Black Skin, White Masks Quotes
"To speak is to exist absolutely for the other."
"The black man possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites."
"It’s no longer a question of knowing the world, but of transforming it."
"To speak means being able to use a certain syntax and possessing the morphology of such and such a language, but it means above all assuming a culture and bearing the weight of a civilization."
"The more the black Antillean assimilates the French language, the whiter he gets—i.e., the closer he comes to becoming a true human being."
"A man who possesses a language possesses as an indirect consequence the world expressed and implied by this language."
"There is an extraordinary power in the possession of a language."
"All colonized people position themselves in relation to the civilizing language: i.e., the metropolitan culture."
"The black man who has been to the métropole is a demigod."
"The more the colonized has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis, the more he will have escaped the bush."
"There is not in the world one single poor lynched bastard, one poor tortured man, in whom I am not also murdered and humiliated." - Aimé Césaire
"I am a prisoner of the vicious circle." - Frantz Fanon
"Negrophilism and philanthropy are insults in South Africa… The agenda is to separate the natives from the Europeans, territorially, economically, and politically." - Frantz Fanon
"Every one of my acts commits me as a man. Every instance of my reticence, every instance of my cowardice, manifests the man." - Frantz Fanon
"They know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to stretch out my right arm and grab the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table." - Frantz Fanon
"For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man." - Frantz Fanon
"I refuse to accept this amputation. I feel my soul as vast as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers." - Frantz Fanon
"I had to choose. What am I saying? I had no choice." - Frantz Fanon
"I am a nigger, I am a nigger, I am a nigger." - Frantz Fanon
"The Negro: I can’t shoot white folks." - Frantz Fanon
"The family structure is internalized in the superego and projected into political behavior." - Marcus (as quoted by Frantz Fanon)
"As long as the black child remains on his home ground his life follows more or less the same course as that of the white child."
"The truth is that he is made to feel inferior."
"The black man realizes that many of the assertions he had adopted regarding the subjective attitude of the white man are unreal."
"The black man’s superiority or inferiority complex and his feeling of equality are conscious."
"Whenever we have read a work on psychoanalysis, discussed the matter with our professors, or conversed about it with European patients, we have been struck by the incongruity between the corresponding schemata and the reality presented by the black man."
"The black man is a 'phobogenic' object, provoking anxiety."
"Whether you like it or not the Oedipus complex is far from being a black complex."
"A European familiar with the current trends in black poetry would be amazed to learn that as late as 1940 no Antillean was capable of thinking of himself as black."
"Whenever we had discussions with our professors or conversed with European patients, the possible differences between the two worlds became clear to us."
"The behavior of these women is clearly understandable from the standpoint of imagination because a negrophobic woman is in reality merely a presumed sexual partner—just as the negro-phobic man is a repressed homosexual."
"The black man represents the biological danger; the Jew, the intellectual danger."
"To have a phobia about black men is to be afraid of the biological, for the black man is nothing but biological."
"The government and the civil service are overrun by Jews."
"For the Negro has a hallucinating sexual power."
"All the negrophobic women we met had abnormal sexual lives."
"The black man is attacked in his corporeality."
"The black man is something else. Here again, our paths cross with the Jew."
"The black man more so, for the good reason that he is black."
"Seeing only one type of black man and equating anti-Semitism with negrophobia seem to be the errors of analysis committed in these arguments."
"The black man aims for the universal, but on-screen his black essence, his black 'nature' is kept intact."
"The black man is universalizing himself, but at the lycée Saint-Louis in Paris, they threw one out: had the cheek to read Engels."
"There is a problem here, and black intellectuals risk getting caught in it."
"The black man has penetrated the culture of certain countries."
"The black man creates stories where he has a possibility of exerting his aggressiveness."
"In the United States the black man represents the (uneducated) sexual instinct."
"For the majority of Whites the black man represents the (uneducated) sexual instinct."
"He embodies genital power out of reach of morals and taboos."
"The black man is genital. Is this the whole story?"
"He is the specialist in the matter: whoever says rape says black man."
"We managed to create a certain trust, a relaxed air in which our subjects would not be afraid to confide in us or were convinced they would not offend us."
"The black man is, in every sense of the word, a victim of white civilization."
"The black man lives an ambiguity that is extraordinarily neurotic."
"The Martinican is a neurotic, and then he is not."
"The Antillean comparison is topped by a third term: its governing fiction is not personal but social."
"The black man endeavors to protest against the inferiority he feels historically."
"The black man is comparaison in the sense that he is constantly pre-occupied with self-assertion and the ego ideal."
"The black man is a neurotic society, a comparaison society."
"The black man compares himself not to the white man, the father, the boss, God, but to his own counterpart under the patronage of the white man."
"Only conflict and the risk it implies can, therefore, make human reality, in-itself-for-itself, come true."
"I ask that I be taken into consideration on the basis of my desire."
"He who is reluctant to recognize me is against me."
"The other, however, can recognize me without a struggle."
"Out of slavery the black man burst into the lists where his masters stood."
"The black man is a slave who was allowed to assume a master’s attitude."
"The white man is a master who allowed his slaves to eat at his table."
"One day, a good white master, who exercised a lot of influence, said to his friends: 'Let’s be kind to the niggers.'"
"The black man did not become a master. When there are no more slaves, there are no masters."
"The upheaval reached the black man from the outside."
"The black man wants his humanity to be challenged; he is looking for a fight; he wants a brawl."
"The former slave wants his humanity to be challenged; he is looking for a fight; he wants a brawl."
"The black man wants to be like the white man. For the black man, there is but one destiny. And it is white."
"I do not want to be the victim of the Ruse of a black world."
"I must not look for the meaning of my destiny in that direction."
"The misfortune of the man of color is having been enslaved."
"The black man is not. No more than the white man."
"Before embarking on a positive voice, freedom needs to make an effort at disalienation."
"Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?"
"O my body, always make me a man who questions!"