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

Encountering opposition from the other, self-consciousness experiences desire, the first stage that leads to the dignity of the mind. It agrees to risk life, and consequently threatens the other in his physical being. “It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence,

I try to read admiration in the eyes of the other, and if, as luck would have it, the other sends back an unpleasant reflection, I run the mirror down: the other is a real idiot. I have no intention of revealing my nakedness when confronted with the object. The object is denied its individuality and liberty. The object is an instrument. Its role is to allow me to achieve my subjective security.

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—

From time to time you feel like giving up. Expressing the real is an arduous job. But when you take it into your head to express existence, you will very likely encounter nothing but the nonexistent.
I was made to give and they prescribe for me the humility of the cripple. When I opened my eyes yesterday I saw the sky in total revulsion.

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.