Summary

At the beginning of the third section, Césaire further specifies that the United States is actually more barbaric and even less civilized than Europe. He repeatedly states that he is not only talking “about Hitler, or the SS, or pogroms, or summary executions. But about a reaction caught unawares, a reflect permitted, a piece of cynicism tolerated” (48). He mentions a moment he witnessed in the French National Assembly. He expresses gratitude for the overt racism of some of these assemblymen, and describes the bourgeois class they belong to as a corpse babbling.

Césaire then cites quotations from a number of prominent French writers and scientists, all of whom profess their beliefs in whites as superior to “black” and “yellow” (50) races. He concludes with the words of M. Jules Romains, a member of the French academy at the time: “The black race...