Frantz Fanon
Fanon is best known as a revolutionary. Born on the island of Martinique on July 20, 1925, he was a charismatic man of great courage and brilliance, having fought alongside resistance forces in North Africa and Europe during World War II, an occasion on which he was twice decorated for bravery.
After completing his studies in psychiatry and philosophy in France, he directed the Department of Psychiatry at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria (now renamed the Frantz Fanon Hospital) and became a member of the National Liberation Front of Algeria, thus landing on the police’s most-wanted list across France. The rest of his life was devoted to this battle, emphasizing the importance of the struggle to transform the lives of those condemned by the colonial and racist institutions of the modern world. Fanon died of pneumonia on December 6, 1961, in Bethesda, Maryland, in the United States, while seeking treatment for his leukemia.
There are four books published under his name. Each of them is a classic, marking a significant place in the philosophical canon of the African Diaspora. The most well-known among them is Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961), posthumously published and written over a period of ten weeks while the author was already suffering from leukemia. Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks, 1952) and L’an V de la révolution algérienne (1959), subsequently released as Sociologie d’une révolution: l’an V de la révolution algérienne, were published during his lifetime. His wife, Josie (Marie-Josèphe Dublé) Fanon, also posthumously edited an anthology of his writings titled Pour la révolution africaine (1964).
“Others may consider me an idealist. I believe it is others who are the scoundrels.” (p. 45)
Black Skin, White Masks
→ Preface by Lewis Gordon:
When published, this classic work on African Diaspora thought, psychological thought, decolonization theory, human sciences, philosophy, and Caribbean literature was met with both scandal and indifference.
Fanon offers a sharp critique of the denial of racism against black people in France and much of the modern world. While other writers also criticized such behavior, there are distinctive features in Fanon’s analysis that ensured his work survived the 20th century. First, he examines denial as symptomatic in many black people. Second, he rejects the structural thesis by admitting the existential thesis of contingency and exceptions. In other words, Fanon does not consider the entire world to be racist. Third, he examines the problem on its subterranean levels, and by doing so, reveals its significance for the study of humankind. Fourth, he addresses disciplinary issues and problems of domination within the epistemological sphere, within the realm of knowledge, thus radicalizing his critique. Fifth, he offers original discussions on the dynamics of freedom and recognition at the heart of human relations. And sixth, but not least, Fanon proposes a set of rhetorical mechanisms that implement the many ways to address the problem.
Fanon argued that colonization requires more than the material subordination of a people. It also provides the means by which people are able to express and understand themselves. He identifies this in radical terms at the core of language and even in the methods by which sciences are constructed. This is epistemological colonialism.
The fight against anti-black racism, therefore, is not against being the Other. It is a struggle to enter the dialectic of the Self and the Other.
“I do not intend to prepare the world that will follow me. I irreducibly belong to my time. And it is for it that I must live. The future must be a sustainable construction of the existing man. This construction is linked to the present, in that I place it as something to be overcome.” (p. 29)
Introduction
Frantz Fanon presents the objective of Black Skin, White Masks as making a psychological diagnosis of a social nature. It does not address the “alienation of the black man” as a phylogenetic problem (development of the species) or as an ontogenetic problem (individual development), but as a social problem that must be analyzed through sociogeny.
This problem, stated succinctly, is that the black man is socially imposed with an inferiority complex that he internalizes (epidermization), so that his constitution as a black man already presupposes the need to stop being black. The black body is constituted to cease existing in the way it is. From this, “we will try to discover the different positions that the black man adopts in the face of white civilization” (p. 29).
“What does man want? What does the black man want? Even exposing myself to the resentment of my brothers of color, I will say that the black man is not a man.” (p. 26)
“The black man is a black man; this means that, due to a series of emotional aberrations, he has settled within a universe from which he will need to be extracted.” (p. 26)
“However painful this realization may be, we are obliged to make it: for the black man, there is only one destiny. And it is white.” (p. 28)
“There is only an inferiority complex after a double process: — initially economic; — then through internalization, or rather, through the epidermization of that inferiority.” (p. 28)
The Black Man and Language
The first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks addresses the issue of language, specifically the role of the imposition of the French language on the Antillean Black man during the colonization process.
