have allowed his grief and anger to control him. He could have told the man to get out of his car and left him with the angry crowd. My father was mourning the murder of a man who had given his life for Black freedom. He had every reason to be angry. Instead, my father took the man home. When my father told me that story, he taught me something I have never forgotten. In one of the most painful moments of his life, surrounded by anger and violence, he chose to protect another human being. He chose not to see that White man as the symbol of everything that had been done to Black people. He saw a person whose life was in danger, and he chose love. He looked past his own anger and chose to love.
Love was the only answer then, and love is the only answer now. I feel all of this so deeply because I used to be a strong supporter of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Then I became closely involved with DEI in practice. While working at a university, I experienced racially insensitive treatment from a colleague and reported it. The response was to ask me to attend a training with the person who had done this to me. I would have to stand before a crowd of people and tell them what she had done so that she could “learn.” I had to do this WHILE she was sitting there. I refused. I had no desire to embarrass the woman. Instead, I asked for a mediator who could sit with both of us, help us discuss what had happened, and help us find a healthier path forward. The leader of the DEI office told me that they did not provide mediators for private conversations. Instead, they offered programs for people to go through. After that conversation, the DEI office never helped or supported me again.
That experience helped me understand why DEI has failed. It often does not include reconciliation. It includes programs, trainings, activities, and sometimes even public humiliation, but none of those things necessarily change the heart. I did not want to embarrass this woman. Some people may believe that I should have wanted to call her out publicly, but I did not see how humiliating her in front of other people would ultimately bring healing. It may have given me temporary satisfaction to see her embarrassed, but how would that have helped the university if her heart remained unchanged? What if that experience only made her more bitter and more prejudiced toward Black people? I believed that an honest conversation with her, guided by a mediator, might have helped change her heart. Going through that process with her might also have helped heal mine. Then, together, we might have helped bring greater healing to the university. I wanted someone to help us sit together, talk honestly about what had happened, and find a healthier path forward. The DEI office had no process for helping us do that.
We cannot heal without love and a process of reconciliation. When the Bible says, “Love keeps no record of wrongs,” it is not saying that we should deny our pain or act as if nothing happened. It is telling us that we cannot dwell there. We have to acknowledge the pain, but then we have to do an act of love to heal it. At times, my efforts are misunderstood as not being angry enough. But when I read the Bible, nothing supports allowing anger to be at the root of healing relationships. The Bible gives us a process for reconciliation, and I have never seen that process fail.
Malcolm X had a change of heart, and that change began to affect his work, his life, and the lives of those within his sphere of influence. Abraham Lincoln also experienced a change of heart, and it began to affect how he led the country. Lincoln went from saying, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it,” to describing the bloodshed of the Civil War as God’s punishment for the sin of slavery. Lincoln’s evolution was incomplete when he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer who was enraged by Lincoln’s changing views on slavery and Black citizenship. Malcolm’s circumstances were different, but he also died in the midst of an unfinished transformation. They both died before their evolution was complete because anger can become so inflamed by even the slightest glimmer of love that hatred rushes in to snuff it out. Too often, anger toward the other side is what drives our work. We may begin with a legitimate desire for justice, but if we are not careful, anger becomes more than a response to injustice. It becomes the place where we dwell. Both Lincoln and Malcolm were killed by people from within their own communities who chose to dwell in that anger and could not accept the changes taking place within them.
When I read How to Be an Antiracist, I came away feeling that, to be an antiracist, a Black person would have to look around at every part of America and reject it in order to move forward. A White person would have to hate themselves so much that they would begin to reject their own identity. It was one of the most hopeless books I have ever read.
The author begins by mocking the faith of his own parents and accusing them of choosing a Black church that was only seeking to imitate the White church. My heart was broken. He denied the power of the Black church and the way it has been a beacon of light for us throughout the darkest times in American history. How to Be an Antiracist includes Malcolm X, but it conveniently forgets the second half of his autobiography. The angry Malcolm is remembered, but the transformed Malcolm is forgotten.
During the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, my brother and I wanted to do something to take a stand against police brutality. We organized an event called the Black Lives Funeral. We partnered with Daniel Payne of Precious Memories Funeral Home, who gathered funeral homes from all over the Washington metropolitan area, and Pastor Devin Turner of Revolution Church. Together, we organized a funeral procession from Maryland into the center of Washington, D.C., in honor of the lives lost to police brutality. The city was largely shut down, and police officers even joined the procession. It was a peaceful, powerful, and beautiful day.Every major news station was notified about the event. Only one station mentioned it, and even then, only for a few seconds. At the same time, violent protests received full coverage day after day after day. There is a lot of money in anger and violence. Peace is not always popular.
