In this passage of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X describes the dissolution of his family at the hand of state institutions. This passage, as well as this entire “Nightmare” chapter, demonstrates how systematic racism preys on the black family. After Malcolm’s father is killed by white men, his mother is left “thirty-four years old […] with no husband, no provider or protector to take care of her eight children” (14). To make matters worse, his life insurance money falls through because his death was ruled a suicide; as if it were possible he “could bash himself in the head, then get down across the streetcar tracks to be run over” (14). In this way, it is implied the insurance company ruled it as a suicide either to protect his white killers, or as an excuse to deprive their family of the money, knowing they could get away with it because they …show more content…
That is, while slavery as a practice is over, its presence and impact remains and has manifested in different ways. The word ‘wake’ specifically evokes the image of the slave ship, whose “semiotics […] continue” even today (21). Black people are left still living in “wake,” experiencing “insistent black exclusion” (14) and lasting “abjection from the realm of human” (14). And despite this lasting racial terror inflicted on Black people, Black people are instead seen as “carriers of terror[…] and not the primary objects of terror’s multiple enactments” (15). This occurs at a systematic level globally, and constitutes “everyday black existence’ (15). In Larsen’s Quicksand, we see what it is like to live in the “wake” through Helga Crane’s continual experience of rejection. Through this character, Larsen demonstrates the debilitating impact of this sort of