Neither Veneuse nor Capécia’s behavior yields a general law of race relations

Evidence

Just as there was a touch of fraud in trying to deduce from the behavior of Nini and Mayotte Capécia a general law of the behavior of the black woman with the white man, there would be a similar lack of objectivity, I believe, in trying to extend the attitude of Veneuse to the man of color as such. And I should like to think that I have discouraged any endeavors to connect the defeats of Jean Veneuse with the greater or lesser concentration of melanin in his epidermis. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 300

Categorization

  • XREF: Ties back to Fanon’s own earlier critiques of CapĂ©cia and directly guards against the reader’s temptation to read one case as the whole story. — connects to: An individual neurotic’s behavior cannot be generalized into a law of black psychology; Algerian colonial racism was neither institutionalized like apartheid nor miscegenated like Brazil — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 160; Racism exists as a variable spectrum, not a single invariant form

Broader Connections