38 pages • 1 hour read
Frantz FanonBlack Skin, White Masks
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1952A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
The Introduction sets out the program of Black Skin, White Masks, along with the tone for the rest of the investigation.
The basic premise of Black Skin, White Masks is that the encounter between white European colonizer and black colonized subject gives rise to a unique set of psychopathologies. Specifically, white men consider themselves superior to black men, and black men are driven to prove that they are the intellectual equals of white men. Fanon’s aimin Black Skin, White Masks is to understand the “massive psychoexistential complex” (5) created by this relationship between blacks and whites and, by analyzing this complex, to destroy it and thereby achieve “the liberation of the man of color from himself” (2).
As Fanon explains, when he speaks of “the black man” he has primarily Antilleans (people from the French island colonies in the Caribbean) in mind, but also uses the word more broadly as a shorthand for all people of African descent who are native to European (especially French) colonies or who were born in European countries. Thus, “the black man” functions as a synonym for “the colonized subject.” When he speaks of “black psychology” he emphatically does not mean the psychology of pre-contact peoples in Africa, or Africans who have never been colonial subjects, which he takes to be fundamentally different from that of the colonized subject.
Fanon acknowledges that although his study is a psychological one, focused on the inferiority complex of the black man, the causes of this complex are not only psychological, but economic as well. Moreover, “the black man’s alienation is not an individual question” (4), but rather a social one. That is, this alienation is common to black people and is brought about by an anti-black society. Thus, overcoming this psychological complex requires both psychoanalysis and social change, namely the elimination of an oppressive social structure.
Chapter 1: "The Negro and Language"
In this chapter, Fanon analyzes the complex and multifaceted role language plays in reproducing colonial power structures and shaping the psychology of the colonized subject. Speaking a language involves taking on a set of ideas and values, and the languages of the French colonial world are shot through with a racist ideology according to which whiteness is associated with intelligence, civilization, social and cultural capital, and humanity, whereas blackness is coded as savage, illiterate, and sub-human. In virtue of the language he speaks, the black colonial subject inhabits and internalizes this worldview.
Two languages are relevant to Fanon's study: French and creole. French can be divided into three main varieties. In order of descending prestige, they are: the French spoken in France (“French-French”); the French spoken in the Antilles; and the French spoken in Senegal.
This hierarchy of languages corresponds to a racial hierarchy, with the white colonizer at the top, black Africans at the bottom, and those of varying degrees of “whiteness” in the middle, where “whiteness” is understood both in racial terms (i.e. having some white ancestors, as do most Antilleans) and in cultural and symbolic terms.
French-French is the prestige language, the language of intellectual life. It is spoken by the colonizer and by educated, upwardly-mobile black people. Mastery of French enables one to practice a learned profession; it also carries enormous symbolic power. The better a colonial subject speaks French-French, the more his humanity is recognized: “The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter -- that is, he will come closer to being a real human being -- in direct ration to his mastery of the French language” (8). Indeed, a black person who has mastered French is sometimes said to be “one of us”, where “us” means “white people” (49). As Fanon points out, the Antillean who strives to master French-French aims not only to convince others of his humanity, but also, because he has internalized white racism, to convince himself. Similarly,Senegalese immigrants to France sometimes learn creole in order to pass as Antillean -- that is, they use creole to become marginally whiter, just as Antilleans use French to do the same.
However, mastery of language and the “whitening” that accompany it are alienating, for in embracing whiteness the black man is implicitly rejecting himself, his family, and his community. The chapter is rife with examples of Antilleans who return home from France prepared to reject everything that makes them black Antilleans rather than white Frenchmen: they refuse to speak creole, claim not to be able to endure the Caribbean climate, and so on. All the same, no matter how elegant his French and perfect his knowledge of French intellectual and literary culture, a black man can never truly become white, either literally or symbolically. The perfect French of a highly-educated black intellectual does not prevent white doctors from speaking to him in the pidgin French they attribute to black “savages,” and a black man speaking French is always looked upon as an anomaly. Thus, although language allows the black man to "whiten" himself to some extent, this "whitening" is never complete or final, and language is also used to keep the black man "in his place."
Chapter 2: "The Woman of Color and the White Man"
Fanon defines authentic love as “wishing for others what one postulates for oneself, when that postulation unites the permanent values of human reality” (28). Only a healthy psychology is capable of this kind of love; a psyche riddled with unresolved unconscious conflicts is not. In this chapter Fanon examines how the psychological conflicts resulting from black women’s internalized anti-black racism result in inauthentic intimate relationships. Specifically, he argues that black women may become obsessed with marrying white men in an effort to “become white.”
Fanon’s analysis centers on two texts. The first is a semi-autobiographical novel called Je suis Martiniquaise, in which the black Martinican Mayotte Capécia recounts her submissive, worshipful love for a white man whose only virtue appears to be his whiteness. The second text is Abdoulaye Sadji’s Nini, in which a mixed-race woman, Nini, rejects a devoted black suitor. Capécia’s affair ends with her blond, blue-eyed French lover, André, abandoning her and their child. Nini, whose ambition is to marry a white man, takes the black accountant Mactar’s declaration of love as a grievous affront, as does the rest of mulatto society; in contrast, when a white man in their community proposes to a mixed-race woman, the news is received as “delightful, more delightful than all the promises in the world” (40).
