You Have Every Right, Except To Disrespect The Negro God

One is proposing a future to us, one does so by condemning the past. It is into this future also that we want to see clearly. It is these principles that we would like to look at directly. For we already foresee that these new ethics refer to a strange universe, a universe with something sick about it, an elastic universe where our eyes no longer recognize things: but a universe which is that of others, precisely that of which Bernanos had a presentiment when he feared that one day the dreams, locked up in the sly brain of a small Negro shoeshiner in a New York ghetto, would come true. We are there. Our minds are doped. We have been struck by Circe. We have all become Jewish.

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We are free to protest, free, infinitely free, to write, to vote, to speak in public, as long as we never take measures to change all of this. We are free to flail and fight in a world of fluff. One does not know very well where our freedom ends, where our nationality ends, one does not know very well where what is permitted ends. It is an elastic universe. One does not know any more where one’s feet are set; one does not even know any more if one has feet; one feels very light, as if one’s body had been lost.

But for those who grant us this simple ablation what infinite rewards, what a multitude of tips! This universe is made to shine before our eyes like a palace in Atlantis. There are everywhere small glassware, columns of false marble, inscriptions, magic fruits. By entering this palace you abdicate your power, in exchange you have the right to touch the golden apples and to read the inscriptions. You are nothing anymore; you do not feel any more the weight of your body; you cease to be a man: you are now a follower of the religion of Humanity. At the bottom of the sanctuary sits a Negro god. You have every right, except to speak ill of the god.”

-excerpted from “Nuremberg or the Promised Land” by Maurice Bardeche (1948)