Education and abstract values are unattainable without the material conditions that make them possible

Evidence

To understand something new requires that we make ourselves ready for it, that we prepare ourselves for it; it entails the shaping of a new form. It is Utopian to expect the Negro or the Arab to exert the effort of embedding abstract values into his outlook on the world when he has barely enough food to keep alive. To ask a Negro of the Upper Niger to wear shoes, to say of him that he will never be a Schubert, is no less ridiculous than to be surprised that a worker in the Berliet truck factory does not spend his evenings studying lyricism in Hindu literature or to say that he will never be an Einstein. Actually, in the absolute sense, nothing stands in the way of such things. Nothing–except that the people in question lack the opportunities. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 347

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s contrast between locally and externally educated Blacks: external education requires material opportunity that the colony structurally denies. — connects to: Celebrating a destroyed culture’s ontology is empty without material freedom. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 646; Material conditions are necessary but not sufficient for all historical practice. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 747; Excessive theorizing can empty power of its material exercise (+7 more)

Related

• Celebrating a destroyed culture’s ontology is empty without material freedom. (similarity 0.81)
• Material conditions are necessary but not sufficient for all historical practice. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Material conditions are necessary but not sufficient for all historical practice. #expands (0.70) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 747
• Economic level is necessary but not sufficient for explaining other levels #expands (0.60)
• Historical materialism requires retaining economic determination without economic reductionism #expands (0.60)
• Excessive theorizing can empty power of its material exercise #complicates (0.55)
• Culture as constitutive of practice retains contingency and is never finally determined #corroborates (0.50)