Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds. He would not turn the other cheek for you. He would not be a better man for you. He would not be your morality. Malcolm spoke like a man who was free, like a black man above the laws that proscribed our imagination. I identified with him. I knew that he had chafed against the schools, that he had almost been doomed by the streets. But even more I knew that he had found himself while studying in prison, and that when he emerged from the jails, he returned wielding some old power that made him speak as though his body were his own.

To foster an intersubjective milieu that both recognises and honours the inherent sociality of human beings is no simple feat, especially in violent societies where projection and withdrawal are the common psychological responses to perceptions of threat. Add to this mix the phenomenology of alienation - and a difficult task becomes a seemingly insurmountable one. Psychoanalyst Nina Coltart had something interesting to say about this, namely, the person who is interested only in getting better: “Psychoanalytical therapy has nothing to offer a patient who only wishes to be relieved of his suffering.

“Today, I have become a symbol of resistance and freedom and self-acceptance. It’s no longer about winning a race, it’s about the struggle for universal human rights.

The authors of Crucial Conversations observe that in any conversation, respect is like air. When it’s present nobody notices, but when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about.

I write,” Susan Sontag once remarked, “to define myself—an act of self- creation—part

of the process of becoming.