Those colonials who do manage to master the master-language will even then be identified as the ‘remarkable black man who can speak French like a Parisian.’ Inability to speak these languages is a mark of inferiority, even among those upon whom they are imposed: “the more the black Antillean assimilates the French language, the whiter he gets-i.e., the closer he comes to becoming a true human being.” This is the hook which will never break free. It is the imposition of European languages on colonised people which establishes the abiding ground rules of racism. Rather language is his primary focus as the existential ‘operator’: “We attach a fundamental importance to the phenomenon of language and consequently consider the study of language essential for providing us with one element in understanding the black man’s dimension of being-for-others, it being understood that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other.” There is no question but that, as the author says, “White civilization and European culture have imposed an existential deviation on the black man.” But his analysis does not begin with a history of colonialism or slavery or their physical horrors. What holds the book together is a crucial recognition, namely that the source of racism and its operational mechanism is language. What starts as an analysis of the effects of racism on its victims, blossoms into a poetic expression of being black, including the psychological progression through the various stages of escape from the numerous traps of self-image created by a racist society.
Nominally a psychiatrist’s assessment of racial hatred from the point of view of the colonial residents of the island of Martinique, Black Skins, White Masks is actually a phenomenology of racism as relevant today as it was when it was published more than 70 years ago. Recommended for literary and cultural historians. Of course, the second best reason to read the book remains its influence after all, it's hard to read Glissant, Silverman, Hartman, or many others, without first making a pit-stop here. Despite the "vintage" gender politics and analytic practices, Fanon's book conveys a palpable sense of subjective hurt, and also a surprisingly conciliatory desire to forge new, mutually beneficial relationships with white people. These criticisms aside, however, what I think remains most valuable in Black Skin, White Masks is the fact that at heart it's a small, personal book - a meditation on the author's own experiences as a black male intellectual - that can't quite live up to the reputation it has earned as the record of an entire generation. Appiah concedes this point in his introduction to the Grove edition. Perhaps it's just that psychoanalysis has run its course in cultural theory - or perhaps that it's just become so banal, which amounts to roughly the same thing - but I found the long passages on dream interpretations rather dull and not terribly persuasive. (No wonder later writers like bell hooks would lash out against Fanon.) His remarks on white women and homosexual men are equally subjugating: They both want black men to rape them.įor another, Fanon is a trained psychiatrist, and as chapter titles like "The Black Man and Psychopathology" indicate, he is invested in using the psychoanalysic practices of people like the Freuds, Jung, and Lacan to analyze the relation between colonizing and colonized peoples. The greatest irony of the book is that the chapter entitled "The Woman of Color and the White Man" is really a chapter about how black men perceive black women, and its central point is this: Black women bear the children of white men because they believe that by whitening their race they shall earn prestige, and in doing so black women abandon the role they should be playing assuring black men of their virility. He writes that it is in refusing to acknowledge the black man that the white man strips him of his subjectivity, and yet he writes nary a word about the black woman. There is plenty to critique in this book, and I think the urge to critique is heightened by the author's ubiquity.įor one, Fanon is deeply misogynist and homophobic.
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