Black skin white Masks

 

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925. During World War II Fanon enlisted in the French army and was initially sent with allied forces to Casablanca, Morocco, yet was transferred to France where he fought and was wounded in the battle at Colmar, in northern France. After the war Fanon studied medicine in France, where he specialized in psychiatry. It was while studying in France that Fanon wrote his first book, entitled Black Skin, White Masks (1952), a study of the black subjugation in the western white world.

Few modern voices have had as profound an impact on the black identity and critical race theory as Frantz Fanon’s, and Black Skin, White Masks represents some of his most important work. Fanon’s masterwork is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers.

A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements internationally, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today from one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history.

There is but one destiny for the black man. And it is white

This pessimistic statement helps Fanon to explain the weight of the social and psychological pressures on "the black man." What the statement means is that the only path through life for black men is that laid out by white culture and society. Black men either submit to this "one destiny" or they suffer. The word "destiny" strongly implies inevitability. It is not a situation that can be easily resisted. Throughout, Fanon identifies his subject of study primarily as male. This is partly because he is drawing heavily on his own experience.

All colonized people ... position themselves in relation to the civilizing language.

Language is a subject of central importance in Fanon's account of colonialism. Language was primarily a tool of colonial (and postcolonial) authorities. This is indicated by its description as "the civilizing language." To speak French correctly was to be civilized and to gain access to the culture of the French establishment. To do otherwise was to be excluded. But the colonized have an active role. They "position themselves" by accepting or rejecting the colonizer's language. For Fanon, the colonized are victims, but they are not passive, and the colonizer can be resisted.

The 'Negro' is the savage, whereas the student is civilized.

Fanon shows another way in which the black person is sorted into an inferior category. This time, he draws on his own experiences. Fanon himself was a student of color in France. He shows in this passage the contradiction between different social roles and mental categories. Students have "correct" French and other qualities that separate them from the racial category "Negro." As the passage reveals, it would be impossible to be a "Negro student" because a "Negro" could never study or possess the cultural and personal qualities to be a "student." Fanon wishes to show how the confusing and incoherent sorting of people of color into categories, founded on racial judgments, is a confusing and distressing experience for the subject of racism.

 I was responsible not only for my body, but also for my race and my ancestors. 

Fanon, in this passage, describes another aspect of being put under the colonizer's gaze. It is not only he that is being judged, but all people of color. A person can only be fully in control of themselves ("responsible only for my body"), but the subject of the colonizer is made to feel the weight of pressure on all people who are put into the colonizer's categories. He is not taken on his own merits, as a person, but as an example of his "race" and his "ancestors." Following this logic, readers see that all others of his "race" are judged in the same way, as are the ancestors. In an elegant passage Fanon summarizes the vast weight of pressure that he feels when under this kind of judgment—the weight all people of color feel.

A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of not existing.

Fanon takes on the idea that people of color have a feeling of "inferiority." That is, they are made to feel lesser than and unworthy of the dominant white culture. Fanon suggests it is worse than that. People of color are made to feel as if they do not exist at all. They are not real persons. They represent a set of stereotypes. Their treatment causes them to internalize this as a "feeling." It is, again, not enough that people of color are treated in a particular way. It is that they are made to feel it themselves. What Fanon is describing here can accurately be called "dehumanization," both from the colonizer and felt deeply within oneself.