Face to face with the white man, the Negro has a past to legitimate, a vengeance
to extract. . . . In no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly
unrecognized Negro civilization. I will not make myself a man of the past. . . .
I am not a prisoner of history . . . it is only by going beyond the historical,
instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate the cycle of my freedom. (Fanon
2008)
Treated by the whites as a non-existent group, the blacks have always been segregated
from the society, and the addition of racism has brought more inflictions to their lives.
Fanon (2008) talks about the black man who faces an “unfamiliar weight” each and
every moment and is always fenced by “certain uncertainty.” According to Foucault
(2002), the psyche is trained and tries to “grasp subjection in its material instance as a
constitution of subjects,” which again shows the pitiful condition of the blacks. Fanon
(2008) explains how he was himself “subjected” to an “objective examination” and discovered “my blackness, my ethnic characteristics” and how “I was battered down by
tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency. . . .” Hooks (2000b) states that power
should not be utilized to dominate others; rather, it must be “redefined” and transformed
as a means to end oppression. During the twentieth century, a black person was not even
permitted to light up a cigarette in front of a white man, and if the black person smoked,
he needed to lean back a bit—which was not out of habit, but one was taught in that
manner, implying that “power is not simply what we depend on for our existence but that
which forms reflectivity as well” (Butler 1997).
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