Politics & Power Quote by Jean Genet

Genet doesn’t describe racism; he stages it as a reflex so ordinary it contaminates even the most benign American ritual. Planting a tree is the stock image of civic virtue, patience, futurity. He turns it inside out, forcing the reader to see how easily “growth” in the American mythos coexists with the afterimage of lynching. The brilliance is in the conditional: “I wonder if...” It’s not a courtroom accusation; it’s a poisoned question that implicates without offering the comfort of rebuttal. If you feel the urge to answer “not every white man,” Genet has already shown how the defense works: by retreating to individual innocence while the culture’s violence remains unshaken.

The line is meant to be excessive, even unfair, because Genet’s target isn’t a tally of personal prejudice. It’s the depth psychology of a society where racial terror was not merely an eruption but a technology of control, spectacular and public, with trees as infrastructure. His image collapses time: the sapling becomes a gallows; the future is haunted by its own archive. That’s why the hatred is “so deep” it appears at the moment of creation, not destruction.

Context matters: Genet, a French dramatist drawn to outcasts and political revolt, writes as an outsider who refuses American self-flattery. The sentence behaves like one of his plays: a provocation that makes the audience complicit, then dares them to sit with what they’ve tried not to see.