Chapter Two deals with Malcolm’s first close relationship with white people, at the county detention home in Mason, Michigan, where he was sent after his expulsion from school in 1938.

The white couple who kept the home treated him well, but like the welfare people, they refused to consider him a human being. Rather, they looked upon him as a mascot, a pet.

He uses animal imagery to characterize white attitudes toward him throughout the chapter: to the whites, he is like a pink poodle, a pet canary, a fine colt, or a pedigreed pup. In discussing this experience, he expresses the fundamental reason for his opposition to integration: white Americans are unwilling to think of blacks as human beings; they will accept blacks only if blacks are willing to be treated as inferiors.