Black Skin, White Masks

An essential analysis of the psychosocial nature of blackness in the context of colonialism. Fanon is perhaps only hampered by his reliance on case studies representing the extremes of psychological conditions to explain and justify his more universal arguments about reactions to blackness. However, the phenomenological nature of the book allows for narrative to lend powerful support to the central thesis of double consciousness and tension that exists in the world he inhabits. It is impossible to ignore the lived experience of the Antillean as presented by Fanon. It calls us to challenge our perceptions, recognize our failings, and most importantly to allow a dialectical process to reimagine our relation to the other.

This is a classic book I had never read until now.
As a cultural work, I was compelled and what I found inside was a mixed bag. Clearly, some of the content, the psychology, the philosophy, certain particular examples came across as pretty dated and of its time. Oh, and there is plenty of misogany and overgeneralizations BUT what resonated with me was the way he articulates the feelings and subjective experiences of black people and/or the colonized.
The trauma. It all seems sadly relevant...still.
And this was written in 1952.

Its not just about black people either.
Anyone who feels like an outsider of one kind or another can tap into these feelings and find them inspiring. To say nothing of Fanon himself, who had a very interesting life.

I really enjoyed Fanon’s psychoanalytical take on racism and postcolonialism, even though it did sometimes delve into the problematic. One shocking passage was when Fanon shares how contemporaneous scientific theory postulated that “the black man is inherently inferior…[because he is] the missing link between ape and man” (13). I had forgotten how emerging Darwinian science attempted to justify white superiority and authority by using evolution to explain racial differences (and conveniently always elevating the White to the superior evolutionary pedestal). In spite of Fanon’s problematic moments, which we can perhaps forgive/understand him for due to his historical time period’s beliefs, Fanon’s analysis of how Black show more people have internalized racism as a defense mechanism is an interesting psychological approach to racism. In addition to the external suffering racism causes, we often forget how racism becomes internalized by both Whites and Blacks, and while White people can successfully navigate a society biased toward their skin color, Black people must navigate both the explicit and implicit racial bias and their mind’s desire to put on a “white mask” and thus allow that racist society’s structure to continue (4). I think this is why Kehinde Andrews in his book "Back to Black" so strongly urges for a complete revolutionary response to Western imperialist systems: not only will a revolutionary change of Western societies stop racist systems, but it will also to protect the physical and mental health of Blacks in the Diaspora, especially since the system not only attacks Black bodies (i.e. police brutality) but also Black minds (i.e. through internalizing racism).

I've often heard that Black Americans feel that they have to “act white” around White people in business settings so that they will be more respected (i.e. respected in a white-dominated community that views “whiteness” as respectability). This line of thinking connects to Fanon’s point that the fracturing of black identity “is a direct consequence of the colonial undertaking” (1) and that we must “liberate the black man from himself” (xii). I think this liberation involves “endlessly creating yourself” as Fanon concludes (204). He desires that “the subjugation of man by man—that is to say, of me by another—cease. May I be allowed to discover and desire man wherever he may be” (206). I think, for Fanon, if Black people “endlessly create” themselves, they are actively fighting the racist society that attempts to conform them into whiteness and force Black people to wear a white mask. Fanon explains, “It is through self-consciousness and renunciation, through a permanent tension of his freedom, that man can create the ideal conditions of existence” (206). I think Fanon advocates for self-actualization, and this self-actualization involves Black people embracing (and perhaps even celebrating, as Aimé Césaire does in the Négritude movement) their blackness and seeing it as a part of their identities, while also developing all other aspects of their identities. I agree with Fanon that the first step in resisting a racist society is freeing one’s self from society’s racist shackles through self-realization, which I interpret to be “endlessly creating yourself.” However, I think Andrews corrects and extends Fanon’s argument: while Fanon does not explicitly advocate for a revolutionary change in Western systems, Andrews underscores that one must radically overthrow a racist society if that society’s foundations are also racist…there is no way to resuscitate this broken system. show less

After 3-4 years of trying to find the motivation to read Fanon, beyond excerpts of his writing, I read "Black Skin, White Masks" within 2 days for a postgraduate course on postcolonial theory.

Rating: 1 thumb up, maybe 1.5.

"Black Skin, White Masks" is a broad Freudian-psychoanalytical study into racism towards and the alienation of black people in white societies through clinical, literary, and personal examples. While Fanon stated at the beginning of his work that his examples were derived from Martinique and ought to be considered limited to just Martinique, it is made clear through a reading of his entire work that "Black Skin, White Masks" aspired to much more than to be restricted to just that Caribbean island.

One cannot doubt the show more conviction of Fanon and the passion in his writing. And one can’t help but be persuaded by his arguments, which have largely become accepted, today. However, I am critical of how Fanon proves his arguments and of the book as a scholarly work.

Question: Is this book (1) a scholarly work or (2) a political manifesto or (3) an ontological manifesto?

In my reading, Fanon began the work by setting it up as one thing and then ended it as something rather different in purpose and meaning. To write this book, which essentially devolves from a scholarly analysis to a very personal, psychologically revolutionary manifesto, Fanon relied too much on personal anecdotes. He also, I believe, gave too much weight to cherry-picked clinical studies and rumours, along with songs, poems, and novels that arguably did not represent the totality of (white or white French) society's views of black people.

While I agree with Fanon's overall thrust, the book is obviously spoiled by the writer's personal life creeping into the pages and, quite arguably, supersedes the work (I will explain later on why this is not really a particularly bad thing if the ideas/subject and author-as-subject balance is done well).

