Page 175 - BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK

136 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

Remus), of white men strangled by black men (Native Son, If He Hollers Let
Him Go, Uncle Remus). . . . We can package the Negro’s grin and market it
on a grand scale in our popular culture as a cloak for this masochism: The
caress sweetens the blow. And, as Uncle Remus shows, here the interplay
of the races is in large part unconscious. The white man is no more aware
of his masochism when he is being titillated by the subtle content of the
stereotyped grin than the Negro is aware of his sadism when he transforms
the stereotype into a cultural bludgeon. Perhaps less. 37
In the United States, as we can see, the Negro makes stories
in which it becomes possible for him to work off his aggression;
the white man’s unconscious justifi es this aggression and gives
it worth by turning it on himself, thus reproducing the classic
schema of masochism. 38
We can now stake out a marker. For the majority of white
men the Negro represents the sexual instinct (in its raw state).
The Negro is the incarnation of a genital potency beyond all
moralities and prohibitions. The women among the whites, by a
genuine process of induction, invariably view the Negro as the
keeper of the impalpable gate that opens into the realm of orgies,
of bacchanals, of delirious sexual sensations. . . . We have shown
that reality destroys all these beliefs. But they all rest on the level
of the imagined, in any case on that of a paralogism. The white
man who ascribes a malefi c infl uence to the black is regressing on
the intellectual level, since, as we have shown, his perception is
based on a mental age of eight years (the comic books). Is there
not a concurrent regression to and fi xation at pregenital levels
of sexual development? Self-castration? (The Negro is taken as
a terrifying penis.) Passivity justifying itself by the recognition of
the superiority of the black man in terms of sexual capacity? It

37. Bernard Wolfe, “L’oncle Rémus et son lapin,” Les Temps Modernes, May, 1949,
pp. 898 ff.
38. It is usual to be told in the United States, when one calls for the real freedom of the
Negro: “That’s all they’re waiting for, to jump our women.” Since the white man
behaves in an offensive manner toward the Negro, he recognizes that in the Negro’s
place he would have no mercy on his oppressors. Therefore it is not surprising to see
that he identifi es himself with the Negro: white “hot-jazz” orchestras, white blues
and spiritual singers, white authors writing novels in which the Negro proclaims
his grievances, whites in blackface.

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