Page 89 - BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK

50 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

as you shout at him: “I love her. She loves me. We love each other. She must
marry me. Otherwise I will kill myself here and now.” 9

When the question is put directly, then, the white man agrees
to give his sister to the black—but on one condition: You have
nothing in common with real Negroes. You are not black, you
are “extremely brown.”
This procedure is quite familiar to colored students in France.
Society refuses to consider them genuine Negroes. The Negro is a
savage, whereas the student is civilized. “You’re ‘us,’” Coulanges
tells him; and if anyone thinks you are a Negro he is mistaken,
because you merely look like one. But Jean Veneuse does not want
this. He cannot accept it, because he knows.
He knows that, “enraged by this degrading ostracism, mulattoes
and Negroes have only one thought from the moment they land
in Europe: to gratify their appetite for white women.”

The majority of them, including those of lighter skin who often go to the
extreme of denying both their countries and their mothers, tend to marry in
Europe not so much out of love as for the satisfaction of being the master of
a European woman; and a certain tang of proud revenge enters into this.
And so I wonder whether in my case there is any difference from theirs;
whether, by marrying you, who are a European, I may not appear to be
making a show of contempt for the women of my own race and, above
all, to be drawn on by desire for that white fl esh that has been forbidden
to us Negroes as long as white men have ruled the world, so that without
my knowledge I am attempting to revenge myself on a European woman
for everything that her ancestors have inflicted on mine throughout
the centuries. 10
What a struggle to free himself of a purely subjective confl ict.
I am a white man, I was born in Europe, all my friends are
white. There are not eight Negroes in the city where I live. I
think in French, France is my religion. I am a European, do you
understand? I am not a Negro, and in order to prove it to you, I
as a public employe am going to show the genuine Negroes the

9. Ibid., pp. 152–154.
10. Ibid., p. 185.

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