#raphael confiant

“Writing during this same era, Carter G. Woodson offered a response to this question in The Miseducation of the Negro (1933), providing an insight that has become an indispensable component of Sylvia Wynter's thesis. Pre-empting the polemical IQ debates in the latter part of the twentieth century, Woodson explained the reason for black students consistently performing at a level lower than whites: ‘The same educational process which inspires and stimulates the oppressor with the thought that he is everything and has accomplished everything worthwhile, depresses and crushes at the same time the spark of genius in the Negro by making him feel that his race does not amount to much and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples.’[39] Woodson generalized from this position that the conditions confronted by blacks had their origins in the system of knowledge, noting, ‘There would be no lynching if it did not start in the classroom. Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?’[40]

“The more recent research of Claude Steele and his colleagues on ‘stereotype threat’ has provided contemporary examples that verify [Carter G.] Woodson's initial theses. In their work, the social scientists found that ‘the threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype, or the fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype’ helped to determine black college students' performance on standardized tests and generally in college.[41] When told these tests were simply for diagnostic purposes in order to ascertain how certain problems are generally solved, black students performed in a manner similar to their white peers. However, when they were told that the tests were designed to measure intellectual ability, their scores decreased. In another example, a math test was given to white males, who were told that Asians generally performed better on it. With such a statement informing the context in which the test was administered, the performances of the white males was inferior to those who had taken the test without such a comment being made. This result led Steele and his colleagues to conclude that the power of ‘stereotype threat’ was such that it ‘impaired intellectual functioning in a group unlikely to have any sense of group inferiority.’[42] Here is an unequivocal example of how the Thing of Being Black can illuminate a mechanism functioning at the level of the Thing of Being Human. However, the nagging issue from this research remains as to what produces the ‘stereotype threat.’ That is, is it a natural phenomenon that can be found across time and space?”

from “‘Come on Kid, Let’s Go Get the Thing’: The Sociogenic Principle and the Being of Being Black/Human” by Demetrius L. Eudell in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis by Katherine McKittrick, ed.

Parti pour découvrir la Martinique, je vous propose quelques vidéos et textes d’écrivains sur cette île. Sur ce bateau de rapatriement, qui voguait vers la Martinique, Vidrassamy reconnut que le Pondichérien avait contribué, sans même le savoir, à le sauver de la folie. La simple vacuité personnelle du sergent avait désacralisé l’Inde à ses yeux. Il comprit que le pays de ses parents était un…

Bambouler: “…et les pieds du lit bamboulèrent.”

La craintitude: “...qui mettait parfois Marraine dans un état de craintitude débornée.”

Ah, la truculence des mots dans ce livre où la parlure peut être dite “saisonnière”,où le causer se fait en boissonant…Chaque personnage, puisque il s’agit d’une histoire, à l’abri de l’océan méchant, à Grand-Anse (en 1962 il me semble), en terre de…