Critique of the Negro Mind

Negritude as a project for African salvation

Author's name: Achille Mbembe

The Western epistemological, value, and ontological system has painted a picture of the Negro mind as a dark mind that has never, throughout its history, attained the necessary civilization to become a mind capable of philosophizing. The Negro is the product of a social and cultural machine closely linked to the globalization of capitalism. The term was coined to signify exclusion, cruelty, and decadence. It refers to a constantly denigrated, despised, and detested charlatan. He is the only human being in the modern system whose skin has been transformed into an image, and whose soul into a commodity. He is the living vault of capital. However, the Negro, on the other hand, bears an identity that makes him present in this world: "Negroness," which is a symbol of the conscious desire for life, the flowing force, the flexible energy, always engaged in the act of creativity, and capable of living in the midst of multiple times and histories simultaneously. The Negro is the silt of the earth, the lifeblood through which humanity dreams of reconciliation with nature, or even reconciliation with all of existence, and humanity will find its face, its voice, its new movement in this Negro.