Black Skin, White Masks

I find myself one day in a world where things are hurtful; a world where I am required to fight; a world where it is always a question of defeat or victory.

The Vietnamese who die in front of a firing squad don’t expect their sacrifice to revive a forgotten past. They accept death for the sake of the present and the future.

It is not because the Indo-Chinese discovered a culture of their own that they revolted. Quite simply this was because it became impossible for them to breathe, in more than one sense of the word.

When we recall how the old colonial hands in 1938 described Indochina as the land of piastres and rickshaws, of houseboys and cheap women, we understand only too well the fury of the Vietminh’s struggle.

We say the black Frenchman because the black Americans are living a different drama. In the United States the black man fights and is fought against. There are laws that gradually disappear from the constitution. There are other laws that prohibit certain forms of discrimination. And we are told that none of this is given free.

If it is a group of intellectuals, rest assured the black man will try to assert himself. He is asking them to pay attention not to the color of his skin, but to his intellectual powers. Many twenty-or thirty-year-olds in Martinique go to work on Montesquieu or Claudel for the sole purpose of being able to quote him. The reason is that they hope their blackness will be forgotten if they become experts on such writers.

The collective unconscious is not governed by cerebral heredity: it is the consequence of what I shall call an impulsive cultural imposition. It is not surprising, then, that when an Antillean is subjected to waking-dream therapy he relives the same fantasies as the European. The fact is that the Antillean has the same collective unconscious as the European.

Jung regularly assimilates the outsider with darkness and baser instincts. He is quite right. This mechanism of projection or, if you prefer, transitivity, has been described in conventional psychoanalysis. Whenever I discover something out of the ordinary, something reprehensible in me, I have no other alternative but to get rid of it and attribute its paternity to someone else. Thereby I put an end to a circuit of high tension that threatened to compromise my equilibrium.

This is why Jung is an innovator: he wants to reach out to the childhood of the world. But he makes a big mistake: he reaches out only to the childhood of Europe.

Jung locates the collective unconscious in the inherited cerebral matter. But there is no need to resort to the genes; the collective unconscious is quite simply the repository of prejudices, myths, and collective attitudes of a particular group.

Quite simply that when Blacks make contact with the white world a certain sensitizing action takes place. If the psychic structure is fragile, we observe a collapse of the ego. The black man stops behaving as an actional person. His actions are destined for “the Other” (in the guise of the white man), since only “the Other” can enhance his status and give him self-esteem at the ethical level.

It was only with Aimé Césaire that we witnessed the birth and acceptance of negritude and its demands. The most visible proof of this is the impression the young generations of students get when they arrive in Paris: it takes a few weeks for them to realize that their contact with Europe compels them to face a number of problems which up till then had never crossed their mind. And yet these problems were not exactly invisible.

They’ll tell us it’s not that important, precisely because they haven’t given any thought to the role of these comics. Here is what G. Legman says of them:

With only very rare exceptions, the average American child who was six in 1938 has now seen at least eighteen thousand scenes of violent torture and bloody violence. The Americans are the only modern nation, except for the Boers, in living memory who have totally eliminated the native population from the territory where they have settled.6 Only America, then, could have the need to appease the national conscience by forging the myth of the “Bad Injun” so as to later introduce the historical figure of the noble Redskin unsuccessfully defending his territory against the invaders armed with Bibles and rifles; the punishment we deserve can be averted only by denying responsibility for the wrong and throwing the blame on the victim: by proving—at least in our own eyes—that striking the first and only blow we are simply acting in legitimate defense.

I embrace the world! I am the world! The white man has never understood this magical substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself. He discovers he is the predestined master of the world. He enslaves it. His relationship with the world is one of appropriation.

For us the body is not in opposition to what you call the soul. We are in the world. And long live the bond between Man and the Earth! Moreover, our writers have helped me to convince you that your white civilization lacks a wealth of subtleness and sensitivity.

It was my philosophy teacher from the Antilles who reminded me one day: “When you hear someone insulting the Jews, pay attention; he is talking about you.” And I believed at the time he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible in my body and soul for the fate reserved for my brother. Since then, I have understood that what he meant quite simply was that the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe.

Every time there was a rebellion, the military authorities sent only the colored soldiers to the front line. It is the “peoples of color” who annihilated the attempts at liberation by other “peoples of color,” proof that there were no grounds for universalizing the process: if those good-for-nothings, the Arabs, got it into their heads to rebel, it was not in the name of reputable principles, but quite simply to get their “towelhead” unconscious out of their system.

Inferiorization is the native correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority. Let us have the courage to say: It is the racist who creates the inferiorized.

With this conclusion we agree with Sartre: “The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew: that is the simple truth from which we must start. . . . It is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew.

He speaks of phenomenology, of psychoanalysis, of human brotherhood, but we would like him to consider these aspects in more concrete terms. All forms of exploitation are alike. They all seek to justify their existence by citing some biblical decree. All forms of exploitation are identical, since they apply to the same “object”: man. By considering the structure of such and such an exploitation from an abstract point of view we are closing our eyes to the fundamentally important problem of restoring man to his rightful place.

Colonial racism is no different from other racisms.

We shall see that another solution is possible. It implies restructuring the world.

A marvelous description that fits perfectly the character of Jean Veneuse, for he tells us:

All it took for me was to come of age and go and serve my adopted motherland in the country of my ancestors to make me wonder whether I hadn’t been betrayed by everything around me, white folk refusing to accept me as one of their own and black folk virtually repudiating me. That is precisely where I stand.

It is because the black woman feels inferior that she aspires to gain admittance to the white world.

When a black man speaks of Marx, the first reaction is the following: “We educated you and now you are turning against your benefactors. Ungrateful wretches! You’ll always be a disappointment.” And then there’s that sledgehammer argument from the plantation owners in Africa: our enemy is the elementary-school teacher.

As we have seen, we are not mistaken in thinking that a study of the Antillean’s language can reveal several characteristics of his world. As we said at the beginning, there are mutual supports between language and the community.

To speak a language is to appropriate its world and culture.

If the person who speaks to a man of color or an Arab in pidgin does not see that there is a flaw or a defect in his behavior, then he has never paused to reflect. At a personal level, during certain consultations, I have felt myself lapsing.

In the company of this seventy-three-year-old peasant afflicted with senile dementia I suddenly feel I am losing my touch. The very fact of adopting a language suitable for dementia and the mentally retarded, the fact of “leaning over” to address this poor seventy-three-year-old woman, the fact of my reaching down to her for a diagnosis are the signs of a weakening in my relations with other people.