University of California Black Skin and White Masks by Frantz Fanon Essay And for the reading Frantz Fanon Black skin and white masks, you just need to read from page1 -page 27.2-3 pages, double spaced, not including reference section In essay form (sentences & paragraphs, no bullet points, lists, etc.) Due Friday at 5pm Black Skin, White Masks
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I>86A
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Revolution,
Democracy,
Socialism
Selected Writings
V.I. Lenin
Edited by
Paul Le Blanc
9780745327600
Jewish History,
Jewish Religion
The Weight
of Three
Thousand Years
Israel Shahak
Forewords by
Pappe / Mezvinsky/
Said / Vidal
Black Skin,
White Masks
Frantz Fanon
Forewords by
Homi K.
Bhabha and
Ziauddin Sardar
9780745328485
The
Communist
Manifesto
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels
Introduction by
David Harvey
9780745328461
9780745328409
Theatre of
the Oppressed
Augusto Boal
9780745328386
Catching
History on
the Wing
Race, Culture and
Globalisation
A. Sivanandan
Foreword by
Colin Prescod
9780745328348
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black
skin
white
it
masks
FRANTZ FANON
Translated by Charles Lam Markmann
Forewords by
Ziauddin Sardar and Homi K. Bhabha
PLUTO PRESS
www.plutobooks.com
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Originally published by Editions de Seuil, France, 1952 as Peau Noire,
Masques Blanc
First published in the United Kingdom in 1986 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
This new edition published 2008
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Editions de Seuil 1952
English translation copyright © Grove Press Inc 1967
The right of Homi K. Bhabha and Ziauddin Sardar to be identified as the
authors of the forewords to this work has been asserted by them in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN
ISBN
978 0 7453 2849 2
978 0 7453 2848 5
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CONTENTS
Foreword to the 2008 edition by Ziauddin Sardar
Foreword to the 1986 edition by Homi K. Bhabha
Translator’s Note
Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
The Negro and Language
The Woman of Color and the White Man
The Man of Color and the White Woman
The So-Called Dependency Complex of Colonized
Peoples
The Fact of Blackness
The Negro and Psychopathology
The Negro and Recognition
By Way of Conclusion
Index
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xxxviii
1
8
28
45
61
82
109
163
174
182
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FOREWORD TO THE 2008 EDITION
Ziauddin Sardar
I think it would be good if certain things were said: Fanon
and the epidemiology of oppression
The opening gambit of Black Skin, White Masks ushers us
towards an imminent experience: the explosion will not happen
today.* But a type of explosion is about to unfold in the text in
front of us, in the motivations it seeks, in the different world it
envisages and aims to create. We are presented with a series of
statements, maxims if you like, both obvious and not so obvious:
I do not come with timeless truths; fervor is the weapon of choice
of the impotent; the black man wants to be white, the white man
slaves to reach a human level. We are left with little doubt we are
confronting a great deal of anger. The resentment takes us to a
particular place: a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and
arid region, where black is not a man, and mankind is digging
into its own flesh to find meaning.
But this not simply a historic landscape, although Black Skin,
White Masks is a historic text, firmly located in time and place.
Fanon’s anger has a strong contemporary echo. It is the silent
scream of all those who toil in abject poverty simply to exist in the
hinterlands and vast conurbations of Africa. It is the resentment of
all those marginalized and firmly located on the fringes in Asia and
Latin America. It is the bitterness of those demonstrating against
the Empire, the superiority complex of the neo-conservative
ideology, and the banality of the “War on Terror.” It is the anger
of all whose cultures, knowledge systems and ways of being that
are ridiculed, demonized, declared inferior and irrational, and, in
some cases, eliminated. This is not just any anger. It is the universal
* Direct quotations from Black Skin, White Masks are set in italics.
vi
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fury against oppression in general, and the perpetual domination
of the Western civilization in particular.
This anger is not a spontaneous phenomenon. It is no gut
reaction, or some recently discovered passion for justice and
equity. Rather, it is an anger borne out of grinding experience,
painfully long self analysis, and even longer thought and reflection.
