Different book Excerpt from Black Skin, White Masks
It’s in the name of tradition that the anti-Semites base their “point of view.” It’s in the name of tradition, the long, historical past and the blood ties with Pascal and Descartes, that the Jews are told: you will never belong here. Recently, one of these good French folks declared on a train where I was sitting: “May the truly French values live on and the race will be safeguarded! At the present time we need a national union. No more internal strife! A united front against the foreigners [and turning to me] whoever they may be.”
It should be said in his defense that he stank of cheap red wine. If he could, he would have told me that as a freed slave my blood was incapable of being inflamed by the names of Villon or Taine.
Disgraceful!
The Jew and I: not satisfied with racializing myself, by a happy stroke of fate, I was turning more human. I was drawing closer to the Jew, my brother in misfortune.
Disgraceful!
At first glance it might seem strange that the attitude of the anti-Semite can be equated with that of the negrophobe. It was my philosophy teacher from the Antilles who reminded me one day: “When you hear someone insulting the Jews, pay attention; he is talking about you.” And I believed at the time he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible in my body and soul for the fate reserved for my brother. Since then, I have understood that what he meant quite simply was that the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe. p.121-122
(...)
So here we have the Negro rehabilitated, “standing at the helm,”governing the world with his intuition, rediscovered, reappropriated, in demand, accepted; and it’s not a Negro, oh, no, but the Negro, alerting the prolific antennae of the world, standing in the spotlight of the world, spraying the world with his poetical power, “porous to every breath in the world.” I embrace the world! I am the world! The white man has never understood this magical substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself. He discovers he is the predestined master of the world. He enslaves it. His relationship with the world is one of appropriation. But there are values that can be served only with my sauce. As a magician I stole from the white man a “certain world,” lost to him and his kind. When that happened the white man must have felt an aftershock he was unable to identify, being unused to such reactions. The reason was that above the objective world of plantations and banana and rubber trees, I had subtly established the real world. The essence of the world was my property. Between the world and me there was a relation of coexistence. I had rediscovered the primordial One. My “speaking hands” tore at the hysterical throat of the world. The white man had the uncomfortable feeling that I was slipping away and taking something with me. He searched my pockets, probed the least delineated of my convolutions. There was nothing new. Obviously I must have a secret. They interrogated me; turning away with an air of mystery, I murmured:
Tokowaly, uncle, do you remember the nights gone by
When my head weighed heavy on the back of your patience or
Holding my hand your hand led me by shadows and signs
The fields are flowers of glowworms, stars hang on the grass and the
trees
Silence is everywhere
Only the scents of the bush hum, swarms of reddish bees that drown
the crickets’ shrill sounds,
And muffled drums, the distant breathing of the night,
You Tokowaly, you listen to what cannot be heard, and you explain to
me what the ancestors are saying in the sea-like serenity of the
constellations,
The familiar bull, the scorpion, the leopard, the elephant and the fish,
And the milky brilliance of the Spirits in the shell of celestial infinity,
But here comes the complicity of the goddess Moon and the veils of
the shadows fall,
Night of Africa, my black night, mystical and bright, black and
shining.
So here I was poet of the world. The white man had discovered poetry that had nothing poetic about it. The soul of the white man was corrupted, and as a friend who taught in the United States told me: “The Blacks represent a kind of insurance for humanity in the eyes of the Whites. When the Whites feel they have become too mechanized, they turn to the Coloreds and request a little human sustenance.” At last I had been recognized; I was no longer a nonentity. p.127-129
There is no such objective thing as "the west" because it is a globe and it is relative to where you stand and the cultures which make up the "west" are varied with very different histories and very tangled and difficult to separate throughlines where they do exist, and the defining lines of what is and isn't "the west" get less-and-less clear the more you zoom in or try to look objectively. So when people say "western values," it is all of this and more, in the history and the dialectical relationships of the "western world" with the "other"; in the religious, social, sociological, scientific, cultural, political, military, economic, imperial, colonial, etc. relationships and interactions through history unfolding through reality and living through now. It is through the history and power dynamics and the dialectical relationship toward and coming from these "others" that out of "the west" produced a construct of "west vs east" in which it centers itself as the central pivot point and axiomatically superior, by way of the "other," the "east", the "colonized" the "black/brown/yellow races" or whatever manifestation-angle you're looking at, being as axiomatically as an "inferior" and an "exotic" and altogether an "other" to the historical forces of Europe which became the global dominators.
