Black Skin, White Masks

In this chapter, Fanon gives a phenomenological account of blackness based on his own lived experience. The chapter is made up of a series of experiential-theoretical stages in an ongoing attempt to live and cognize his blackness in an anti-black world. The stages in this chapter are not chronological biographical episodes; rather, they are Hegelian “moments,” each of which represents a flawed attempt to come to terms with lived reality and contains an inner conflict that brings about its own end while inaugurating the next moment.

The chapter begins with a white child’s exclamation: “‘Dirty nigger!’ Or simply, ‘Look, a Negro!’” (82). This cry disrupts Fanon’s untroubled sense of his own status as a subject and knower and initiates his struggle with a white world that sees him as a mere object -- a primitive, animalistic being without rationality, intelligence, spiritual yearnings, or a reflective inner life.

When the white world reduces him to his physicality and refuses to recognize his personhood, he first attempts to combat irrational racism with reason: to seek respect on the basis of his intellectual achievements and to demonstrate his equality by appeal to scientific facts that demonstrate that race is not a biological category. However, the white world views his achievements as mere exceptions to the general rulethat black people possess inferior intelligence, and rejects the scientific evidence.

After this failure to stake a claim to rationality, Fanon turns to irrationality and “primitivity,” supposedly the natural and exclusive realm of the black man. He embraces popular notions of black art, culture, and “soul”: the black man is uniquely intuitive, mystically one with the natural world, attuned to emotions -- in short, the black man relates to the world in a more human way than does the white man, whose mechanized existence is no longer fully human and who turns to black culture to restore a bit of what he has lost. This attempt, too, is doomed to failure, for the white man claims superiority here as well: “We have had earth mystics such as you will never approach [...]” (98).

Recourse to a pre-historical, “primitive” genius has failed; perhaps a rehabilitation of black history can establish the black man’s place in the world. After all, “I belonged to a race that had already been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago” (99); the men sold into slavery had been skilled workmen, followers of a beautiful religion, proponents of a sophisticated and highly ethical culture. On this ground, too, Fanon fails. The white man rejects this history as irrelevant to the contemporary world: “What matters now is no longer playing the game of the world but subjugating it with integers and atoms” (100).

This series of failures culminates in an impasse: “Every hand was a losing hand for me. [...] I wanted to be typically Negro -- it was no longer possible. I wanted to be white -- that was a joke. And, when I tried, on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to reclaim my negritude, it was snatched away from me. Proof was presented that my effort was only a term in the dialectic” (101). Here, Fanon is speaking of Sartre’s essay “Black Orpheus,” which argued that the Négritude movement, with its assertion of a unique black culture and aesthetic, is only a temporary phase. Since the movement is explicitly anti-racist and proclaims solidarity with all oppressed peoples, eventually it is bound to give way to a more general movement on behalf of the world proletariat.

Rather than arguing that Sartre is mistaken, Fanon expresses a feeling of loss. While Sartre may be right from the abstract perspective of world history, his negativity is destructive to the living black subject who needs the creative energy, positive self-image, and sense of purpose that Négritude provides. Even if he must eventually abandon Négritude, he needs to do so when he has already outgrown it, and Sartre’s critique intervenes prematurely.