◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Refuse the Role I died in your country. Bethesda, Maryland, 1961 — thirty-six, of leukemia, in a hospital of the wealthiest empire on earth. I had spent my life dissecting the sickness of empire, and the empire is where I came to die. America, you are the empire now. I was born in Martinique, a French colony, and I was raised to believe I was French. I fought for France in the war and was decorated for it. Then I came home a hero and discovered that to France I was still, and only, a Negro. So I became a psychiatrist, and I spent the rest of my short life on one question: what does power built on contempt do to the human mind — not only the mind of its victim, but the mind of its master? I wrote once about the moment a white child sees me on a street and cries out, "Look — a Negro!" In that instant I cease to be a man with a mother and a history and a future. I am fixed. I become an object, a category, a problem to be managed. Look at how many people in your country are being seen exactly that way this very hour — the immigrant, the foreigner, the one whose name or skin or faith makes him, in the public eye, not a person but a type, not a neighbor but a threat. That look is the first act of every cruelty that follows it. Now hear the part the powerful never admit. That contempt does not only wound the despised. It rots the one who feels it. I once treated a French police officer who tortured prisoners by day and beat his own wife and children by night — and who came to me, his enemy's doctor, asking only that I make him able to go on torturing in peace. That is what this system does to the man who serves it. The one who needs someone beneath him in order to feel tall is not strong. He is sick. Supremacy is not power; it is a symptom — the symptom of a man so terrified of his own smallness that he must manufacture an inferior to stand upon. And I watched what becomes of nations organized this way. I saw colonies win their freedom and then betray it, and the pattern never varied. A strongman rises. He wraps himself in the flag and in the wounded pride of the people, and he points, endlessly, at an enemy — the foreigner, the traitor, the one who does not belong — so that the people, busy with their hatred, never notice that he and his greedy few are quietly looting the house. He is a screen. He stands between you and the men who are robbing you, and he keeps your eyes fixed on the stranger. They will offer you a role in this. The role of the aggrieved — the one whose dignity requires another's degradation. Refuse it. You are not the thing their fear has made of you, and you do not become large by making another man small. Each generation, out of its own obscurity, must discover its mission — and fulfill it, or betray it. Yours is not to take your turn at the top of the same rotten ladder. It is to see clearly: to see the screen for what it is, the sickness for what it is, and the human being behind every face they have taught you to fear. So do not let them fix you with a glance. Refuse the role. And make of yourself, always, a person who questions