Depersonalization In Frrantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Man

During a time where African American literature was fueled with racial segregation and pride in ones race during the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston offers a different and controversial approach with her literary work “How it feels to be colored me”.(13) In the works Hurston uses several colloquialisms, anecdotes, imagery and figurative expression to invite the reader on an adventure filled with pleasure. The poem takes the reader from the beginning of the Hurston’s childhood back in Eatonville, Florida into adulthood in Orlando, Florida. Hurston proves that overcoming racism can be accomplished by uniting the public and ignoring the visual difference in a person’s outer appearance. Hurston’s strength, individuality and resilience scream

In Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “How It Feels To Be Colored Me”, her racial identity varies based on her location. Towards the beginning of her life when Zora was in her own community she could be a lighthearted, carefree spirit. However, when she was forced to leave her community, Zora’s identity became linked to her race. In this essay I will demonstrate how Zora’s blackness is both a sanctuary and completely worthless.

In the essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”, author Zora Neale Hurston writes to an American audience about having maturity and self-conscious identity while being an African American during the early 1900’s through the 1920’s Harlem Renaissance. Hurston expresses and informs her audience about how she does not see herself as a color, and instead sees herself as all she is made up of on the inside. Her primary claim is that she is not “tragically colored” and she should not have a single care about how the world reminds her of how she should act about her race. Her essay chronicles her personal experiences in being an unapologetically colored woman and creates the argument that she should not ever feel self-pity for being black. She utilizes her personal anecdotes and weaves them with metaphors, analogies, and rhetorical questions in order to create an immersive experience for the reader. Furthermore, Hurston engages the reader with her slightly sarcastic, strong, and blissfully positive tone effectively creates a way with words that communicate her claims in an entertaining way.

Hurston, on the other hand, lived in a town where only blacks lived until she was thirteen years old. Therefore, she only knew the “black” self. There was no second identity to contend with. She states that “white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there.”2 She does not feel anger when she is discriminated against. She only wonders how anyone can not want to be in her company. She “has no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored” (Hurston 1712).

Zora Neale Hurston is unequivocally open about her race and identity in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” As Hurston shares her life story, the reader is exposed to Hurston’s self-realization journey about how she “became colored.” Hurston utilizes her autobiographical short story as a vehicle to describe the “very day she became colored.” Race is particularly vital in Zora Neale Hurston’s essay, “How it Feels to Be Colored Me” as she deals with the social construct of race, racism, and sustaining one’s cultural identity.

On a sociological basis, the notion of race is understood as a social construction. As a black student in France, Frantz Fanon writes of how the white man has made him a “slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of [him] but of [his]

In Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “How It Feels To Be Colored Me”, her racial identity varies based on her location. Towards the beginning of her life when Zora was in her own community she could be a lighthearted, carefree spirit. However, when she was forced to leave her community, Zora’s identity became linked to her race. In this essay I will demonstrate how Zora’s blackness is both a sanctuary and completely worthless.

The memoir “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston, was first published in 1928, and recounts the situation of racial discrimination and prejudice at the time in the United States. The author was born into an all-black community, but was later sent to a boarding school in Jacksonville, where she experienced “race” for the first time. Hurston not only informs the reader how she managed to stay true to herself and her race, but also inspires the reader to abandon any form of racism in their life. Especially by including Humor, Imagery, and Metaphors, the author makes her message very clear: Everyone is equal.

Before laws were passed for equality, African-Americans had a difficult time coping with being undermined by whites. This led them to build their own communities and remain among their own. The story “How it Feels to be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston was written in 1928, about her moving from a community of her own kind to neighbors who discriminated against her and her family. Though a person’s environment can affect how they see himself/herself or how others might perceive him/her, difficult times does not exactly mean that a person will become bitter or vengeful about it.

In the "Lived Experience of a Black man" chapter, Fanon asserts his anger towards the white man because a black person 's skin color is the basis for prejudice and thus they are not the ideal human. He is annoyed that when someone mentions a physician or a teacher and they are black, the white society seems surprised that these black scholars are gentle or intelligent. His anger leads him wanting to be accepted by the white man. He writes, "Like all good tacticians I wanted to rationalize the world and show the white man he was mistaken"(Fanon 98). He feels the need to show the white man that they are mistaken about believing all the negative thoughts about black people.

In The essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” is a descriptive essay in which Zora Neale Hurston discovers her real identity. At the beginning of the essay, the setting takes place in Eatonville, Florida describing moments when Zora greets her neighbors by singing and dancing without anybody judging her. Back then, she was free from feeling different among other races. However, a tragedy happened when she was thirteen, her mom passed away and she left home to attend school in Jacksonville where she experiences discrimination due to her color of skin. She was introduced to a different lifestyle where the color of her skin was an unfortunate thing. However, she felt this change effected the way she viewed her appearance, as well as inside her. Here she also experienced isolation that comes from being different compared to other races. Hurst realizes that it’s more than just being “colored”, but how race can separate people. Back in history, Jacksonville’s habitants were a mixture of blacks and whites. In Jacksonville, Hurst was just another “colored girl.” However, this essay motivated me to analyze, evaluate and synthesize these works and explore the concepts and themes that run through each of the readings. Most importantly, find out what made this essay so important in American literature. According to the description in the essay, I have notice that the author Hurston uses literary devices like metaphor and tone that I found interesting and deserving for the reader to enjoy this journey.

Decolonization is the undoing of colonialism, where a nation establishes and maintains its domination over dependent territories. In the words of Fanon, in the reading The Wretched of the Earth, “National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the na­tion to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event.” (Fanon, 1). Frantz Fanon was one of many authors who supported decolonization struggles occurring after World War II. He breaks down decolonization into two senses: one being the physical act of freeing a territory from external control of a colonizer, and the other being the psychological act of freeing the consciousness of the native from the alienation caused by colonization. Fanon particularly advocated that violence was justified by overthrowing colonial oppression. In his reading, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wrote on why and how colonialism must be stopped. Fanon argued that the colonial infrastructure must be destroyed. “Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder. But it cannot be accomplished by the wave of a magic wand, a natural cataclysm, or a gentleman’s agreement. Decolonization, we know, is an historical process: In other words, it can only be understood, it can only find its significance and become self coherent insofar as we can discern the history-making movement which gives it form and substance,”

Fanon insists that decolonization entails a violent struggle between two parties since decolonization is "the replacing of a certain 'species ' of men by another 'species of men" (The Wretched of the Earth 35). In other

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.”

Franz Fanon, in his seminal work The Wretched of the Earth, argues that decolonisation alias restoring nationhood is always a ‘violent phenomenon’: “To tell the truth, the proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up…. If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the well-known words: "The last shall be first and the first last." Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence.”