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.
Themes
Colonial Identity
Black Skin, White Masks is primarily about Antilleans – black French citizens from what was, in Fanon's time, a French colony in the Caribbean. As Fanon notes, everything from history lessons to comic books shapes the young Antillean to think of himself not only as a Frenchman but as a white man, because he identifies with the morally good, civilized and civilizing heroes of children's stories. According to the Antillean understanding of race that Fanon describes, blacks are people who, like the Senegalese, live in Africa and speak "inferior" French. For the young Antillean, the black man is an object of fear and revulsion who epitomizes sin and savagery.
The children of middle-class families like Fanon's were not only educated according to the French system and inculcated into anti-black French ways of thinking, but also frequently traveled to France in order to complete their education. They only learned they were black upon arriving in France, where they were treated as second-class citizens and racial inferiors.
Fanon describes the sense of disorientation and cognitive dissonance that results from this encounter – the Antillean no longer understands who he is. After a lifetime of identifying himself with the white man and considering himself French, he learns that he is in fact black and that his countrymen do not view him as an equal. Moreover, after a lifetime of thinking of himself as good, civilized, and intelligent, and investing black people with all the negative qualities he would like to avoid, he learns that he is a black person. The result is a kind of identity crisis. Upon returning home to the Antilles, he may decide to embrace his blackness by speaking creole, or he may reject his roots, insist on speaking only French-French, and identify himself fully with France and with the white man.
Fanon traces this crisis of identity, showing that it manifests itself in intimate relationships (in which a black partner, feeling him- or herself inferior, seeks approval from a white partner), in intellectual life (as he attempts both to make sense of his condition and to be recognized by the white world as an intellectual peer), and most of all in the psychological life of the individual (who develops certain characteristic neuroses).
Solidarity with Other Oppressed Groups
Fanon emphasizes the notion that all forms of racism are basically the same. Although there are, for example, differences between expressions of anti-Semitism and expressions of anti-black racism, these are differences of detail and not of essentials. For instance, while anti-Semitism tends to take the form of fear that Jews will take one's wealth or social capital – that "they" control the banks, the stock exchange, the government, the universities or media – anti-black racism is fear of the black body itself. The black body is seen by the white world as a genital, as a symbol for animality and physicality, and above all as sexually potent – the fear is not that black people will acquire things of value so much as that "they" will copulate with white women.
This kind of difference is important when it comes to understanding how a given racism is inscribed in a culture, but the structure of racism is the same no matter who the target is. In each case, one group of people is made into an object of fear and revulsion by another, more privileged group of people. Moreover, on the empirical level, people who are anti-Semites are also anti-black and vice-versa.
Recognition of these facts provides a basis for solidarity among oppressed groups. Fanon unequivocally declares that he considers any people's struggle for liberation to be his own. He explicitly mentions Jews several times, and his discussion is informed by Sartre's essay "Anti-Semite and Jew" (1946); in Chapter 8, in particular, he also expresses solidarity with workers' movements. These attitudes are consistent with his ultimate goal: to liberate all people from colonial psychopathologies so that each person is able to embrace their radical human freedom without being encumbered by the past.
Re-engineering "the master's tools"
Fanon engages with a wide range of texts, all of which would have been familiar to Francophone intellectuals of his time, but which vary considerably in terms of discipline and purpose. If there is one thing his critiques of these texts have in common, it is perhaps the notion that the schools of thought developed by white Europeans are not adequate to address the colonial condition. (As Audre Lorde famously said, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.") Many foundational ideas and powerful tools in philosophy and psychology need to be, as it were, discarded or revamped for black use.
For example, Fanon finds Adler's individual psychology unsuited to explain black neuroses, especially the inferiority complex. This is because the black man's sense of inferiority is not rooted in some individual or family trauma; rather, it is the result of a specific set of social circumstances that are common to colonized subjects. Analyzing such neuroses on the individual level overlooks their true etiology and obscures possible methods of treatment.
Similarly, Fanon says of Jung that, although his studies of the "collective unconscious" were meant to make sense of "the childhood of the world," in reality Jung ventured only into the childhood of Europe (146), which he mistook for a universal childhood. That said, Fanon does find the concept of the collective unconscious useful when describing the way that racism and racialized thinking inscribe themselves into black children's view of the world. The collective unconscious, for Fanon, is simply that set of images and symbols – such as the bad black man, or the good and heroic white one -- that one absorbs by virtue of living in a culture, reading its books, and hearing its stories.
One striking exception to Fanon's tendency to repudiate or at least modify the ideas of the other thinkers he discusses is Hegel. Fanon argues that because the colonial subject has not yet achieved recognition from the former master, he is not in the position of Hegel's liberated slave and has not yet achieved full self-consciousness. He suggests that achieving this self-consciousness and overcoming his neuroses requires that he demand recognition. Fanon engages with Hegel not to reject his thought, but rather to make use of it.
