Analysis Of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks

Frantz Fanon was a Martinique-born, Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer whose works are influential in the fields of post colonial studies, Marxism, and critical theory. He was born in 1925 and died in 1961. The quote above is from Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), originally titled as “An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks.” Fanon, in this book is providing a prognosis about the lived experience of the black man. He is concerned with describing the place that is held by blacks in the mid 20th century and illustrates the issues of race and racism and to point the reader toward a better and free future for all men. The quote above shows how oppression gives rise to ways of being. Fanon’s experience and the background of the time period he was living in justifies his hostility when he argues that the black man is constantly trying, but never fully accomplishing, to be white and to integrate into the white man’s world. In this essay I will show the three phases Fanon goes through to reach this conclusion: to escape his blackness,

Citizen, written by Claudia Rankine in 2014, narrates testimonies of systematic racism and every day micro aggressions through poems, essays, scripts and images. Rankine documents the racist encounters through the second person point of view for the reader to feel and understand the effects racism has on the body and mind. This paper will examine hypervisibility and invisibility of the black body embedded in the novel because of decades of racism. Rankine emphasizes the sensory emotions and feelings of the black body as a response to America’s reluctance to recognize and empathize with black men and women.

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B DuBois pioneers two concepts that describe the Black experience in America— the notions of “the veil” and “double-consciousness.” The meaning and implication of these words not only describe the plight of being Black and American then, it also refers to what it means to still be Black and American today – the remnants of the past live on. DuBois explains the veil concept in reference to three things: the literal darker skin of Blacks, which is the physical demarcation of the difference from whiteness, white people’s lack of clarity in order to see Blacks as “true” Americans, and lastly Blacks’ lack of clarity to see themselves outside of what white America prescribes for them. The idea of double consciousness refers to the two-ness, caused by our nations flawed and polarized system, felt by many Blacks. I argue that although DuBois was the first to coin these two terms, it is clear through analyzing Uncle Tom’s Cabin and 12 Years a Slave that these two significant concepts gave a name to what African-Americans had been feeling for years but previously could not define.

The oppression of certain groups of people is nothing new. These oppressed groups tend to be looked at as different because of their physical features and/or cultural background. Many efforts to improve the lives of the oppressed have been achieved, but there is still a long way to go. These oppressed groups consist of women and different ethnic groups which have had to deal with being pushed around by the white man throughout history. Frantz Fanon deals with his experience as a black man in the French colony of Martinique. Simone de Beauvoir speaks about her experience as a woman in the French mainland. Both authors assert the idea that the man, in particular the white man, sets himself as the superior being that defines what it is to be human and views women and blacks or minorities as the “Other”.

In the wake of slavery, the black body is constantly under attack. The hold co-exists within the wake of slavery. According to Christina Sharpe, college professor, author of In the Wake on Blackness and Being, (2016) “The wake; a state of wakefulness and a state of consciousness” (pg. 5). Being in the wake of slavery means one still faces the negative effects it and is aware of the negative affects it has on the black community. The hold co-exists in the wake of slavery and the black body is inhibited by this hold. Sharpe defines the hold as, “A large space in the lower part of a aircraft in which cargo is stowed (of a ship or aircraft); keep or detain (someone)” (p. 68). In the hold, the black body has been introduced, taught, ingrained and continues this idea of the language of violence. Through the actual hold of the ship during the Middle Passage, to the perception of blacks which also holds the black body, and to the engrained idea of the “masculine black body” which keeps queer black bodies in their own hold. In this paper, I will examine the intersectionality of blackness and queerness which is being held in the wake of slavery.

The misinterpretation of African Americans is very prominent in society. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen sheds light on the hyper-visibility of the African-Americans through stereotypes and invisibility of the Black body itself in an attempt to get readers to understand the inner conflicts of Black citizens. Citizen is composed of seven sections, which vary in length and content. The book is interspersed with photographs, sculpture, paintings, and other types of media. Rankine also draws from film and video, and various news media. Her descriptions of encounters between people of different races show how disconcerting words are and how they affect people. Though we often hear about deep-rooted institutional and cultural forces that contribute to racism, it appears that we less often hear about the psychological processes involved. Many would like to believe that racism is over, but society actions are a constant reminder of their true feeling about Blacks. Racial bias is prominent at all levels of the institution and it paralyzes the race as a whole. Rankine uses pronouns, anecdotes, and visual art to uncover the unconscious nature of racism and extend the conversation. The audience is both the eyewitness and the victim in this “post-racial” society that fails to teach us how to be a citizen. In allowing us, the readers and audience, to subject ourselves to this hurt, we experience, an understanding of true citizenship by identifying the wrongs and understanding the difference.