As such, it is a guarded anger, directed at a specific, long term
desire. The desire itself is grounded in self-consciousness: when it
encounters resistance from the other, self-consciousness undergoes
the experience of desire—the first milestone on the road that
leads to dignity. Black Skin, White Masks offers a very particular
definition of dignity. Dignity is not located in seeking equality
with the white man and his civilization: it is not about assuming
the attitudes of the master who has allowed his slaves to eat
at his table. It is about being oneself with all the multiplicities,
systems and contradictions of one’s own ways of being, doing
and knowing. It is about being true to one’s Self. Black Skin,
White Masks charts the author’s own journey of discovering his
dignity through an interrogation of his own Self—a journey that
will not be unfamiliar to all those who have been forced to endure
western civilization.
1. I was born in the Antilles
Frantz Omar Fanon, born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France,
in the French colony of Martinique, was a complex figure, with
multiple selves. He was, as he tells us, from Antilles but he ended
his life thinking of himself as an Algerian. His parents belonged
to the middle class community of the island: father a descendant
of slaves, mother of mixed French parenthood. In Fort-de-France,
he studied at Lycée Schoelcher, where one of his teachers was
poet and writer Aimé Césaire. Césaire’s passionate denouncement
of colonial racism had a major influence on the impressionable
Fanon. As a young dissident, he agitated against the Vichy regime
in the Antilles and traveled to Dominica to support the French
resistance in the Caribbean. Soon afterwards, he found himself in
France where he joined the resistance against the occupying forces
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BL AC K S KI N, WHI TE M A SKS
of Nazi Germany. While serving in the military, Fanon experienced
racism on a daily basis. In France, he noticed that French women
avoided black soldiers who were sacrificing their lives to liberate
them. He was wounded; and was awarded the Croix de Guerre
for bravery during his service in the Free French forces.
After the War, Fanon won a scholarship to study medicine and
psychiatry in Lyon.
While still a student he met José Dublé, a French woman who
shared his convictions against racism and colonialism. The couple
married in 1952, had one son, and stayed together for the rest of
their lives. Fanon also began to use psychoanalysis to study the
effects of racism on individuals, particularly its impact on the selfperception of blacks themselves. During the 1950s metropolitan
France was a center of revolutionary philosophy and a magnet
for writers, thinkers and activists from Africa. Fanon imbibed the
ideas of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre; and became friends with
Octave Mannoni, French psychoanalyst and author of Psychology
of Colonization. As a young man searching for his own identity in
a racist society, Fanon identified with the African freedom fighters
who came to France seeking allies against European colonialism.
He began to define a new black identity; and became actively
involved in the anti-colonialist struggle. So when, in 1953, he
was offered a job as head of the psychiatric department of BildaJoinville Hospital in Algiers he jumped at the opportunity.
Fanon arrived in Algeria just as the colony was on the verge of
a full blown, violent struggle against the French. He was appalled
by the racist treatment of Algerians and the disparity he witnessed
between the living standards of the European colonizers and
the indigenous Arab population. He developed a close rapport
with the Algerian poor and used group therapy to help, as well
as study, his patients. There was intellectual ferment too. A
major event of 1954 was the publication of Vacation de l’Islam
by the Algerian social philosopher Malek Bennabi. Published
to synchronize with the outbreak of the Algerian revolution,
Vacation de l’Islam presented the radical concept of “colonisibilité”: the historical process through which Algeria, and other
Muslim countries, declined culturally and intellectually to a stage
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where colonialism becomes a “historical necessity.” Bennabi, who
like Fanon spent most of his life struggling against French racism,
distinguished between “a country simply conquered and occupied
and a colonised country.”1 The latter had lost its own cultural
bearings and internalized the idea of the inherent superiority of the
colonizing culture. Fanon and Bennabi never met; but it is difficult
to imagine their work did not fertilize each other’s thought.
The French response to the 1954 Algerian revolt was brutal,
involving torture, killing, physical abuse and barbaric repression.
