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66 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

brother. 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. 9
I feel that I can still hear Césaire:
When I turn on my radio, when I hear that Negroes have been lynched in
America, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when I turn on
my radio, when I learn that Jews have been insulted, mistreated, persecuted,
I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when, fi nally, I turn on
my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has been inaugurated and
legalized, I say that we have certainly been lied to: Hitler is not dead. 10
Yes, European civilization and its best representatives are
11
responsible for colonial racism ; and I come back once more
to Césaire:

9. When I wrote this I had in mind Jaspers’ concept of metaphysical guilt:
There exists among men, because they are men, a solidarity through which
each shares responsibility for every injustice and every wrong committed in the
world, and especially for crimes that-are committed in his presence or of which
he cannot be ignorant. If I do not do whatever I can to prevent them, I am an
accomplice in them. If I have not risked my life in order to prevent the murder
of other men, if I have stood silent, I feel guilty in a sense that cannot in any
adequate fashion be understood juridically, or politically, or morally. . . . That
I am still alive after such things have been done weighs on me as a guilt that
cannot be expiated.
Somewhere in the heart of human relations an absolute command imposes
itself: In case of criminal attack or of living conditions that threaten physical
being, accept life only for all together, otherwise not at all. (Karl Jaspers, La
culpabilité allemande, Jeanne Hersch’s French translation, pp. 60–61.)
Jaspers declares that this obligation stems from God. It is easy to see that God
has no business here. Unless one chooses not to state the obligation as the explicit
human reality of feeling oneself responsible for one’s fellow man. Responsible in the
sense that the least of my actions involves all mankind. Every action is an answer
or a question. Perhaps both. When I express a specifi c manner in which my being
can rise above itself, I am affi rming the worth of my action for others. Conversely,
the passivity that is to be seen in troubled periods of history is to be interpreted as
a default on that obligation. Jung, in Aspects du drame contemporain, says that,
confronted by an Asiatic or a Hindu, every European has equally to answer for
the crimes perpetrated by Nazi savagery. Another writer, Mme. Maryse Choisy,
in L’Anneau de Polycrate, was able to describe the guilt of those who remained
“neutral” during the occupation of France. In a confused way they felt that they
were responsible for all the deaths and all the Buchenwalds.
10. Quoted from memory—Discours politiques of the election campaign of 1945,
Fort-de-France.
11. “European civilization and its best representatives are not, for instance, responsible
for colonial racialism; that is the work of petty offi cials, small traders, and colonials
who have toiled much without great success” (Mannoni, p. 24).

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