Page 195 - BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK

156 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

Farther on, Jacques Howlett tells us that as a reaction he made
the Negro his symbol of innocence. He tells us the reason why,
but we have to remember that he was no longer eight years old,
for he speaks of “a bad conscience about sexuality” and about
“solipsism.” I am convinced, however, as far as that “innocence
for a grown man” is concerned, that Jacques Howlett has left it
far, far behind him.
Beyond all question the most interesting testimony is presented
by Michel Salomon. Although he defends himself against the
charge, he stinks of racism. He is a Jew, he has a “millennial
experience of anti-Semitism,” and yet he is a racist. Listen to him:
“But to say that the mere fact of his skin, of his hair, of that aura
of sensuality that he [the Negro] gives off, does not spontaneously
give rise to a certain embarrassment, whether of attraction or of
revulsion, is to reject the facts in the name of a ridiculous prudery
that has never solved anything. . . .” Later he goes to the extreme
of telling us about the “prodigious vitality of the black man.”
M. Salomon’s study informs us that he is a physician. He should
be wary of those literary points of view that are unscientifi c.
The Japanese and the Chinese are ten times more prolifi c than
the Negro: Does that make them sensual? And in addition, M.
Salomon, I have a confession to make to you: I have never been
able, without revulsion, to hear a man say of another man: “He
is so sensual!” I do not know what the sensuality of a man is.
Imagine a woman saying of another woman: “She’s so terribly
desirable—she’s darling. . . .” The Negro, M. Salomon, gives off
no aura of sensuality either through his skin or through his hair.
It is just that over a series of long days and long nights the image
of the biological-sexual-sensual-genital-nigger has imposed itself
on you and you do not know how to get free of it. The eye is not
merely a mirror, but a correcting mirror. The eye should make it
possible for us to correct cultural errors. I do not say the eyes, I
say the eye, and there is no mystery about what that eye refers to;
not to the crevice in the skull but to that very uniform light that
wells out of the reds of Van Gogh, that glides through a concerto
of Tchaikovsky, that fastens itself desperately to Schiller’s Ode

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