What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.

Interview with Tahar Ben Jelloun Le Monde November 1979
1980s
Interview with Antoine Bourseiller (1981) and with Bertrand Poirot-Delpech (1982) distributed as a videocassetts in the series Témoin. While he received excellent grades in school his childhood involved a series of attempts at running away and incidents of petty theft (although White also suggests that Genet's later claims of a dismal impoveriJean Genetd childhood were exaggerated to fit his outlaw image). He worked with Foucault and Sartre to protest police brutality against Algerians in Paris a problem persisting since the Algerian War of Independence when beaten bodies were to be found floating in the Seine.

Jean Genet (French: [ʒɑ̃ ʒənɛ]; (1910-12-19)December 19 1910 – April 15 1986(1986-04-15)) was a prominent and controversial French novelist playwright poet essayist and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal but later took to writing.