Cross’ book Shades of black: diversity in African-American identity (1991) depicts a perceived metamorphous of black identity through five stages of development—his ideologies are now termed as the Nigrescence theory. In simple terms, this philosophy refers to the process of becoming Black. It also demonstrates daily struggles that the black community may have in developing a healthy personal identity. Over the years, many authors attempt to define what the word black means. Eventually, many came to begin using the politically acceptable term widely applied today to regard black people; that word is known as Negroes. As different historical events occurred, one being the black power revolution on the 1970’s the experience called for a fresh definition of the term negro. Blacks or Africans in America began to be more conscious of their identity and more aware of the differences separating them. This is the experience that Cross (1971) illustrates and is primarily referenced in his five-stage progress including: pre-encounter, encounter, immersion/emersion, internalization, and internalization-commitment. This book highlights some very vital topics relating to mental health, which has been carefully disregarded by other researchers. Nonetheless, it has strong affiliations to the black experience and can positively explain a more normal psychological behavior through logical and very thought provoking

Black history has taught us that the black community has been seen as “servants” a lower class in communities of white supremacy therefore, genocides against women, children and men have been carried out through history and how “colonization” has played an important role in the white supremacy actions against black. Cesaire cites in “Colonial Discourse” “The colonial encounter in other words requires “reinvention of the Colonized” the deliberate destruction of the cast, in other words what Cesaire calls “Thingfication”, colonialism works to ‘decivilize” the colonizer, torture,

The earliest movements for repatriation by Black Americans in the late nineteenth-century reflected the ways in which the gratuity of violence of both colonialism and slavery created a dialectical tension between Black Americans and Continental Africans. The psychological and social effects of this violence manifested in the concerns W. E. B. Du Bois discusses in relation to double consciousness. Amongst the most important of them would be the ways in slavery and colonialism had shaped Black Americans perspectives of themselves, Continental Africans and Africa as a land. While many Black Americans are representative of this process, people such as Martin Delaney, one of the first proponents for Black Nationalism, and Robert Campbell, a teacher at the Institute of Colored Youth in Philadelphia, exemplify the attitudes taken up by Black Americans in the late nineteenth-century and how both behavioral and structural violence shaped their understandings. Through the conceptual framework provided by people such as Du Bois, E. P. Skinner, Frantz Fanon and Frank B. Wilderson, III, one can begin to understand how these movements not only were a product of the ideologies of Black Americans, but also the products of white supremacist, anti-Black ideology.

“Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination” written by American author, feminist and social activist, bell hooks, dissects the dichotomy of black and white culture in a westernized society. Hooks utilizes the term ‘whiteness’ throughout her piece as an acknowledgment of the domination, imperialism, colonialism, and racism that white people have asserted among black people. This discipline progressively has evolved from history; through slavery and forth, leaving an imprint in

This disconnection is most poignantly demonstrated through their enduring inquisition of whether “their names were called at holiday gatherings,” an unfulfilled curiosity concerning the simple recollection of their existences (Cliff 42). From an analytical standpoint, the colony presents a metaphor for the dehumanization and erasure of black identity as a means of societal marginalization and disposal.

Citizen, written by Claudia Rankine in 2014, narrates testimonies of systematic racism and every day micro aggressions through poems, essays, scripts and images. Rankine documents the racist encounters through the second person point of view for the reader to feel and understand the effects racism has on the body and mind. This paper will examine hypervisibility and invisibility of the black body embedded in the novel because of decades of racism. Rankine emphasizes the sensory emotions and feelings of the black body as a response to America’s reluctance to recognize and empathize with black men and women.

Frantz Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness,” a chapter from Black Skin, White Masks describes the anxiety felt while held in the gaze of the colonizer. A reading of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in conjunction with Fanon’s work raises questions and possible strategies on how to reject neocolonialism and contemporary white supremacy. Fanon’s idea of blackness is performative but not for the gain of the black man, rather for the white man. Butler suggests that regaining control of the black man’s fate comes from interpellation, the act, of interrupting the white man’s claims or ideas, or rather their misconceptions of the black man. A way of disregarding the white man’s claims is a form of rejecting that normativity, similar to Butler’s analysis of drag where one rejects normativity altogether. The black man’s lack of interpellation enhances the white man’s performativity furthering white supremacy; a way of rejecting neocolonialism that disregards societal norms.

The inferiority complex placed upon the subaltern is adverse, calamitous, and destructive. The subalterns are and have been alienated, isolated, marginalized, and outed from the hegemonic forces. They are distinguished as that of a lower class, inferior, and they do not have a voice in the world because they are outside of the hegemonic class; they are not able to tell their side of history. “To be colonized is to be removed from history, except in the most passive sense.” In the world today, the reason why that we rarely hear from the subalterns is because their voice is viewed as inferior, they have assimilated into the colonial power’s culture, and loss of personal identity. However, from becoming aware about African intellectuals, such as Frantz Fanon, and historical references to the conscious development of “racial constructs” will allow people to view the static images of subalterns in films in a different light; a light of awareness and outrage. It helps to give the subaltern a chance to tell his or her side of history and it results in talk about race in the world. In Frantz Fanon’s book, Black Skin, White Mask, it expounds that films, from the subaltern’s point of view, help to create is discourse about race relations in the Unites States and the world alike through allowing the view to think differently, express sympathy for the subaltern, and give as to why we rarely hear from the subaltern.

Franz Fanon is one of the many profound voices of black identity during the 1950s. His work in the field of psychology features an unfathomed approach to critical theory, post-colonial studies and Marxism. In Black Skin White Masks, Fanon dives into the Negro psyche through understanding its origin. In studying this, Fanon comes to the argument that the dehumanizing process of colonization renders both Blacks and Whites crazy. In analyzing Africans, specifically, Fanon determines that the “Negro [is] enslaved by his inferiority [and] the white man enslaved by his superiority” and that is why they are both mentally unbalanced. It is this neurotic orientation through which Fanon discusses the process through which Africans become second-class French people. In discussing the Negro neurosis, Fanon begins with this statement: The Negro “becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness.”