“The problem we will address in this chapter is as follows: the Antillean Black man will be whiter, that is, will approach the true man, to the extent that he adopts the French language.”
“The Black man has two dimensions. One with his fellow man and another as a white. A Black man behaves differently with a white person and with another Black man. There is no doubt that this cissiparity (division into parts) is a direct consequence of the colonial adventure…” (p. 33)
“Every colonized people — that is, every people in whose midst a complex of inferiority was born due to the burial of its cultural originality — takes a position towards the language of the civilizing nation, that is, the metropolitan culture.” (p. 34)
Regarding the so-called petit-nègre, the broken and infantilized language used by the French when speaking to Black people:
“We are not exaggerating: a white person, addressing a Black man, behaves exactly like an adult with a child, using miming, whispering, full of artificial kindness and niceties.” (p. 44)
“Speaking petit-nègre to a Black person is to afflict him, because he becomes stigmatized as ‘the one-who-speaks-petit-nègre’. However, one might argue that there is no intention or desire to afflict him. We agree, but it is precisely this lack of intention, this ease, this nonchalance, this facility in framing him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, that is humiliating.” (p. 45)
“Yes, the Black man is required to be a good Black man; once that is established, the rest follows naturally. Making him speak petit-nègre is to imprison him in an image, to infantilize him, an eternal victim of an essence, of a appearance for which he is not responsible. And naturally, just as a Jew who spends money without counting it is suspicious, the Black man who quotes Montesquieu must be watched. Let them understand us: watched, in the sense that with him something begins.” (p. 47)
The Woman of Color and the White Man
“In this chapter, dedicated to the relationship between the woman of color and the European, the question is to determine to what extent authentic love will remain impossible as long as we do not eliminate this feeling of inferiority, or this Adlerian exaltation, this supercompensation, which seem to be the indication of the Black worldview.” (p. 54)
“Whether it is Mayotte Capécia, the Martinican, or Nini, the Saint Louisian, we find the same process. A bilateral process, an attempt to acquire by internalization values originally forbidden. The Black woman feels inferior, and therefore aspires to be admitted into the white world. In this attempt, she will be assisted by a phenomenon that we will call affective erotism.” (p. 66)
“Whatever the field considered, one thing impressed us: the Black man, a slave to his inferiority, the White man, a slave to his superiority, both behave according to a neurotic line of direction. Thus, we were led to consider their alienation according to psychoanalytic descriptions. The Black man, in his behavior, resembles an obsessive neurotic type, or in other words, he is in full situational neurosis. There is in the man of color an attempt to escape his individuality, to annihilate his being-here.” (p. 66)
The Man of Color and the White Woman
“When asked, the White man consents to give her the hand of his sister, but protected by a presumption: ‘You have nothing to do with the real Blacks. You are not Black, you are ‘excessively dark’. This process is well known to students of color in France. They refuse to consider them as real Blacks. The Black man is the savage, while the student is ‘evolved.’ You are ‘one of us,’ says Coulanges, and if they consider you Black, it is a mistake, because from Black you only have the appearance. But Jean Veneuse does not accept, he cannot, because he knows.” (p. 73)
On the Alleged Dependency Complex of the Colonized
The fourth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks is dedicated to critiquing the work Psychologie de la colonisation by O. Mannoni. Fanon addresses the fallacy that colonized peoples are psychologically predisposed to submission in a “complex of inferiority” or “complex of dependency.”
“The problem of colonization thus involves not only the intersection of objective and historical conditions but also the attitude of the man toward these conditions.” (p. 84)
“We need the courage to say: it is the racist who creates the inferiorized. With this conclusion, we approach Sartre: ‘The Jew is a man whom other men consider a Jew: this is the simple truth from which one must start… It is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew.’” (p. 90)
Here lies the central point of Fanon: not only is there no predisposition in the Black man to submit to the White, but there is no Black man before the arrival of the colonizer.
