Even well-meaning Europeans’ childhood racial imagery persists into adulthood

Evidence

In the same issue of Presence Africaine, Emile Dermenghem, who cannot be accused of Negrophobia, said: “One of my childhood memories is of a visit to the World’s Fair of 1900, during which my chief enthusiasm was to see a Negro. My imagination had naturally been stimulated by my reading: Capitaine de quinze ans (A Captain at Fifteen), Les Aventures de Robert (Robert’s Adventures), Les Voyages de Livingstone (Livingstone’s Travels).” Dermenghem tells us that this was the manifestation of his taste for the exotic. While I may be prepared to put my two hands into his and believe the Dermenghem who wrote the article, I ask his permission to entertain doubts about the Dermenghem of the 1900 Fair. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 708

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The European family mirrors the nation so home values carry into adult life; Adulthood strips childhood things of their accumulated meaning — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1980; Jung’s universal archetypes are actually just Europe’s childhood projected onto all humanity — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 665 (+7 more)

Related

• The European family mirrors the nation so home values carry into adult life (similarity 0.83)
• Jung’s universal archetypes are actually just Europe’s childhood projected onto all humanity (similarity 0.80)
• Jung universalized what was only European childhood psychic material (similarity 0.79)
• Europeans hold a fixed, condescending concept of the Negro (similarity 0.79)
• Europe’s contact with black peoples made Negroes the projected principle of evil (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The uncanny surfaces when foreign scenes trigger repressed childhood imagery. #responds-to (0.55)
• Sexual phenomena are central to understanding racial experience psychoanalytically #expands (0.45)
• Blackness symbolizes Evil and Ugliness in white thought #corroborates (0.40)
• Europeans hold a fixed, condescending concept of the Negro #corroborates (0.40) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 135
• Europeans project their repressed evil onto the racialized Other #complicates (0.35)