Colonial desire inverts cause and effect, making whiteness the true object of love

Evidence

Mayotte loves a white man to whom she submits in everything. He is her lord. She asks nothing, demands nothing, except a bit of whiteness in her life. When she tries to determine in her own mind whether the man is handsome or ugly, she writes, “All I know is that he had blue eyes, blond hair, and a light skin, and that I loved him.” It is not difficult to see that a rearrangement of these elements in their proper hierarchy would produce something of this order: “I loved him because he had blue eyes, blond hair, and a light skin.” We who come from the Antilles know one thing only too well: Blue eyes, the people say, frighten the Negro. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 160 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonized people become psychologically whiter as they adopt the mother country’s culture; The Negro’s whiteness-seeking stems from overcompensation for racial inferiority; Dreaming oneself white is a normal Antillean response to socialization (+16 more)

Related

• Black women’s professed love for white men reorders as love of whiteness itself (similarity 0.90)
• The woman of color’s love is directed at whiteness itself, not the man (similarity 0.88)
• Antillean women seek whiteness through desiring lighter-skinned partners (similarity 0.84)
• A black woman’s longing to marry white reflects a vast internalized delusion (similarity 0.82)
• Colonized people become psychologically whiter as they adopt the mother country’s culture (similarity 0.81)
• The Uncle Remus stories encode simultaneous white love-seeking and hatred of blacks (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial moral categories coded racialized peoples’ aspirations as dangerous affective excess (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Black women’s professed love for white men reorders as love of whiteness itself #exemplifies (0.80) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 160
• Colonial moral categories coded racialized peoples’ aspirations as dangerous affective excess #corroborates (0.70)
• The Negress seeks white admittance out of felt inferiority via affective erethism #exemplifies (0.65)
• Colonial emotional attributions constructed the social hierarchies they claimed to describe #corroborates (0.60)
• Pleasure follows from desire rather than desire being caused by pleasure #corroborates (0.55) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2231
• White-imposed dehumanization drives the black subject to seek whiteness #contradicts (0.50)
• Rejection by white reason drove blacks to embrace irrationality #complicates (0.50) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 447