“He wants to be an American rather than to be Black. He wants to be something other than what he is. And knowing that America is a white country, he knows he can’t be Black and be an American too. So he never calls himself Black. He calls himself an American Negro—a Negro in America. And usually he’ll deny his own race, his own color, just to be a second-class American. He’ll deny his own history, his own culture. He’ll deny all of his brothers and sisters in Africa, in Asia, in the East, just to be a second-class American. He denies everything that he represents or everything that was in his past, just to be accepted into a country and into a government that has rejected him ever since he was brought here.”

-Malcolm X (1963)