“If he is Malagasy, it is because the White man arrived, and if, at a certain point in his history, he was led to question whether he was or was not a man, it is because his humanity was contested. In other words, I begin to suffer for not being White, to the extent that the White man imposes discrimination on me, makes me a colonized subject, strips me of any value, any originality, and expects me to be a parasite in the world, urging me to catch up with the White world as quickly as possible, ‘that I am a wild beast, that my people and I are walking dung, repugnant providers of soft sugarcane and silky cotton, that I have no place in the world.’ Then I will simply try to make myself White, that is, I will force the White man to recognize my humanity.” (p. 94)
“In other words, the Black man should no longer be placed before this dilemma: whiten or disappear, he must be able to become aware of a new possibility of existence; or, if society creates difficulties for him because of his color, if I find in his dreams the expression of an unconscious desire to change color, my objective will not be to dissuade him, advising him to ‘keep his distance’; on the contrary, my objective will be, once the causes are clarified, to make him capable of choosing action (or passivity) regarding the true origin of the conflict, that is, the social structures.” (p. 95 - 96)
Fanon then discusses what he calls the “racial division of guilt,” in which, among the French colonies, Arabs were placed against Blacks, Blacks against Jews, Jews against Arabs, etc., in a move that absolves the White French of the guilt for the ills of colonialism.
Fanon also cites Pierre Naville:
“Talking about the dreams of society as if they were the dreams of the individual, collective desires for power as if they were personal sexual instincts, is once again reversing the natural order of things, since, on the contrary, it is the economic and social conditions of class struggles that explain and determine the real conditions in which individual sexuality is expressed, and that the content of a human being’s dreams ultimately depends on the general conditions of the civilization in which he lives.” → Pierre Naville, Psychologie, marxisme, matérialisme, Marcel Rivière Éditeur, 2nd edition, p. 151.
The Lived Experience of the Black Man
“I came into the world intending to discover a meaning in things, my soul filled with the desire to be at the origin of the world, and here I find myself an object among other objects.” (p. 103)
The fifth chapter of the work addresses precisely the nature of “being Black,” or the (lack of) nature of being as a Black person. However, “any ontology becomes unachievable in a colonized and civilized society.”
“In the eyes of the White man, the Black man has no ontological resistance. From one day to the next, Blacks had to position themselves before two systems of reference. Their metaphysics, or less pretentiously, their customs and points of reference, were abolished because they were in contradiction with a civilization they did not know and which was imposed on them.” (p. 104)
“In the White world, the man of color faces difficulties in developing his body schema. The knowledge of the body is solely an activity of negation. It is third-person knowledge. Around the body, there is a dense atmosphere of uncertainty.”
Fanon discusses how his journey to Europe destabilized his body schema, giving way to a racial epidermal schema. The moment when a French child shouts “Mom, look at the Black man, I’m scared” reveals to Fanon his existence as Black within the Black-White dichotomy created by colonialism.
“I was at the same time responsible for my body, responsible for my race, for my ancestors. I cast an objective gaze on myself, discovered my Blackness, my ethnic characteristics—and then my eardrum was detonated with cannibalism, mental retardation, fetishism, racial perversions, slave traders, and above all, ‘y’a bon banania.’” (p. 105-106)
This encounter with French racism and Fanon’s own position as a Black man defined his battleground. As he wrote:
“Once the battleground was delineated, I entered the struggle.” (p. 107)
Fanon’s response to the inescapable complex of his identity as Black was to assert it proudly:
“Since it was impossible to rid myself of an inborn complex, I decided to assert myself as Black. Once the other hesitated to recognize me, there was only one solution: to make myself known.” (p. 108) “The Jew is only unloved from the moment he is detected. But with me, everything takes on a new aspect. No chance is offered to me. I am overdetermined by the outside. I am not a slave to the ‘idea’ others have of me, but to my appearance.” (p. 108)
“When they love me, they say they do so despite my color. When they hate me, they add that it’s not because of my color…” (p. 109)
“I was hated, detested, despised, not by the neighbor in front or by the maternal cousin, but by an entire race. I was exposed to something irrational. Psychoanalysts say there is nothing more traumatizing for a child than contact with the rational. Personally, I would say that for a man whose only weapon is reason, nothing is more neuroticizing than contact with the irrational.” (p. 110)
The chapter describes Fanon’s journey as he discovers himself as a Black man, culminating in his decision to react, which shaped his role not only as a writer but also as an activist and revolutionary.
