Malcolm X diagnosed colonized loyalty through the house Negro figure

Evidence

The house Negroes—they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good ‘cause they ate his food—what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near the master; and they loved their master more than the master loved himself. They would give their life to save the master’s house quicker than the master would. The house Negro, if the master said, “We got a good house here,” the house Negro would say, “Yeah, we got a good house here.” Whenever the master said “we”, he said “we”. That’s how you can tell a house Negro. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 216

Categorization

• SHARE: The perfect ‘we sick’ identification detail is worth sending to anyone teaching rhetoric or postcolonial theory.
• XREF: Recalls the dynamics of the ‘favorite slave’ archetype across colonial and plantation literatures, and ties to W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness.

Related

• Malcolm X’s house Negro trope indicts assimilated minorities who chase proximity to power. (similarity 0.85)
• Comfort and proximity make the colonized resist liberation (similarity 0.82)