A teach-in led by Platypus member Sunit Singh on February 1st, 2010, at Loyola University.
Audio Recording
Suggested Readings
Fanon - Wretched of the Earth - Conclusion
Fanon - Black Skin White Masks (Introduction) (Conclusion)
“The Negro, however sincere, is the slave of the past. None the less I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the compass. Face to face with the white man, the Negro has a part to legitimate, a vengeance to exact; face to face with the Negro, the contemporary white man feels the need to recall the times of cannibalism… Some men want to fill the world with their presence. A German philosopher described this mechanism as the pathology of freedom… The problem considered here is one of time. Those Negroes and white men will be disalienated who refuse to let themselves be sealed away in the materialized Tower of the Past. For many other Negroes, in other ways, disalienation will come into being through their refusal to accept the present as definitive. I am a man, and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world… In no way should I derive my basic purpose from the past of the peoples of color. In no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly unrecognized Negro civilization. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to exalt the past at the expense of my present and of my future.”