“I felt blades of steel being born in me. I made the decision to defend myself. As a good tactic, I wanted to rationalize the world, show the White man that he was wrong.” (p. 110)
However, reason eluded Fanon as science and scientists were also tainted by racism:
“Reason ensured victory on all fronts. I was readmitted into the assemblies. But I had to lose my illusions. Victory played cat and mouse; it mocked me. As the other says, when I am there, it is not; when it is there, I am no longer. On the level of ideas, we agreed: the Black man is a human being. That is, added the less convinced, he has, like us, his heart on the left. But the white man, on certain issues, remained unyielding. (…) You came too late, too late. There will always be a world – a white world – between you and us…” (p. 111)
“It was my philosophy teacher, of Antillean origin, who once called my attention: ‘When you hear people speak ill of the Jews, pay close attention, they are speaking of you.’ And I thought he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible, body and soul, for the fate reserved for my brother. Later, I understood that he simply meant: an anti-Semite is surely a Negro-phobe.” (p. 112)
“I had rationalized the world, and the world had rejected me in the name of color prejudice. Since, on the level of reason, agreement was not possible, I plunged into irrationality. It is the white man’s fault, for being more irrational than I!” (p. 113)
“I marry the world! I am the world! The white man never understood this magical substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it only for himself. He considers himself the predestined master of this world. He submits it, establishes a relationship of appropriation between himself and the world.” (p. 117)
“Soon I would lose my illusions. The white man, momentarily stunned, showed me that, genetically, I represented a stage: ‘Your qualities were exploited to exhaustion by us. We had earth mystics like you will never have. Study our history, and you will understand how far this fusion went.’ I then had the impression of repeating a cycle. My originality was extorted from me. I cried for a long time, and then I began life again.” (p. 118)
After the disillusionment that his recognition with the Earth was, for the whites, merely an “evolutionary stage,” Fanon turns his gaze and hopes toward the history and antiquity of Black civilization.
“The white man was wrong, I was not a primitive, nor a half-man, I belonged to a race that, two thousand years ago, was already working with gold and silver.” (p. 119)
“I put the white man in his place; encouraged, I confronted him and threw it in his face: adapt to me, I don’t adapt to anyone! I openly mocked him. The white man, visibly, bristled. But his reaction time grew slower and slower… I had won. I exulted.” (p. 120)
However, in response to the exultation of ancient civilizations, the white man responded to Fanon that this was the past, and that civilization, in its most advanced stage—industrialized, scientific—had long been ahead of the lost Black civilizations.
“Thus, to my irrationality, they opposed rationality. To my rationality, the ‘true rationality.’ I was always starting over a game that was already lost. I experienced my heredity. I took a full inventory of my illness. I wanted to be typically Black—but that was no longer possible. I wanted to be white—it was better to laugh. And, when I tried, on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to claim my Blackness, they tore it from me.” (p. 120)
Fanon cites and critiques the notion presented by Sartre that, in the Marxist dialectical view, Blackness is a “concrete and particular” fact, and class is “universal and abstract,” and that Black people and their movement are “the preparation of the synthesis or the realization of the human in a society without races. Thus, Blackness exists to destroy itself; it is a passage and a point of arrival, a means, not the final end.”
