Black Skin, White Masks

"The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter – that is, he will come closer to being a real human being – in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language."

Fanon introduces the idea that whiteness and humanity are thought of as one and the same; a black man is not considered fully human. Language is one of the ways in which black people attempt to 'whiten' themselves – that is, to be accepted as human beings – and consequently one of the ways that racist systems are reproduced. 

"The black man who arrives in France changes because to him the country represents the Tabernacle; he changes not only because it is from France that he received his knowledge of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, but also because France gave him his physicians, his department heads, his innumerable little functionaries – from the sergeant-major 'fifteen years in the service' to the policeman who was born in Panissières. There is a kind of magic vault of distance, and the man who is leaving next week for France creates round himself a magic circle in which the words Paris, Marseille, Sorbonne, Pigalle become the keys to the vault. He leaves for the pier, and the amputation of his being diminishes as the silhouette of his ship grows clearer. In the eyes of those who have come to see him off he can read the evidence of his own mutation, his power. 'Good-by bandanna, good-by straw hat…."

This passage depicts the enormous symbolic power with which France is invested in the Antillean mind. The young Antillean who is leaving for France feels that he is getting closer to achieving his full potential and to finally making contact with Culture.

"Ah, yes, as you can see, by calling on humanity, on the belief in dignity, on love, on charity, it would be easy to prove, or to win the admission, that the black is the equal of the white. But my purpose is quite different: What I want to do is help the black man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been developed by the colonial environment."

Fanon's aim is therapeutic: he intends to help the colonized subject to heal.

"Yes, the black man is supposed to be a good nigger; once this has been laid down, the rest follows of itself. To make him talk pidgin is to fasten him to the effigy of him, to snare him, to imprison him, the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance for which he is not responsible. And naturally, just as a Jew who spends money without thinking about it is suspect, a black man who quotes Montesquieu had better be watched. Please understand me: watched in the sense that he is starting something. Certainly I do not contend that the black student is suspect to his fellows or to his teachers. But outside university circles there is an army of fools: What is important is not to educate them, but to teach the Negro not to be the slave of their archetypes."

Fanon emphasizes the liberational nature of his project – although the white man holds false beliefs about the black man, Fanon focuses not on him but on the black man, whom he wants to help liberate himself from the stereotypes and expectations that limit him.

“I am white: that is to say that I possess beauty and virtue, which have never been black. I am the color of the daylight …. I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo. If I am black, it is not the result of a curse, but it is because, having offered my skin, I have been able to absorb all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a ray of sunlight under the earth….”

Fanon describes the standard symbolism of whiteness. In this particular passage, he leaves out the negative connotations of blackness and instead gives voice to a more positive (though still problematic) view of blackness. Adherence to a notion of black people as possessing a unique "soul" and connection to the earth is one of the "moments" the speaker passes through in Chapter 6.

"We must see whether it is possible for the black man to overcome his feeling of insignificance, to rid his life of the compulsive quality that makes it so like the behavior of the phobic. Affect is exacerbated in the Negro, he is full of rage because he feels small, he suffers from an inadequacy in all human communication, and all these factors chain him with an unbearable insularity."

This passage, which immediately follows Fanon's mention of an Antillean girl who kept a list of nightclubs in Paris where there was no chance of running into other black people, suggests the isolation that results from the black Negrophobic's rejection of himself and his community. According to Fanon, the only way out of this insularity is through the white world, specifically through becoming like or gaining the approval of the white man.

“I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white. Now - and this is a form of recognition that Hegel had not envisaged - who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man.”

Here, Fanon illustrates the black inferiority complex within a relationship between a black man and a white woman. Since whiteness is synonymous with moral goodness and intellect, the black man wants to be acknowledged "as white."

"Making people ashamed of their existence, Jean-Paul Sartre said. Yes: teaching them to become aware of the potentials they have forbidden themselves, of the passivity they have paraded in just those situations in which what is needed is to hold oneself, like a sliver, to the heart of the world, to interrupt if necessary the rhythm of the world, to upset, if necessary, the chain of command, but in any case, and most assuredly, to stand up to the world." 

Fanon recalls a phrase of Sartre's and riffs on it, elaborating his own vision for his psychoanalytic work. While he identifies black neuroses as resulting from the racist colonial system, he also holds each individual responsible for asserting himself and insisting upon his own worth.

“In this work I have made it a point to convey the misery of the black man. Physically and affectively. I have not wished to be objective. Besides, that would be dishonest: It is not possible for me to be objective.”

Scholarly and scientific work usually aims for objectivity. However, Fanon openly rejects objectivity, aiming instead to provide a deeply personal account of the phenomenology of blackness.

“When one tries to examine the structure of this or that form of exploitation from an abstract point of view, one simply turns one's back on the major, basic problem, which is that of restoring man to his proper place.”

According to Fanon, attempts to understand oppression should not be mere intellectual exercises; they should serve the practical and liberational purposes of improving individuals' mental health and achieving social justice.

“Colonial racism is no different from any other racism. Anti-Semitism hits me head-on: I am enraged, I am bled white by an appalling battle, I am deprived of the possibility of being a man. I cannot disassociate myself from the future that is proposed for my brother. Every one of my acts commits me as a man. Every one of my silences, every one of my cowardices reveals me as a man.”

This is one of several passages in which Fanon declares his solidarity with other victims of racism, and refuses to engage in discussions about which racism is "worse."

