Candid speech about black suffering is essential to racial justice.

Evidence

Malcolm X’s insistence on “frank and fearless speech” may be just the remedy to how we dance around the subject of race in this country. Not that we should set white people’s houses on fire (funny how calls to burn down the country don’t make white Americans feel any better), but that we embrace his claim that only by telling the nation exactly “what kind of hell we’ve been catching” will we achieve true racial justice. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 255

Categorization

• XREF: Frames the chapter’s ‘frank speech’ imperative against the invocation of King that follows; connects to Glaude’s broader value-gap argument.