Malcolm

Purpose and Audience

1. This is selection has explicitly state thesis that makes its purpose clear. What is this thesis?

The thesis of Malcolm X’s “My First Conk”. His thesis is not stated directly, but is stated throughout the piece. Malcolm X wants people to think about how society has affected them and, how society takes away individuality. In the beginning of the story he talks about his life and what he has been through, and then goes into his autobiography, which is about African American men who tried to achieve a straight hair look called a “conk”. He goes through a list of buying the materiel, mixing, and going through the process to get conk hair. Having straight hair is good, and curly hair is bad, straight hair meaning white, and curly hair meaning black. When he tries to achieve the look of having conk hair. He states at the near end that this is “self-degradation”; he also endured all of the pain and burning of the scalp to look like the “white man.” Even after going through the whole process to get conk hair, his hair wasn’t completely how he wanted it to be.

The whole purpose was to explained how damaging and degrading everything was. He figured out that this wasn’t him, and what was the point of going through all this torture to be something that his not. To him it was ridiculous. He sacrifices himself, and his dignity to prove that this wasn’t him. Malcolm X wasn’t the only person that degraded himself. There were many like him and also women. He felt like he lost his identity and probably felt the same way about everyone else. The society we live in everyone wants to fit in, but what everyone should do is embrace their own culture.

Style and Structure

2. In paragraph 22-26, Malcolm X encloses several words in quotation marks, occasionally prefacing them with the phrase so-called. What is the effect of these quotation marks?

I believe the effects of the quotation marks add emphasis to the ridiculous concepts of...