20 quotes
In no way should my color be regarded as a flaw.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
In every society, in every collectivity, exists - a channel, an outlet through which the forces accumulated in the form of aggression.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
The Negro is a toy in the white man's hands; so, in order to shatter the hellish cycle, he explodes.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
What is South Africa? A boiler into which thirteen million blacks are clubbed and penned in by two and a half million whites.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
Yes, European civilization and its best representatives are responsible for colonial racism.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
Every one of my acts commits me as a man. Every one of my silences, every one of my cowardices reveals me as a man.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
The black man wants to be white. The white man slaves to reach a human level.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
The black is a black man;that is, as the result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
By refusing to multiply our element, we take the risk of not setting a limit to our field ; for it is essential to convey to the black man that an attitude of rupture has never saved anyone.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
I said just above that South Africa has a racist structure. Now I shall go farther and say that Europe has a racist structure.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
All forms of exploitation resemble one another. They all seek the source of their necessity in some edict of a Biblical nature. All forms of exploitation are identical because all of them are applied against the same "object": man.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
Hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes. Hate demands existence and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behavior; in a sense, he has to become hate.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. In most cases, the black man lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into real hell.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
The landing of the white man on Madagascar inflicted injury without measure. The consequences of that irruption of Europeans onto Madagascar were not psychological alone, since, as every authority has observed, there are inner relationships between consciousness and the social context.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
"Dirty nigger!" Or simply, "Look! A Negro!"
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.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
In the magazines the Wolf, the Devil, the Evil Spirit, the Bad Man, the Savage are always symbolized by Negroes or Indians; sinc there is always identification with the citor, the little negro, quite as easily as the little white boy, becomes an explorer, an adventurer, a missionary " who faces the danger of being eaten by the wicked Negroes."
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
A white man addressing a Negro behaves exactly like an adult with a child and starts smirking, whispering, patronizing, cozening. It is not one white man I have watched, but hundreds; and I have not limited my investigation to any one class but, if I may claim an essentially objective position, I have made a point of observing such behavior in physician, policemen, employers.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)