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114 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

these fundamental repressions, every attack aimed at such simple escape
devices as comic books will remain futile. 8

The black schoolboy in the Antilles, who in his lessons is forever
talking about “our ancestors, the Gauls,” identifi es himself with
9
the explorer, the bringer of civilization, the white man who carries
truth to savages—an all-white truth. There is identifi cation—that
is, the young Negro subjectively adopts a white man’s attitude. He
invests the hero, who is white, with all his own aggression—at that
age closely linked to sacrifi cial dedication, a sacrifi cial dedication
permeated with sadism. An eight-year-old child who offers a gift,
even to an adult, cannot endure a refusal. Little by little, one can
observe in the young Antillean the formation and crystallization
of an attitude and a way of thinking and seeing that are essentially
white. When in school he has to read stories of savages told by
white men, he always thinks of the Senegalese. As a schoolboy,
I had many occasions to spend whole hours talking about the
supposed customs of the savage Senegalese. In what was said there
was a lack of awareness that was at the very least paradoxical.
Because the Antillean does not think of himself as a black man;
he thinks of himself as an Antillean. The Negro lives in Africa.
Subjectively, intellectually, the Antillean conducts himself like a
white man. But he is a Negro. That he will learn once he goes to
Europe; and when he hears Negroes mentioned he will recognize
that the word includes himself as well as the Senegalese. What
are we to conclude on this matter?
To impose the same “Evil Spirits” on the white man and on
the black man is a major error in education. If one is willing
to understand the “Evil Spirit” in the sense of an attempt to
personify the id, the point of view will be understood. If we are
utterly honest, we must say that children’s counting-out rhymes
are subject to the same criticism. It will have already been noticed

8. G. Legman, “Psychopathologie des Comics,” French translation by H. Robillot,
Les Temps Modernes, May, 1949, pp. 919 ff.
9. One always sees a smile when one reports this aspect of education in Martinique.
The smile comes because the comicality of the thing is obvious, but no one pursues
it to its later consequences. Yet these are the important aspects, because three or
four such phrases are the basis on which the young Antillean works out his view
of the world.

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