Racism in the Negritude Movement
Zelun Kang
BL ST 130A
Dr. Roberto Strongman
10.17.2022
Negritude is a word that represents the black movement as a means of re-branding the name as a form of empowerment. The term was coined by writers, intellectuals, and politicians living in the diaspora in the 1930s. The movement focused on raising awareness of black consciousness in a foreign land and Africa. The writers and intellectuals who later became the leaders of their native states include Leon Damas, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire. The movement leaders promoted African culture and nature through a presidential framework. The negritude leaders generated poems and theories that helped push the movement forward in all the targeted countries. For example, Aimé Césaire was a playwright, poet, and politician from Martinique who studied in Paris but saw the movement as the concept of being black and accepting that concept. The authors of the negritude movement did not accept the idea of black people as conjured by the western world. Racism and slavery are issues explored in the theories and poems by the leaders of the Negritude movement.
The theme of racism is apparent in the Negritude poems as the leaders exploit the experiences of black people in foreign countries. Racism and discrimination against black people is a social issue still being felt in the contemporary world but was also discussed by people in the 20th century. White people justified the aspect of racial discrimination through their belief in white supremacy. For example, Aimé Césaire has evidence and experience of how the white man used white supremacy against the native people of his homeland Martinique. In “Return to my Native Home,” Aimé Césaire adopts his black identity and exposes his hatred and anger toward white superiority (Césaire, 2001). Aimé Césaire grew up in a French Colony in Martinique, where he witnessed how the French mistreated and maltreated black people. “Discourse on Colonialism” by Aimé Césaire focuses on racial discrimination he witnessed while studying in Paris (Miles, 2009). He experienced cultural alienation while in Paris, forcing him to question the Eurocentric nature of his education. “Negritude” is another ideological response to the colonial conditions that black people face from their colonizers. One can find racial descriptions all over Aimé Césaire’s poems and books detailing his experiences in his Native land and Paris.
The issue of racism is also present in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of the Spirit.” He represents a dialectical identity of the enslaver and enslaved person, an ideology of the two self-consciousness where the master is confused once he is faced with a similar consciousness. The master emphasizes freedom while the enslaved person pits value on life. The master consciousness states that freedom is an essential value; without it, life is not worth preserving (Hegel, 1807). In the end, the master wins, and the enslaved person has to meet all the needs of the master. The story symbolizes the relationship between blacks and white people, where blacks are the slaves, and the masters are the white people. The white individuals enslaved black people so they could meet their needs and serve them. However, blacks longed for their freedom, but their masters were unwilling to grant it to them as it did not matter. It is a battle between providing freedom for the enslaved people and meeting the curiosity about the meaning of life of the whites.
“Le Code Noir” also describes the issue of racism supporting Aimé Césaire and Hegel’s theories. The code is a decree by the French King Louis XIV written by Jean-Paul Sartre, which defined the terms of the slavery institution during the French colonial empire. It was a decree on the types of punishments that masters could inflict on their slaves or workers. The workers were predominantly black and viewed as inferior to the rest. Article XVIII of the code states that enslaved people selling sugarcane, even with permission from their masters, accrue a punishment of whips. Enslaved Black people were also not allowed to meet at night, which could lead to punishment. Sartre’s idea of slavery and the code is also reflected in Damas’ work, arguing that white people have led black people to forget their identity through enslavement (Moody & Ross, 2020, p.129). For example, the code prevents enslaved people from engaging in any other religious activity which differs from Catholic, Roman, and Apostolic. This supports Damas’s statement that white man imposed their culture, which turns out to be a civilization, on black people, including their religious beliefs.
Patterson also brings out the issue of racism through the enslavement of black people in her book “Slavery and Social Death.” In the book, she gives the difference between enslaved people and enslavers, where domestic workers had to serve the masters, who were mostly the members of the Imperial service system. She demonstrates how the empire treated black people primarily enslaved as domestic military and domestic workers (Patterson, 1982, p. 301). White masters treated their slaves as animals in a cage rather than human beings. Leopold Sedar Senghor fights such a perspective on black people by suggesting that black people and their culture are more than animals and deserve better. In his idea of a Universal Civilization, Senghor suggests that Europeans came to Africa in such humanism, which was vital for globalization through African resources and the intellectual capacity of Africans (Moody & Ross, 2020, p.129). Senghor opposes the idea of white supremacy by supporting Patterson’s idea that slavery was imposed on Africans along with western culture.
The Negritude movement comprises a series of theories and poems designed by African leaders who want to instill the black identity among black people in Africa and the diaspora. The main issue addressed by the authors of the Negritude movement is racism and the discrimination that black people have faced at the hands of white people. For example, Aimé Césaire explains his hatred for white supremacy against black people in his native people. Other authors, such as Leopold Sedar Senghor, try to remove the perception that black people are animals and inferior by giving examples of Egyptian art and how it has influenced the world for over four thousand years. Finally, Jean-Paul Sartre uses the “Le Code Noir” to demonstrate how racism was used to punish and restrict freedom among enslaved Black people by the French colony.
Reference
Césaire, Aimé. (2001). Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Translated by Clayton Eshleman Annette Smith. Wesleyan Poetry.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1807). The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. AV.
Miles, W. F. S. (2009). Introduction: Aimé Césaire as Poet, Rebel, Statesman. French Politics, Culture & Society, 27(3), 1–8. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42843609
Moody, A., & Ross, S. J. (2020). Global modernists on modernism: An anthology. Bloomsbury Academic.
Patterson, O. (1985). Slavery and social death: A Comparative Study. Harvard University Press.
Sartre, J., P. (1685). Le Code Noir. https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/1205/2016/02/code-noir.pdf