Black Skin, White Masks

Quotes

1. A white man addressing a Negro behaves exactly like an adult with a child and starts smirking, whispering, patronizing, cozening. It is not one white man I have watched, but hundreds; and I have not limited my investigation to any one class but, if I may claim an essentially objective position, I have made a point of observing such behavior in physician, policemen, employers.

   p. 31

2. 

   Man is motion toward the world and toward his like. A movement of aggression, which leads to enslavement or to conquest; a movement of love, a gift of self, the ultimate stage of what by common accord is called ethical orientation. Every consciousness seems to have the capacity to demonstrate these two components, simultaneously or alternatively. The person I love will strengthen me by endorsing my assumption of my manhood, while the need to earn the admiration or the love of others will erect a value-making superstructure on my whole vision of the world.

   p. 41

3. 

   What is South Africa? A boiler into which thirteen million blacks are clubbed and penned in by two and a half million whites. If the poor whites hate the Negroes, it is not, as M. Mannoni would have us believe, because "racialism is the work of petty officials, small traders, and colonials who have toiled much without great success." No; it is because the structure of South Africa is a racist structure.

   p. 87

4. 

   The black man wants to be white. The white man slaves to reach a human level.

   p. 9

5. 

   All forms of exploitation resemble one another. They all seek the source of their necessity in some edict of a Biblical nature. All forms of exploitation are identical because all of them are applied against the same "object": man.

   p. 88

6. 

   Yes, European civilization and its best representatives are responsible for colonial racism.

   p. 90

7. 

   Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.

   p. 9

8. 

   I said just above that South Africa has a racist structure. Now I shall go farther and say that Europe has a racist structure.

   p. 92

9. 

   The childhood of Mayotte Capécia shows us a certain number of characteristics that illustrate the line of orientation she followed as an adult. And each time there is a movement or a contact, it will have a direct relation to her goal. It would seem indeed that for her white and black represent the two poles of a world, two poles in perpetual conflict: a genuinely Manichean concept of the world; the word has been spoken, it must be remembered—white or black, that is the question.

   I am white: that is to say I possess beauty and virtue, which have never been black. I am the color of daylight....

   I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be , can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo. If I am black, it is not the result of a curse, but it is because, having offered my skin, I have been able to absorb all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a ray of sunlight under the earth...

   p. 44

10. 

    "Dirty nigger!" Or simply, "Look! A Negro!"

    I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.

    p. 109

11. 

    In the magazines the Wolf, the Devil, the Evil Spirit, the Bad Man, the Savage are always symbolized by Negroes or Indians; sinc there is always identification with the citor, the little negro, quite as easily as the little white boy, becomes an explorer, an adventurer, a missionary " who faces the danger of being eaten by the wicked Negroes."

    p. 146

12. 

    The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation.

    p. 60

13. 

    In no way should my color be regarded as a flaw. From the comment the Negro accepts the separation imposed by the European he has no further respite, and "is it not understandable that thenceforward he will try to elevate himself to the white man's level? to elevate himself in the range of colors to which he attributes a kid of hierarchy.

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

    p. 81

14. 

    The black is a black man;that is, as the result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated.

    p. 8

15. 

    The landing of the white man on Madagascar inflicted injury without measure. The consequences of that irruption of Europeans onto Madagascar were not psychological alone, since, as every authority has observed, there are inner relationships between consciousness and the social context.

    p. 97

16. 

    Why write this book? No one has asked me for it.

    Especially those to whom it is directed.

    Well? Well, I reply quite calmly that there are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.

    p. 7

17. 

    In every society, in every collectivity, exists - a channel, an outlet through which the forces accumulated in the form of aggression.

    p. 144

18. 

    At risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man. There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. In most cases, the black man lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into real hell.

    p. 8

19. 

    To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.

    p. 38

20. 

    By refusing to multiply our element, we take the risk of not setting a limit to our field ; for it is essential to convey to the black man that an attitude of rupture has never saved anyone.

    p. 28

21. 

    The Negro is a toy in the white man's hands; so, in order to shatter the hellish cycle, he explodes.

    p. 140

22. 

    Negrophobes exist. It is not hatred of the Negro, however, that motivates them; they lack the courage for that, or they have lost it. Hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes. Hate demands existence and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behavior; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching. Each to his own side of the street.

    p. 53

23. 

    Every one of my acts commits me as a man. Every one of my silences, every one of my cowardices reveals me as a man.

    p. 89

24. 

    What is there to say? Purely and simply this: When a bachelor of philosophy from Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the ground of his color. I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. Wren one else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men, I say that intelligence has never saved anyone; and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men .

    p. 28

That’s all the quotes.

24 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more