Both Malcolm X and President- elect Barack Hussein Obama, contributes a powerful message to both the black and white communities of America. The two powerful strong black men gave forth a sense of hope and pride, specifically, to the black communities all over this country. The change that has happened over the centuries, for the black community has given us all hope that America truly can become a better place, and we are all capable of living this “American dream.” Traveling through the times of slavery (which lasted for centuries), the segregation, Jim crow laws, and overall inequality, blacks has suffered from a deep pain that goes down to the roots of America.
Malcolm X explores this pain through childhood experiences he had to face in the white communities. He had experienced the lashed of oppression through the era of growing up in at predominately white neighborhood.Over the years blacks have learned by society to suppress themselves, Malcolm gives the example of blacks “conking” their hair and discriminating one another. The discrimination black do to themselves comes from the struggles of the past history of the black culture. Both bell hooks and Cornell West’s in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life, bell hooks endorses “the suffering many Black people experience today is linked to the suffering of past, to ‘historical memory,’” (14). This “historical memory” that blacks face is psychologically influenced by, made them feel as though they will never be worth much in this country. Understanding the pain and suffering their ancestors had to go through makes them acknowledge that same suffrage of pain. Until 4 November 2008, us Americans had the biggest teaching that will go down in our history books, Senator Barack Obama was announced the New President- elect of America.