“The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew: that is the simple truth from which we must start …. It is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew.”

Here, Fanon is summarizing the views of Jean-Paul Sartre. The idea is that racial identities are socially constructed, rather than embodying some essential set of characteristics belonging to the race. The European idea of "the Jew" is an idea created by the anti-Semite; it is derived neither from historical fact nor individual experience, but from hatred.

“A Malagasy is a Malagasy; or, rather, no, not he is a Malagasy but, rather, in an absolute sense he ‘lives’ his Malagasyhood. If he is a Malagasy, it is because the white man has come, and if at a certain stage he has been led to ask himself whether he is indeed a man, it is because his reality as a man has been challenged. In other words, I begin to suffer from not being a white man to the degree that the white man imposes discrimination on me, makes me a colonized native, robs me of all worth, all individuality, tells me that I am a parasite on the world, that I must bring myself as quickly as possible into step with the white world, ‘that I am a brute beast, that my people and I are like a walking dung-heap that disgustingly fertilizes sweet sugar cane and silky cotton, that I have no use in the world.’ Then I will quite simply try to make myself white: that is, I will compel the white man to acknowledge that I am human.”

Prior to the colonial encounter, a Malagasy simply lives his life (according, of course, to the customs and norms of his time and place). It is only the encounter with the white man – and with the racist ideology and exploitation he brings -- that prompts him to compare himself with the white man and question his own humanity.

“Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought lost, and by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it. But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self.”

The motif of shattering and re-assembling oneself recurs throughout the chapter and expresses both the feeling of rupture one feels when attempting to reason with a completely irrational force and the violation of one’s bodily integrity.

"I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: 'Sho' good eatin.'" 

Fanon describes becoming aware of his blackness and all it entails: the history of slavery and stereotypes.

“My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white you throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up.”

This passage depicts the black man's awareness of his body as the focus of white phobia; the shifting sense of perspective (we see the situation first from the perspective of the black man himself, then from the perspective of the little boy) dramatizes the experience of double consciousness and allows the reader to have a vivid imaginative experience of alienation from his own body.

“The psychoanalysts say that nothing is more traumatizing for the young child than his encounters with what is rational. I would personally say that for a man whose only weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason.”

In this passage, Fanon argues against a piece of psychoanalytical, received wisdom. Black people's experiences differ from those of white people; for a black intellectual like Fanon, the failure of reason to combat irrational racism is extremely traumatic. 

"It was my philosophy professor, a native of the Antilles, who recalled the fact to me one day: 'Whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you.' And I found that he was universally right – by which I mean that I was answerable in my body and my heart for what was done to my brother. Later I realized that he meant, quite simply, an anti-Semite is inevitably anti-Negro."

Fanon recalls his professor's statement, and understands in retrospect that he read more into it than was intended. Still, he accepts his original conclusion – that each person is responsible for defending others – as correct. 

"So here we have the Negro rehabilitated, 'standing before the bar,' ruling the world with his intuition, the Negro recognized, set on his feet again, sought after, taken up, and he is a Negro – no, he is not a Negro but the Negro, exciting the fecund antennae of the world, placed in the foreground of the world, raining his poetic power on the world, 'open to all the breaths of the world.' I embrace the world! I am the world! The white man has never understood this magic substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself alone. He finds himself predestined master of this world. He enslaves it. An acquisitive relation is established between the world and him. But there exist other values that fit only my forms. Like a magician, I robbed the white man of 'a certain world,' forever after lost to him and his. When that happened, the white man must have been rocked backward by a force that he could not identify, so little used as he is to such reactions. Somewhere beyond the objective world of farms and banana trees and rubber trees, I had subtly brought the real world into being. The essence of the world was my fortune. Between the world and me a relation of coexistence was established. I had discovered the primeval One."

Here, Fanon expresses an embrace of "irrational blackness," a stance which glorifies the black man's supposedly more "soulful," holistic, and harmonious relation to the natural world.

"The black schoolboy in the Antilles, who in his lessons is forever talking about 'our ancestors, the Gauls,' identifies himself with the explorer, the bringer of civilization, the white man who carries truth to savages – an all-white truth."

Antilleans do not think of themselves as black; due in part to the Antillean educational system, they consider themselves French, and think of black people as those who live in Africa.

“If the question of practical solidarity with a given past ever arose for me, it did so only to the extent to which I was committed to myself and to my neighbor to fight for all my life and with all my strength so that never again would a people on the earth be subjugated. It was not the black world that laid down my course of conduct. My black skin is not the wrapping of specific values.”

Here, Fanon expresses solidarity with all struggles against oppression and rejects racial essentialism.

"There is no Negro mission. There is no white burden."

Although Black Skin, White Masks is explicitly about race, and Fanon repeatedly argues that the black inferiority complex is not an individual disorder, but a social one, the ultimate goal of Fanon's project is actually to liberate the individual from his neuroses and make it possible for him to live as an individual – neither black, nor white, but simply the individual he is. 

"The Negro is not. Any more than the white man. Both must turn their backs on the inhuman voices which were those of their respective ancestors in order that authentic communication be possible. Before it can adopt a positive voice, freedom requires an effort at disalienation."

Although Fanon believes that it is important to address racial injustice, he does not think that identification with one's race is an end in itself – for him, all people are radically free, and can only truly avail themselves of this freedom once they have eliminated their racial neuroses.