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126 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

with his posterity; when one sterilizes a Jew, one cuts off the
source; every time that a Jew is persecuted, it is the whole race
that is persecuted in his person. But it is in his corporeality that
the Negro is attacked. It is as a concrete personality that he is
lynched. It is as an actual being that he is a threat. The Jewish
menace is replaced by the fear of the sexual potency of the Negro.
O. Mannoni said:

An argument widely used by racialists against those who do not share their
convictions is worthy of mention for its revealing character. “What,” they
say, “if you had a daughter, do you mean to say that you would marry her to
a negro?” I have seen people who appeared to have no racialist bias lose all
critical sense when confronted with this kind of question. The reason is that
such an argument disturbs certain uneasy feelings in them (more exactly,
incestuous feelings) and they turn to racialism as a defence reaction. 26

It is in white terms that one perceives one’s fellows. People will say of someone,
for instance, that he is “very black”; there is nothing surprising, within a family,
in hearing a mother remark that “X is the blackest of my children”—it means that
X is the least white. I can only repeat the observation of a European acquaintance
to whom I had explained this: in terms of people, it is nothing but a mystifi cation.
Let me point out once more that every Antillean expects all the others to perceive
him in terms of the essence of the white man. In the Antilles, just as in France,
one comes up against the same myth; a Parisian says, “He is black but he is very
intelligent”; a Martinican expresses himself no differently. During the Second World
War, teachers went from Guadeloupe to Fort-de-France to correct the examinations
of candidates for the baccalaureate, and, driven by curiosity, I went to the hotel
where they were staying, simply in order to see Monsieur B., a philosophy teacher
who was supposed to be remarkably black; as the Martinicans say, not without a
certain irony, he was “blue.” One family in particular has an excellent reputation:
“They’re very black, but they’re all quite nice.” One of them, in fact, is a piano
teacher and a former student at the Conservatoire in Paris, another is a teacher
of natural science in the girls’ academy, etc. The father was given to walking up
and down his balcony every evening at sunset; after a certain time of night, it was
always said, he became invisible. Of another family, who lived in the country, it
was said that on nights when there was a power failure the children had to laugh
so that their parents would know that they were there. On Mondays, very carefully
got up in their white linen suits, certain Martinican offi cials, in the local fi gure of
speech, “looked like prunes in a bowl of milk.”
a. Hallucinations of animals. (Translator’s note.)
b. The vivid psychological awareness and examination of one’s own internal
organs as if they were outside oneself—an extreme hypochondria. (Translator’s
note.)
c. See note 52.
26. [Dominique] O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization
(New York, Praeger, 1964), p. 111, note 1.

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