According to Fanon’s analysis, both Capécia and Nini display the same obsessive neurotic tendency. Both feel inferior because of their blackness, and are determined to escape these feelings of inferiority by marrying, or at least gaining the approval of, white men -- this is what motivates them, and not their love of any individual white man. Fanon argues that they are typical in their desire to “preserve the race” (33), not in the sense of preserving the uniqueness of the black race, but in the sense of whitening the race (by marrying the whitest man possible and giving birth to children whiter than oneself). This explains why the mulatto society in Sadji’s story receives the news that a white man has proposed to a mulatto woman with such joy: the mixed-race woman, Dédée, does not only achieve her own ambition, her marriage fulfils a shared infantile fantasy of gaining white approval.
According to Fanon’s definition of authentic love, neither Nini nor Capécia are motivated by true love. He ends the chapter by reminding the reader that his ultimate aim is to propose a solution to the psychopathology he has described: “What I insist is that the poison must be eliminated once and for all” (44). In other words, the internalized anti-black racism that motivates women like Nini and Capécia must be eliminated so they can experience authentic love.
Chapter 3: "The Man of Color and the White Woman"
In this chapter, Fanon continues his exploration of the colonized black subject’s neuroses. His focus this time is Jean Veneuse, the protagonist of René Maran’s autobiographical novel Un homme pareil aux autres. Veneuse, a black intellectual who came to France from the Antilles as a child, falls in love with a white woman, Andrée Marielle, who also loves him. A healthy person would simply rejoice in this love, but Veneuse cannot, for he “represents [...] a certain mode of behavior in a neurotic who by coincidence is black” (58). Veneuse knows the stereotype concerning black men’s sexual appetite for white women and worries that by wanting to marry Andrée he may be subconsciously using her to take revenge for centuries of racial injustice. Despite their mutual love, he tells Andrée that they cannot be together.
As Fanon notes, a classical Freudian analysis would interpret Veneuse, with his introverted character, orphan childhood, and feelings of betrayal by both the black and white races, as an “abandonment neurotic.” On the one hand, he lacks self-esteem and is wholly dependent on others for his sense of worth; on the other hand, he is so frightened of abandonment that he enacts a preemptive revenge: he abandons others before they have the chance to abandon him.
This analysis is accurate as far as it goes; Veneuse certainly is an abandonment-neurotic, insatiable in his demand for proofs of Andrée’s love and unable to feel secure in the knowledge that his own love is returned. However, this is one of the places where classical analysis alone proves insufficient. Veneuse is not only an abandonment-neurotic; he is specifically a black abandonment-neurotic, and exhibits a specifically black symptom. Veneuse not only seeks proofs from Andrée of her love; he also seeks approval of and permission for his love from a third party -- the white man.
Veneuse writes to his white friend Coulanges, seeking his approval for a marriage to Andrée. Coulanges gives Veneuse the response he seeks -- he encourages him to accept Andrée’s love, but in doing so emphasizes Veneuse’s whiteness: “In fact you are like us -- you are ‘us.’ Your thoughts are ours. You behave as we behave [...]. You think of yourself -- others think of you -- as a Negro? Utterly mistaken! You merely look like one” (49). Coulanges’ response gives Veneuse permission to love Andrée and be loved by her, but in a way that actually underscores the basic impossibility of marriage between a white woman and a black man.
Introduction-Chapter 3 Analysis
The Introduction provides a number of clues to Fanon’s method and approach. First, his use of language ranges from poetic, elliptical, and suggestive (1) to crisp and analytical (3); this refusal to rely on “objective” language alone reflects Fanon’s commitment to providing a first-person account of lived experience.
"At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man" (1), Fanon writes in the Introduction. He means that white people do not recognize black people as fully human and is referring to the European racist imaginary of the black man -- that is, as savage, unintelligent, simple, servile, purely physical (as opposed to intellectual), as well as evil, dangerous, and sexually powerful and predatory. This set of stereotypes is key to Fanon's analysis. He goes on to argue that black people have internalized these stereotypes and identified themselves with the white man. For example, according to Fanon, when the Antillean thinks of “Negroes” he thinks primarily of the Senegalese, who figure in both the white and the colonized consciousness as the embodiment of the "bad black man."
Throughout the book, there are a number of hints and references that indicate Fanon’s existentialist orientation; for instance, “Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies” (2). There are other philosophical influences as well; when Fanon describes the future as “connected to the present to the extent that I consider the present in terms of something to be exceeded” (6), his language is clearly reminiscent of Nietzsche’s, and the voice of Hegel can be heard in Fanon’s characterization of consciousness as “a process of transcendence” (2). Finally, the epigraph from Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1) indicates Fanon’s debt to the Négritude movement in general and to Césaire in particular.
Chapter 2 opens: “Man is motion toward the world and toward his like” (28). Like other existentialist thinkers, Fanon is fundamentally concerned with the way human beings exist in the world and orient themselves to their possibilities. However, he is careful to set his own views about love apart from those of the most well-known existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre (who treated love as a species of frustration), and describes Sartre’s Being and Nothingness as “only an analysis of dishonesty and inauthenticity” (28).
Fanon’s approach to his subject matter in Chapters 2-3 can be considered intersectional. Instead of treating the subject of black-white race relations monolithically, he addresses black women’s relation to white men and black men’s relation to white women separately; the decision to focus on intimate relationships from the perspective of each gender implicitly acknowledges that men’s and women’s experiences of race differ. (Ironically, however, in Chapter 3, one aspect of the pathology appears to be that black men’s and black women’s roles coincide, as each seeks validation from the same source: white men.) Similarly, Fanon’s analysis suggests that one’s blackness is not only a function of one’s ancestors or skin color; “whiteness” and “blackness” are also partially defined by class membership -- “One is white above a certain financial level” (30) -- and one’s language use and mastery (see Chapter 1).