Most of the people who have read Fanon know that "Black Skin, White Masks" was Fanon's first doctoral thesis, know that it was rejected, and know that that rejection by his professors only emboldened him to publish this work. In due time, Fanon found a publisher for the text, Francis Jeanson, and despite an acrimonious start—he accused Jeanson of being a patronizing racist, got the work published and the rest is history, or was it? The last 2 or 1.5 chapters of the work gives the sense that Fanon's true intent with the work was to declare his rebellion from white-dominated society rather than to be a servile doctor of medicine or to submit a scholarly thesis on the Freudian psychological roots of racism inherent in colonialism. That is, it seems that everything that has preceded the last chapter was to build up to Fanon's personal declaration to psychologically and ontologically revolt against mainstream white society.

Okay... but that does not make this a scholarly work. The author should not conclude: The proof is in the pudding and the pudding is me! No, the author’s arguments should have been proven in his or her examples, and that should be sufficient.

What "Black Skin, White Masks" is, is an autobiographical (ontological) manifesto.

The blurring of the lines between author and subject is what I'm getting at. In a scholarly work, the author is firmly separated from his or her subject to achieve a standard of impartiality and rigor. Such is that case in most works of serious literature. Tolstoy did not fight in the Patriotic War against France and he did not write himself into “War and Peace.” The author of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” whoever the hell she is, isn't in the novel and definitely isn't on the receiving end of anything... And yes, there is a rather wide and complicated grey-area that resides Yukio Mishima's "Confessions of a Mask", Proust, and Raymond Radiguet's "Le Diable au corps," but we can divide fiction from truth in those works quite clearly. For the most part, journalism is the same though it occupies the lowest rungs of detachment with gonzo journalism residing on the lowest rung.

Regardless and above all, in scholarly works, fiction, and journalism, the audience (knows) that x and y work does not represent a physical or ontological life or death struggle for the author, because the author has stated as such (or) they understood it as such from reading the book.

Readers do not get that understanding of a scholarly or clinical detachment from "Black Skin, White Masks."

Now, given the subject matter and undoubtedly the inevitable, passionate proximity Fanon had with this work, being a black person and analyzing the roots of racism against blacks, was format that he choose for the book and how he wrote it, appropriate?

My answer is “yes” and “no.”

While his psychoanalysis of literature, media, news reports, and clinical studies are the best and most persuasive parts of the book, the fact that it's book ended by Fanon as scholar-is-author-is-subject spoils it.

I do believe that he could've written two books out of the one he had published: a scholarly work and a personal work. He didn't need to make his life and body a sort of tapestry where he could affix certain ideas from here and there to make his arguments. The way he has written the book makes him less of a scholar than a writer-artist or a performance artist. I believe this, because others have done what he has tried to do while maintaining an author’s detachment, and citing books from my freshmen year: Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Winona LaDuke’s “All Our Relations,” Maude Barlow and Elizabeth May’s “Frederick Street,” Lu Xun’s “The True Story of Ah Q,” and Sandra Steingraber’s “Living Downstream,” which was both a memoir of a cancer patient and an environmental activist’s manifesto built upon sound medical and scientific data.

Steingraber, unlike Fanon, was quite clear about what her book was about: she wanted to spur people and governments to improve the environment so ordinary people like her wouldn’t get cancer. Steingraber, unlike Fanon, alternated between chapters about her cancer’s prognosis and chapters about cases about how pollution devastated ecologies and human communities. I have the feeling that if Fanon did that, alternate between chapters about racism as is and how racism has affected structured and determined his life, then I would’ve liked “Black Skin, White Masks” even more.

However, I do recognize the historical importance of an minority individual putting off the shackles of mainstream society’s need to censor and to subjugate the knowledge and stories of minorities and telling it the way it is, unfiltered and unrepressed, and Fanon was one of those critical people in history and postcolonial studies.

Finally, I found that Fanon gave credit to Hegel and Hegel's master-slave dialectic way too late in his work (Chapter 7 out of 8), especially when his work essentially builds off of Hegel.

Regardless of my concerns, "Black Skin, White Masks" is a seminal work on the psychoanalysis of racism and postcolonial theory. It's good reading in parts and it's relatively short.

Rating (again): 1 thumb up, maybe 1.5. show less

Fanon flayed me. His rich and concise prose, arguments, have considerable breadth for such a slim volume. His points about the culpability of all in a society for the atrocities those in power inflict, is moving, damning, and necessary.

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Returning to Black Skin, White Masks during 2020 only underscored my earlier points. I appreciated Fanon's rhetorical experimentation more this go around, his attempt (as writing is always an attempt) at rendering the phenomenological experience as a Black man in text was confounding and provocative.

This is an extended essay regarding the current dominant culture of the world, the Western Christian one. Can a black man, being conversant with this culture be truly said to be completely black? This is the beginning of the cultural appropriation debate. Well argued.

Fanon is probably a better and more likeable human being than many of his French existentialist contemporaries, with whom he is associated (I am thinking of Sartre specifically). However, the fact this book was written, published, and remains lauded and in print, and that its author went on to such enduring prominence, is a potent expression of what befell the Western world after the disastrous wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Granted that Fanon might have been an okay person, this is a muddled book that for the most part offers either conceits or platitudes. If it has any discernible central thesis at all, Fanon wants a complete break with the past so that a new reciprocally validating humanity can be built by "always show more asking questions". Implicit throughout is an explicitly denied prejudice that it would be effortless for the white man to do this, and that he is morally obliged to. show less