For two years Fanon secretly supported the revolutionaries. Then,
in 1956, he resigned his post and openly joined the National
Liberation Front (FLN). He moved to Tunis, where he worked
for Manouba Clinic and Neuropsychiatric Center and founded
the radical magazine Moudjahid (from Jihad, meaning freedom
fighter). Soon he acquired a reputation as a leading ideologue of
the Algerian revolution. He received many death threats from the
French and their sympathizers—which only served to strengthen
his resolve. By now, Fanon identified himself as an Algerian.
He traveled throughout Africa speaking on behalf of the FLN;
and even served as an ambassador to Ghana on behalf of the
provisional government of Algeria.
Fanon did not live to see Algeria acquire full independence.
While still in Ghana he was diagnosed with leukemia. He went
first to the Soviet Union for treatment; and later to the United
States. He died in Washington on 6 December 1961.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Fanon was hailed as a
revolutionary writer, a hero of the Third World and anti-colonial
movement. He wrote his most influential book, The Wretched of
the Earth, just before his death. Published in 1961, with a preface
by Sartre, it became a key text for radical students and served as
an inspiration for the Black Power movement in the United States.
While its endorsement of violence is problematic, The Wretched
of the Earth offers one of the most penetrating analyses of the
social psychology of colonialism. But Fanon’s celebrity collapsed
almost as quickly as the Berlin Wall and he was even forgotten in
Algeria which he claimed as his own. Conservative writers have
reacted against his views on violence and leftist intellectuals have
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dismissed his revolutionary statements as outdated and naïve. But
the arrival of postcolonial studies in the 1990s heralded a new
interest in Fanon. Today, Fanon waits to be rediscovered by a new
generation burning with a desire for change—the very emotion
that motivated Fanon to set sail from Martinique.
2. The architecture of this book is rooted in the temporal
Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks when he was 27. Published
in 1952, it was his first and perhaps most enduring book. And it
was ignored. Its significance was recognized only after the death
of the author, particularly after the publication of the English
translation a decade and a half later in 1967. It was a year when
anti-war campaigning was at its height; and student strikes and
protests, that began at Columbia University, New York, started to
spread like wildfire across the United States and Europe. Martin
Luther King was leading the civil rights movement and was to
be assassinated a year later. Advocates of black power were
criticizing attempts to assimilate and integrate black people. The
book caught the imagination of all who argued for and promoted
the idea of black consciousness. It became the bible of radical
students, in Paris and London, outraged at the exploitation of
the Third World.
Black Skin, White Masks was the first book to investigate
the psychology of colonialism. It examines how colonialism
is internalized by the colonized, how an inferiority complex is
inculcated, and how, through the mechanism of racism, black
people end up emulating their oppressors. It is due to the sensitivities
of Fanon, says Ashis Nandy, that “we know something about the
interpersonal patterns which constituted the colonial situation,
particularly in Africa.”2 Fanon began a process of psychoanalytic
deconstruction that was developed further first by Nandy in The
Intimate Enemy and then by Ngugi wa Thiong in Decolonising
the Mind (1986). Other theorists of colonial subjectivity have
followed in their footsteps.
Fanon writes from the perspective of a colonized subject. He is
a subject with a direct experience of racism who has developed a
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natural and intense hatred of racism. When it comes to experience,
this is no ordinary subject: already the author has fought for the
resistance in the Caribbean and France, has been wounded near
the Swiss border, and received a citation for courage. He has a
professional interest in psychoanalysis and speaks of Sigmund
Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Gustav Jung without much
distinction. He is going to offer us a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem, he says. But we can be sure that this
is not a therapy session. Fanon is no armchair philosopher or
academic theorist. He has a more urgent and pressing thing on
his mind: liberation.
