Nick Perzacki’s Reviews > Black Skin, White Masks > Status Update

“The black problem is not just about Blacks living among Whites, but about the black man exploited, enslaved, and despised by a colonialist and capitalist society that happens to be white… What’s all this about black people and a black nationalism? I am French… I take personal interest in the destiny of France, the French nation, and its values. What am I supposed to do with a black empire?”

There is shockingly more Freud in this book than i initially expected - Oedipus is everywhere!

The next chunk of the chapter is all about the irrational sexual basis for phobia of black people, most notably black men. Uses anti-semitism, which is founded on Jewish proportional representation in economics, as a point of comparison, to demonstrate how the two phobias overlap and differ. As one might expect, there are some absolutely wild passages in this section.

Unfortunately, I’m no smarter when it comes to Freudian psychoanalysis than I am regarding post-war French and French-colonial literature. But basically chapter 6 starts with him discussing how and why the psychology of white and black people is fundamentally different, largely tying it back to the family dynamic and its relationship to broader society.

I feel like I need to read five different books and then come back to this one with all the context he seems to assume I have. Because damn, I am just really struggling to keep up with his train of thought as he bounces around in the way that he does between himself and those he’s discussing.

I guess I spoke too soon about chapter 5, because the immediate next 10 pages are a constant jumping between a long poem describing the coming into existence & ongoing experience of blackness, and his interjecting points & occasional sarcasm. So once again, my dumb ass is having a hard time keeping track of where he’s making a point, someone else is making a point, he’s criticizing someone or building on them.

Chapter 5, on the lived experience of the black man, has easily been the most engaging chapter so far. While the previous few chapters were centered on his critique of some contemporary literary works, this feels like a deeply personal way to describe the historical process of the subjugation of black people.

A bit more Marxism seems to be creeping in - Quote from Pierre Naville: “To speak of society’s dreams as one speaks of an individual’s dreams… is once again to reverse the natural order of things, since, on the contrary, it is the economic and social conditions of the class struggle that explain and determine the actual conditions [on] which… the contents of an individual’s dreams depends.”

The fourth chapter is focused on dispelling the myth of inherent dependency or insubordination of colonized people (and, in general, “inferiorized” people) - it is not something inherent to these groups, but something imposed on them (feels obvious in modern context, but it’s much more extensive in-book and was written in the ‘50s). Sartre - “It is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew.”

“Jean Veneuse is a neurotic, and his color is but an explanation of his psychic structure. If this objective difference had not existed, he would have fabricated itself from scratch.”
“From the moment the black man accepts the split imposed by the Europeans, there is no longer any respite… We shall see that another solution is possible. It implies restructuring the world.”