“I am not a potentiality of something, I am fully what I am. I don’t need to resort to the universal. In my chest, no probability has a place. My Black consciousness does not present itself as the lack of something. It is. It adheres to itself.” (p. 122)
“Still not white, no longer black, I was a condemned man. Jean-Paul Sartre forgot that the black man suffers in his body in a way different from the white man. Between the white man and me, there is irreparably a relation of transcendence.” (p. 123)
The Black and Psychopathology
“It cannot be emphasized enough that psychoanalysis, as is known, aims to understand certain behaviors within a specific group represented by the family.” (p. 127)
However, Fanon points out that in Europe, the structures and values of families are repeated or mirror the structures and values of the nation, so that:
“The child who leaves the family environment encounters the same laws, the same principles, the same values. A normal child, raised in a normal family, will be a normal man.” (p. 128)
“Now, and this is very important, we observe the opposite in the case of the man of color. A normal Black child, having grown up in a normal family, will become abnormal at the slightest contact with the white world.” (p. 129)
Considering the example of a young Black man who adopts a defensive stance toward whites (whom he has never met) even before arriving in Europe, Fanon denies the idea that a Black child can “inherit” trauma from their father regarding whites.
“If we are to answer correctly, we are obliged to resort to the notion of collective catharsis. In every society, in every collective, there exists, there must exist, a channel, an outlet, through which the accumulated energies, in the form of aggression, can be released.” (p. 130)
This collective catharsis is materialized in culture, in books, stories, tales, etc., passed down to children.
“In the Antilles, the young Black student who, in school, keeps repeating ‘our fathers, the Gauls,’ identifies himself with the explorer, with the civilizer, as a white man who brings the truth to the savages, a truth that is all white. There is identification, that is, the young Black adopts a subjective attitude of whiteness.” (p. 132)
“But the Antillean does not consider himself Black; he considers himself Antillean. The Black man lives in Africa. Subjectively, intellectually, the Antillean behaves like a white man. However, he is Black. And he will only realize this when he is in Europe; and when someone there speaks of ‘Black,’ he will know they are referring to him as well as to the Senegalese. What conclusion can we draw from all this?” (p. 132)
“What is our proposition? Simply this: when Blacks approach the white world, there is a certain sensitizing action. If the psychic structure reveals itself to be fragile, there is a collapse of the ego. The Black man ceases to behave as an active individual. The meaning of his action will be in the Other (in the form of the white), for only the Other can value him.” (p. 136)
Through his analysis of psychopathology, Fanon studies the notion of the Black man as a representation of the penis, the biological, the sexual power, as well as the Jew as a representation of greed and cunning. Both are, together, representations of Evil in the unconscious of society.
“European civilization, within what Jung calls the collective unconscious, is characterized by the presence of an archetype: the expression of bad instincts, the dark side inherent in every ego, the uncivilized savage, the Black man asleep in every white. And Jung claims to have observed in uncivilized peoples the same psychic structure that reproduces his diagram. Personally, I think Jung was wrong. Moreover, all the peoples he encountered—Pueblo Indians from Arizona or Blacks from Kenya in British East Africa—had more or less traumatizing encounters with whites. We said earlier that, in their salvation, the young Antillean is never Black, and we tried to show what this phenomenon corresponds to. Jung locates the collective unconscious in the inherited brain substance. But the collective unconscious, without the need to resort to genes, is simply the set of prejudices, myths, and collective attitudes of a given group.” (p. 159)
“The collective unconscious does not depend on a cerebral inheritance: it is the consequence of what I would call an unreflected cultural imposition. Nothing surprising, since the Antillean, subjected to the method of waking dream, relives the same fantasies as a European. The fact is that the Antillean has the same collective unconscious as the European. If what has just been said makes sense, we are in a position to announce the following conclusion: it is normal for the Antillean to be Black-phobic.” (p. 162)
“As I realize that the Black is the symbol of sin, I begin to hate it. However, I notice that I am Black. To escape the conflict, there are two solutions. Either I ask others not to pay attention to my color, or, on the contrary, I want them to notice it. I then try to value what is bad—since, unreflectively, I admitted that Black is the color of Evil. To put an end to this neurotic situation, in which I am forced to choose an insane, conflicting solution, fed by fantasies, antagonistic, ultimately inhuman, I have only one solution: to step over this absurd drama that others have created around me, to push aside these two equally unacceptable terms and, through a human particularity, tend towards the universal.” (p. 166)
“The Black problem is not limited to the Blacks who live among whites, but to those Blacks who are exploited, enslaved, humiliated by a capitalist, colonialist society, which is only incidentally white.” (p. 170)
The Black and Recognition
The last chapter of the book is dedicated to a psychological analysis of Antillean Blacks. For Fanon, from the perspective of Adlerian psychology, Blacks are in a state of comparison, so any self-positioning remains dependent on the dismantling of the other.
