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.
Symbols & Motifs
Whiteness and Blackness
On the very first page of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes: "The black is not a man" (1). What he means by this becomes clearer later in the text. Blackness is associated with several ideas that are usually opposed to the notion of "man" or "human": savagery, cannibalism, the body, the genitals, and animality.
Consider the following passage, which brings these ideas together: "As for the Negroes, they have tremendous sexual powers. What do you expect, with all the freedom they have in their jungles! They copulate at all times and in all places. They are really genital. They have so many children that they cannot even count them. Be careful, or they will flood us with little mulattoes" (121). Here, the black man is pictured as a sort of wild animal in heat. The association with the body is obvious: for most of Western history, animals were thought of as purely physical beings without a mental life.
In contrast, whiteness is associated with culture, intelligence, and intellectual achievement. France, which functions as a sort of metonymy for whiteness, is the nation that produced Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, as well as the Antilles' physicians, department heads, and bureaucrats – in short, all those who represent order and civilization, from the ordinary policeman to the great thinker.
Whiteness is associated with moral goodness, while blackness signifies sin and evil: "Is not whiteness in symbols always ascribed in French to Justice, Truth, Virginity? I knew an Antillean who said of another Antillean, 'His body is black, his language is black, his soul must be black too.' This logic is put into daily practice by the white man. The black man is the symbol of Evil and Ugliness" (139).
Whiteness also signifies beauty, culture, and worthiness of love and respect; speaking in the voice of an imagined black man marrying a white woman, Fanon writes, "I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness" (45). Blackness, on the other hand, signifies ugliness, as in this passage in which the speaker experiences whiteness as painful, yet detests his own black "uniform": "All round me the white man, above the sky tears at its navel, the earth rasps under my feet, and there is a white song, a white song. All this whiteness that burns me... I sit down at the fire and I become aware of my uniform. I had not seen it. It is indeed ugly" (125).
The Jew
The Jew functions in Black Skin, White Masks as a kind of foil for the black man; both are victims of racism, though the details of their oppression differ. For Fanon, it is sometimes useful to compare and contrast anti-Semitism and anti-black racism, though ultimately they are instances of the same phenomenon. Fanon cites one of Césaire's political speeches to this effect:
When I turn on my radio, when I hear that Negroes have been lynched in America, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when I turn on my radio, when I learn that Jews have been insulted, mistreated, persecuted, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead (66).
For example, in his discussion of the role stereotypes play in maintaining a white supremacist status quo, Fanon writes, "Just as a Jew who spends money without thinking about it is suspect, a black man who quotes Montesquieu had better be watched" (22). Stereotypes are tools of oppression; racists are extremely resistant to noticing data that do not fit their theory, so each Jewish or black person who does not fit white stereotypes is treated as a dangerous anomaly. The task of the Jew or black man is to resist white pressure to adhere to these stereotypes.
When Fanon criticizes Mannoni's Prospero and Caliban for attributing a "dependency complex" to the pre-contact Malagasy, he argues that Mannoni has essentialized the very trait he purported to explain. In fact, according to Fanon, if there is a dependency complex among the Malagasy, that is more likely the result of colonization. He quotes Sartre, making an analogy between the racist image of the Jew and Mannoni's image of the Malagasy: "The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew […] It is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew" (69).
Still, there are differences between anti-Semitism and anti-black racism. Unlike the black man, Fanon says, "the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness. […] He is a white man, and apart from some rather debatable characteristics, he can sometimes go unnoticed. […] But in my case everything takes on a new guise. I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the 'idea' that others have of me but of my own appearance" (87). And, of course, the details of the racist stereotypes attributed to Jews and black people are different.
Ultimately, however, Fanon views the Jew as his "brother in misery" (92) and in most instances he sees the situation of European Jews as analogous to the situation of blacks in the white world.
Shattering and Reassembling
At several points in the text, Fanon speaks of feeling himself shatter or explode and having to put the pieces of himself back together. For example, Fanon writes about Sartre's "Black Orpheus," "the dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself. It shatters my unreflected position" (102). That is, Sartre's verdict about Négritude destroyed Fanon's original stance toward the movement -- Négritude poetry could no longer serve as a much-needed lifeline once Fanon confronted the idea that it was only a necessary negative moment within a world-historical process leading elsewhere. Fanon repeats again that Sartre "shattered my last illusions" (105). Sartre failed to understand that the black man needed Négritude. All that remains to Fanon is to reassemble himself: " So I took up my negritude, and with tears in my eyes I put its machinery together again. What had been broken to pieces was rebuilt, reconstructed by the intuitive lianas of my hands" (107).
This shattering of the individual also occurs on the social level, with the arrival of the colonizer: "the arrival of the white man in Madagascar shattered not only its horizons but its psychological mechanisms" (72). This parallel between the individual and his society is consistent with Fanon's diagnosis of the neuroses of the individual black subject as a product of his social condition.
On the compulsion the black man feels to fulfill the white world's expectations of him, Fanon writes, "The Negro is a toy in the white man’s hands; so, in order to shatter the hellish cycle, he explodes" (107). Fanon suggests Richard Wright's fictional character, Bigger Thomas, as an example of this phenomenon; one also recalls Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem," which ends "Or does it explode?".
This recurring image suggests the impossibility and paradoxicality of the situation in which the colonial subject finds himself (he shatters or explodes because he is under intense pressure). It also suggests the process of Hegelian dialectic, in which two opposing ideas or states (thesis and antithesis) come into conflict, giving rise to a third, more advanced idea or state (synthesis).
