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122 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

The government and the civil service are at the mercy of the
Jews.
Our women are at the mercy of the Negroes.
For the sexual potency of the Negro is hallucinating. That
is indeed the word: This potency must be hallucinating.
Psychoanalysts who study the problem soon enough fi nd the
mechanisms of every neurosis. Sexual anxiety is predominant
here. All the Negrophobic women I have known had abnormal
sex lives. Their husbands had left them; or they were widows
and they were afraid to fi nd a substitute for the dead husband; or
they were divorced and they had doubts at the thought of a new
object investment. All of them endowed the Negro with powers
that other men (husbands, transient lovers) did not have. And
besides there was also an element of perversion, the persistence
of infantile formations: God knows how they make love! It must
be terrifying. 23
There is one expression that through time has become singularly
eroticized: the black athlete. There is something in the mere idea,
one young woman confi ded to me, that makes the heart skip a
beat. A prostitute told me that in her early days the mere thought
of going to bed with a Negro brought on an orgasm. She went
in search of Negroes and never asked them for money. But, she
added, “going to bed with them was no more remarkable than
going to bed with white men. It was before I did it that I had the
orgasm. I used to think about (imagine) all the things they might
do to me: and that was what was so terrifi c.”
Still on the genital level, when a white man hates black men, is
he not yielding to a feeling of impotence or of sexual inferiority?
23. In the work of Joachim Marcus we encounter the view according to which the
social neurosis—or, if one prefers, abnormal behavior in contact with The Other,
whoever he may be—is closely related to the individual situation:
The study of our questionnaires showed that the most strongly anti-Semitic
persons belonged to the most confl ictual family structures. Their anti-Semitism
was a reaction to frustrations suffered inside the family environment. What
demonstrates that the Jew is a substitutive object in anti-Semitism is the fact
that, depending on local conditions, the same family situations will produce
hatred of Negroes, anti-Catholicism, or anti-Semitism. One can therefore state
that, contrary to what is generally believed, it is the attitude that seeks the
content rather than the content that creates the attitude. (“Structure familiale et
comportements politiques,” op. cit., p. 282.)

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