“The Antillean society is a neurotic society, a ‘comparison’ society. So we move from the individual to the social structure. If there is a flaw, it is not in the ‘soul’ of the individual, but in the ‘soul’ of the environment.” (p. 177)
From the individual point of view:
“As the Black person has always been an inferior, they try to react through a sense of superiority.” (p. 177)
However, Fanon argues that analyzing this complex from an individual perspective leads to conclusions similar to those criticized in Mannoni’s work, which suggests that the position of inferiority is due to the individual rather than imposed by the material reality of their surroundings. “It is the environment, it is society that is responsible for their mystification.” (p. 180)
The Black and Hegel
“A man is only human to the extent that he wants to impose himself on another man in order to be recognized. As long as he is not effectively recognized by the other, it is this other who remains the object of his action. It is from this other, from recognition by this other, that his value and human reality depend. It is in this other that the meaning of his life is condensed.” (p. 180)
Considering that the Black person (at least the Antillean) did not truly fight for their freedom in the Hegelian sense of the struggle for recognition, since freedom came as a white concession rather than a Black conquest (according to Fanon), the author argues that this situation leaves a mark on Black individuals, as if they missed the opportunity to assert themselves as free at the moment when their masters declared them free.
“The former slave demands that his humanity be contested; he desires a struggle, a confrontation. But it is too late: the French Black person is condemned to bite and to be bitten.” (p. 184)
“For the French Black person, the situation is intolerable. Never sure that the white person considers them as a consciousness-in-itself-for-itself, they are continually concerned with discovering resistance, opposition, and contestation.” (p. 184)
“To lead a person to be active, while maintaining within their sphere of influence the respect for fundamental values that make a human world—this is the primary urgency of one who, after having reflected, prepares to act.” (p. 184)
Conclusion
The conclusion of the work is a call to action:
“We do not carry naïveté to the point of believing that appeals to reason or respect for humanity can change reality. For the Black person who works in the sugarcane plantations in Robert, there is only one solution: the struggle. And this struggle, he will undertake and lead not after a Marxist or idealistic analysis, but simply because he can only conceive of his existence through a fight against exploitation, misery, and hunger.” (p. 186)
Indeed, this struggle is not the result of intellectual reasoning, Marxist or idealist analysis, or even the considerations Fanon makes in the book about his past experiences seeking recognition.
“The few working-class companions I had the occasion to meet in Paris never concerned themselves with discovering a Black past. They knew they were Black, but they told me, that doesn’t change anything. And they were completely right. (…) Intellectual alienation is a creation of bourgeois society.” (p. 186)
“Every time a man makes the dignity of the spirit triumph, every time a man says no to any attempt at oppression of his fellow, I feel solidarity with his act.” (p. 187)
“In no way should I strive to resurrect an unjustly ignored Black civilization. I am not a man of the past. I do not want to sing the past at the expense of my present and future.” (p. 187)
“The Indo-Chinese did not revolt because they discovered their own culture, but ‘simply’ because, in various ways, it was no longer possible for them to breathe. (… The Vietnamese who die before the firing squad do not expect their sacrifice to bring back the past. It is in the name of the present and the future that they accept death.” (pp. 187-188)
“There is no Black mission. There is no White burden. One day I wake up in a world where things hurt; a world where they demand that I fight; a world where annihilation or victory are always at stake.” (p. 189)
“I wake up one fine day in the world and assign myself a single right: to demand human behavior from the other. A single duty: never, through my choices, to renounce my freedom.” (p. 189)
“I do not want, above all, to be misunderstood. I am convinced that there is great interest in contacting Black literature or Black architecture from the 3rd century BC. We would be very happy to know that there is a correspondence between such a Black philosopher and Plato. But we do not see, at all, how this fact could change the situation of the eight-year-old children who work in the sugarcane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe.” (p. 190)