Page 187 - BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK

148 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

Negro is almost always a white woman. In the same way, the
animus of the Antilleans is always a white man. That is because
in the works of Anatole France, Balzac, Bazin, or any of the rest
of “our” novelists, there is never a word about an ethereal yet
ever present black woman or about a dark Apollo with sparkling
eyes. . . . But I too am guilty, here I am talking of Apollo! There
is no help for it: I am a white man. For unconsciously I distrust
what is black in me, that is, the whole of my being.
I am a Negro—but of course I do not know it, simply because
I am one. When I am at home my mother sings me French love
songs in which there is never a word about Negroes. When I
disobey, when I make too much noise, I am told to “stop acting
like a nigger.”
Somewhat later I read white books and little by little I take
into myself the prejudices, the myths, the folklore that have
come to me from Europe. But I will not accept them all, since
certain prejudices do not apply in the Antilles. Anti-Semitism, for
instance, does not exist there, for there are no Jews, or virtually
none. Without turning to the idea of collective catharsis, it would
be easy for me to show that, without thinking, the Negro selects
himself as an object capable of carrying the burden of original sin.
The white man chooses the black man for this function, and the
black man who is white also chooses the black man. The black
Antillean is the slave of this cultural imposition. After having
been the slave of the white man, he enslaves himself. The Negro
is in every sense of the word a victim of white civilization. It is
not surprising that the artistic creations of Antillean poets bear
no special watermark: These men are white. To come back to
psychopathology, let us say that the Negro lives an ambiguity
that is extraordinarily neurotic. At the age of twenty—at the
time, that is, when the collective unconscious has been more or
less lost, or is resistant at least to being raised to the conscious
level—the Antillean recognizes that he is living an error. Why
is that? Quite simply because—and this is very important—the
Antillean has recognized himself as a Negro, but, by virtue of an
ethical transit, he also feels (collective unconscious) that one is a
Negro to the degree to which one is wicked, sloppy, malicious,

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