Jamal Awil

← Black skin, white masks

Black women’s aesthetic judgment is racially biased. [fact]

The educated mulatto woman, especially if she is a student, engages in doubly equivocal behavior. She says, "I do not like the Negro because he is savage. Not savage in a cannibal way, but lacking refinement." An abstract point of view. And when one points out to her that in this respect some black people may be her superiors, she falls back on their "ugliness." A factitious point of view. Faced with the proofs of a genuine black esthetic, she professes to be unable to understand it; one tries then to explain its canon to her; the wings of her nose flare, there is a sharp intake of breath, "she is free to choose her own husband." As a last resort, the appeal to subjectivity.

Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, loc. 209