It is this same kind of socio-political dialectical relationship as "whiteness" to "non-whiteness," (racialization and white supremacy being itself a representation and one of the manifested constructs of this "west vs east" "us vs them,") where it is an elastic and evolving superstructural construct, purely invented but self-organized into a practical reality by the "superior/master" in the relationship dialectic; with many specific relations and implications of its existence and current form, undergirded by the huge webs of material historical realities and dynamics from which they arose; unfolded to now on the lines of these dialectical relationships and their contradictions, between these different parts of the world in their geographies and their people --- ruling classes, militaries, academics, artists, and all that these theorists quoted above said and more. There is no real biological bases for "white" vs "black" races. Just like there is no objective "white" values vs "black" values, because even within those classifications as we know them today there are many diverse groups with many diverse cultures and histories and material conditions. "white values" and "black values" only exist as they were self-organized and self-reinforced within and out of the wider material systems of interaction, power and exploitation, colonialism and slavery, imperialism and violence, which gave rise to and perpetuated the itself-materially-baseless constructs of racialization and racial categorization, which itself gives rise to and perpetuates as "values" certain outcomes and perspectives generated in the dialectical interactions and struggles in this inhrently antagonistic relationship between the 'us' and the 'them', the master and the slave, the colonizer and the colonized, etc; which then are carried and evolved through the superstructural mechanisms of culture, art, science and academia and historiography, etc. to cyclically reinforce the base and cycle back through this process as a living evolving social phenomenon
Also see this: https://hexbear.net/comment/5474294
Different book Excerpt from Black Skin, White Masks
There is no such objective thing as "the west" because it is a globe and it is relative to where you stand and the cultures which make up the "west" are varied with very different histories and very tangled and difficult to separate throughlines where they do exist, and the defining lines of what is and isn't "the west" get less-and-less clear the more you zoom in or try to look objectively. So when people say "western values," it is all of this and more, in the history and the dialectical relationships of the "western world" with the "other"; in the religious, social, sociological, scientific, cultural, political, military, economic, imperial, colonial, etc. relationships and interactions through history unfolding through reality and living through now. It is through the history and power dynamics and the dialectical relationship toward and coming from these "others" that out of "the west" produced a construct of "west vs east" in which it centers itself as the central pivot point and axiomatically superior, by way of the "other," the "east", the "colonized" the "black/brown/yellow races" or whatever manifestation-angle you're looking at, being as axiomatically as an "inferior" and an "exotic" and altogether an "other" to the historical forces of Europe which became the global dominators.
It is this same kind of socio-political dialectical relationship as "whiteness" to "non-whiteness," (racialization and white supremacy being itself a representation and one of the manifested constructs of this "west vs east" "us vs them,") where it is an elastic and evolving superstructural construct, purely invented but self-organized into a practical reality by the "superior/master" in the relationship dialectic; with many specific relations and implications of its existence and current form, undergirded by the huge webs of material historical realities and dynamics from which they arose; unfolded to now on the lines of these dialectical relationships and their contradictions, between these different parts of the world in their geographies and their people --- ruling classes, militaries, academics, artists, and all that these theorists quoted above said and more. There is no real biological bases for "white" vs "black" races. Just like there is no objective "white" values vs "black" values, because even within those classifications as we know them today there are many diverse groups with many diverse cultures and histories and material conditions. "white values" and "black values" only exist as they were self-organized and self-reinforced within and out of the wider material systems of interaction, power and exploitation, colonialism and slavery, imperialism and violence, which gave rise to and perpetuated the itself-materially-baseless constructs of racialization and racial categorization, which itself gives rise to and perpetuates as "values" certain outcomes and perspectives generated in the dialectical interactions and struggles in this inhrently antagonistic relationship between the 'us' and the 'them', the master and the slave, the colonizer and the colonized, etc; which then are carried and evolved through the superstructural mechanisms of culture, art, science and academia and historiography, etc. to cyclically reinforce the base and cycle back through this process as a living evolving social phenomenon
Also see this: https://hexbear.net/comment/5474294