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THE NEGRO AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY 155

and imperceptibly into that attitude of ethnographic investigator
that is still too often our unbearable manner of putting them in
their place. . . .”
In the same issue of Présence Africaine, Émile Dermenghem, who
cannot be accused of Negrophobia, said: “One of my childhood
memories is of a visit to the World’s Fair of 1900, during which
my chief enthusiasm was to see a Negro. My imagination had
naturally been stimulated by my reading: Capitaine de quinze
ans (A Captain at Fifteen), Les Aventures de Robert (Robert’s
Adventures), Les Voyages de Livingstone (Livingstone’s Travels).”
Dermenghem tells us that this was the manifestation of his taste
for the exotic. While I may be prepared to put my two hands
into his and believe the Dermenghem who wrote the article, I
ask his permission to entertain doubts about the Dermenghem
of the 1900 Fair.
I should be annoyed with myself if I were simply picking up old
subjects that had been worked dry for fi fty years. To write about
the chances for Negro friendship is an unselfi sh undertaking, but
unfortunately the Negro-phobes and the other princes consort
are impregnable to unselfi shness. When we read, “The Negro is
a savage, and to lead savages there is only one method: a kick in
the butt,” we sit at our desks and we like to think that “all such
idiocies will have to die out.” But everyone is in agreement on
that. To quote Présence Africaine (No. 5) again, Jacques Howlett
wrote there:
Two things, furthermore, it seems, contributed to the aversion toward
the Negro in the world of the other, which are impossible for me to
comprehend: the color of his skin and his nakedness, for I pictured the
Negro naked. Certainly, superfi cial factors (although one cannot be sure
to what extent they continue to haunt our new ideas and our altered
conceptions) could sometimes mask that remote black and naked being,
almost nonexistent; such as the nice Negro with the red army tarboosh and
the infi nite Fernandel-like grin, the symbol of some chocolate confection;
or the brave Senegalese pioupiou, “a slave to his orders,” a Don Quixote
without glory, “a good-fellow hero” with all that stems from the “epic of
empire”; or the Negro “waiting for salvation,” the “submissive child” of a
bearded missionary.

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