Colonial assimilation policy aimed to remake Africans into black-skinned Frenchmen

Evidence

I used the term first, that’s true. But it’s possible we talked about it in our group. It was really a resistance to the politics of assimilation. Until that time, until my generation, the French and the English but especially the French-had followed the politics of assimilation unrestrainedly. We didn’t know what Africa was. Europeans despised everything about Africa, and in France people spoke of a civilized world and a barbarian world. The barbarian world was Africa, and the civilized world was Europe. Therefore the best thing one could do with an African was to assimilate him: the ideal was to turn him into a Frenchman with black skin. — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 327

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the politics of assimilation that Negritude was a resistance to — a core concept in the colonial-psychology toolkit.
• XREF: Directly anticipates the Islamophobia readings’ treatment of assimilationist ideology and the construction of the colonized subject; connects to Orientalism’s binary of civilized/barbarian world. — connects to: Early colonial education policy explicitly barred Africans from becoming French citizens; Colonial liberal assimilation differed fundamentally from later racialized exclusion — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 63; French officials shifted naturalization policy toward racial separation in the 1920s (+3 more)
• SEED: The civilized/barbarian binary as the foundational justification for assimilation offers a clean throughline for an essay on how ‘the West must civilize’ logic persists in Islamophobia discourse.

Related

• French officials shifted naturalization policy toward racial separation in the 1920s (similarity 0.82)
• Postwar French colonial policy shifted toward racial separation and away from assimilation (similarity 0.80)
• French colonial policy aimed to assimilate colonial peoples into French identity (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial parents send children abroad to be made into Frenchmen (similarity 0.79)
• Racist and sociological academic trends converged in rejecting African assimilation (similarity 0.79)
• French colonial justice policy tried to stop Islam’s spread by grouping Africans by ethnicity (similarity 0.78)
• French officials condemned educated Africans as unruly products of assimilation (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial liberal assimilation differed fundamentally from later racialized exclusion #complicates (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 63
• Early colonial education policy explicitly barred Africans from becoming French citizens #qualifies (0.82)
• Colonial parents send children abroad to be made into Frenchmen #expands (0.80) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 273
• French officials shifted naturalization policy toward racial separation in the 1920s #complicates (0.78)
• White Frenchmen denied black men any share in their cultural tradition #contradicts (0.75) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 441