DEI sometimes tries to correct the centering of Whiteness by centering Blackness. But healing will not come from replacing one racial center with another. We must center humanity. This requires us to do something deeper, yet simpler. We must genuinely love our neighbors as ourselves. This does not mean ignoring racism or pretending that White supremacy has not caused immeasurable harm. It does not mean asking oppressed people to accept injustice quietly. Love tells the truth, confronts wrongdoing, protects the vulnerable, and demands justice. But love also refuses to strip anyone of human dignity. Love seeks to actually heal broken relationships. Jesus did that for us when he died for us in order to reconcile us to himself. We did not deserve it. He should have waited for us to be nicer to him or to right our wrongs, but he initiated reconcilation even to the point of self-sacrifice. That same love resides in me, so I seek to reflect it to others.
Love. Malcolm X was beginning to understand it. Dr. King taught us about it. James Baldwin wrote about it, saying that at the end of the day it is the only choice that we have. Even Dolly Parton has lived it, which may be why so many people love her. Yet loving people seems to raise up even more anger. I have seen White Christians condemn Dolly Parton to hell because she gives unconditional love to people whose lives or beliefs differ from her own. Throughout history, people on all sides have embraced the most hateful voices while rejecting the people whose lives are marked by loving others through their differences and even their conflicts.
DEI failed because it was not meant to heal and it was not created from a place of love. It was meant to keep us in this war with one another. It gave institutions procedures, vocabulary, activities, and public demonstrations of concern, but it did not provide a path toward reconciliation. It did not help us change our hearts. In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin says that even after we have recounted all the pain of our people, we still must love. We have to choose love even as we wrestle through our deepest scars. That does not mean pretending those scars do not exist. It means refusing to allow them to determine how we treat other people. Through love, we can understand one another, show empathy to one another, and seek the best for one another. That love can transcend color, ethnicity, and the pain and continuous struggles of both the past and the present. Love keeps us from treating other people the way we have been treated. Instead, it leads us to put others before ourselves.
This is important because it is easy to feel our own pain and seek only our own healing. But we are all so intertwined that when we take on a self-centered stance, we end up hurting others, including other oppressed people. Even while DEI efforts were at their strongest, especially in education, marginalized people still felt unseen. As schools changed their curricula to make them more diverse, some erased European stories, diminished other ethnicities, and centered Blackness. Love would not have done this. Love does not erase one group to make another group visible. Love cares about all of humanity and seeks the best for the entire human family. Until we understand how important love is for our healing, we will continue fighting the same old battles, placing Band-Aids over old wounds that become reinfected with each setback. However, if we choose unconditional love grounded in truth, we may finally begin to heal.
The sad thing is that what I have shared here cannot really be applied systemically. This is why DEI was created. You cannot create a system that changes people’s hearts. Hatred lives within the individual, and therefore, healing is a deeply personal journey. It involves facing the moment when hatred was born within us and choosing to replace it with unconditional love. That is a difficult and personal process that requires an individual commitment to healing. However, society cannot wait for every person to make that commitment. Something had to be put in place to ensure that people received equal opportunities and equal treatment, even if that equality had to be enforced. If people said or did hateful things, there had to be consequences. DEI was not created out of love. It was created out of necessity. Therefore, it became a more punitive process rather than one founded in grace and reconciliation.
So, if hearts cannot be changed through a systemic process, why did I write this? I am writing this for YOU and for me. As long as there are political parties, the Black and White framework, and all the other ways we divide ourselves, there will always be division. But we can make a difference where we are. We can begin in our own hearts, homes, neighborhoods, churches, schools, and other organizations. We can seek changed hearts one person, one household, and one community at a time. This transcends our political, cultural, and societal frameworks because I believe all sides get it wrong. Healing has to begin with changed hearts, where hatred is replaced with love for all humanity, even through our differences. That love gives birth to empathy and genuine care for another human being, even when that person’s story differs from our own. There may be no way for this kind of change to happen on a large scale all at once. But perhaps, through one changed heart at a time, healing can come to someone, somewhere, someplace.
Anika Prather 