Fariha’s Reviews > Black Skin, White Masks > Status Update

The question remains whether this maniacal obsession with violence and death is the substitute for a repressed sexuality or whether its function is rather to channel along the path left open by sexual repression both the child’s and the adult’s desire to aggress against the economic and social structure that with their free consent corrupts them.

With only very rare exceptions, the average American child who was six in 1938 has now seen at least eighteen thousand scenes of violent torture and bloody violence. The Americans are the only modern nation, except for the Boers, in living memory who have totally eliminated the native population from the territory where they have settled.

If we want an honest answer, we have to call on the notion of collective catharsis. In every society, in every community, there exists, must exist, a channel, an outlet whereby the energy accumulated in the form of aggressiveness can be released. This is the purpose of games in children’s institutions, of psychodramas in group therapy, and more generally speaking, of the weekly comics for the young—

The dialectic that introduces necessity as a support for my freedom expels me from myself. It shatters my impulsive position. I am not a potentiality of something; I am fully what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. There’s no room for probability inside me. My black consciousness does not claim to be a loss. It is. It merges with itself.

...You have to be tough to be able to live. It is no longer enough to play ball with the world; you have to master it with integrals and atoms. Of course, they will tell me, from time to time when we are tired of all that concrete, we will turn to you as our children, our naive, ingenuous, and spontaneous children. We will turn to you as the childhood of the world. You are so authentic in your life, so playful.

Militarization and the centralization of authority in a country automatically entail a resurgence of the authority of the father. In Europe and in every country characterized as civilized or civilizing, the family is a miniature of the nation. As the child emerges from the shadow of his parents, he finds himself once more among the same laws, the same principles, the same values.

I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.
Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing,

Rejection of that world is combined with an urge to dominate, an urge which is infantile in origin and which social adaptation has failed to discipline. The reason the colonial himself gives for his flight–whether he says it was the desire to travel, or the desire to escape from the cradle or from the “ancient parapets,” or whether he says that he simply wanted a freer life–is of no consequence. . . .

What must be done is to restore this dream to its proper time, and this time is the period during which eighty thousand natives were killed–that is to say, one of every fifty persons in the population; and to its proper place, and this place is an island of four million people, at the center of which no real relationship can be established, where dissension breaks out in every direction,