There is an urgency to Black Skin, White Masks that bursts
from its pages. The text is full of discontinuities, changes in style,
merging of genres, dramatic movement from analysis to pronouncements, switches from objective scientific discussion to deep
subjectivity, transfers from theory to journalism, complex use of
extended metaphors, and, not least, a number of apparent contradictions. As a genuine, and dare I say “old fashioned” polymath,
Fanon is not afraid to use any and all the tools and methods
at his disposal: Marxism, psychoanalysis, literary criticism,
medical dissection, and good old aphorisms. And he is just as
happy to subvert them—a livid subversion that some would see
as contradiction. But above all the text has an immediacy that
engages and stirs us. We can feel a soul in turmoil, hear a voice
that speaks directly to us, and see the injustices described being
lived in front of our eyes. This is most evident in the chapter on
“The Fact of Blackness.” Here, Fanon breaks out of all convention
and simply lets his stream of consciousness wash on to the paper.
All this whiteness that burns me. I sit down at the fire and became
aware of my uniform. I had not seen it. It is indeed ugly. I stop
there, for who can tell me what beauty is? This directness, this
simmering anger, makes us uncomfortable because “civilized
society” does not like uncomfortable truths and naked honesty.
But this is exactly what makes Black Skin, White Masks such a
powerful and lasting indictment of western civilization.
There is little point, I think, in accusing Fanon of sexism and
gender bias. It is indeed true, as Bart Moore-Gilbert suggests, that
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Black Skin, White Masks “discriminates pointedly between the
experiences of men and women of colour.”3 But who used gender
neutral language in the 1950s? And yes, Fanon can be used both to
attack and defend European humanism. That’s because European
humanism does have a few redeeming features along with its
totalizing tendencies. He is critical of European universalism
yet uses the discourse of psychoanalysis to reveal the emotional
anomalies responsible for the resulting complexes because one
can distance oneself from certain varieties of universalism and get
closer to certain other notions of universal thought and values.
Fanon is a contextual thinker and embraces that which makes
most sense to him in the context of his dilemmas.
When reading Black Skin, White Masks one ought to keep
the time and circumstances in which it was written firmly in
mind. This is a dynamic text written in the heat of an intense,
and often bloody, liberation struggle. It emerged from a lifeand-death struggle, an individual as well as a collective struggle,
concerned with the survival of the body as well as the survival of
the soul. The struggle is concerned as much with freedom from
colonialism as with liberation from the suffocating embrace of
Europe, and the pretensions of its civilization to be the universal
destiny of all humanity. The text changes and unfolds itself as
the experiences of the author transform and change him, as he
suffocates, gasps, twists, struggles, and turns his back on the
degradation of those who would make man a mere mechanism.
For Fanon, the struggle is nothing less than an attempt to survive,
to breathe the air of liberty.
We need to see the context. But we also need to lift our
perceptions to see its global message. For we all desire what
Fanon wants.
3. What does the black man want?
At first sight, Fanon is rather hard on the “black man.” He is
supposed to be a good nigger who even lacks the advantage
of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell. But
Fanon’s anger is directed not towards the “black man” but the
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proposition that he is required not only to be black but he must
be black in relation to the white man. It is the internalization,
or rather as Fanon calls it epidermalization, of this inferiority
that concerns him. When the black man comes into contact with
the white world he goes through an experience of sensitization.
His ego collapses. His self-esteem evaporates. He ceases to be a
self-motivated person. The entire purpose of his behavior is to
emulate the white man, to become like him, and thus hope to be
accepted as a man. It is the dynamic of inferiority that concerns
Fanon; and which ultimately he wishes to eliminate. This is the
declared intention of his study: to enable the man of color to
understand … the psychological elements that can alienate his
fellow Negro.
Whiteness, Fanon asserts, has become a symbol of purity, of
Justice, Truth, Virginity. It defines what it means to be civilized,
modern and human. That is why the Negro knows nothing
of the cost of freedom; when he has fought for Liberty and
Justice … these were always white liberty and white justice;
that is, values secreted by his masters. Blackness represents
the diametrical opposite: in the collective unconsciousness, it
stands for ugliness, sin, darkness, immorality. Even the dictionary
definition of white means clean and pure. We can find, in Roget’s
Thesaurus, over 134 synonyms for whiteness, most with positive
connotations. In contrast, Roget’s Thesaurus tells us black means
dirty, prohibited and funerea…
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