This review of Frantz Fanon’s book _Black Skin, White Masks_ (1952) is dedicated to friend and fallen 5%er Juchebot, who recommended the book to me some weeks ago.

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Reading the book one sees why Juche

recommended it. Fanon was mightily “based,” providing insights regarding colonialism from the particular vantage point of an exceedingly erudite French West Indian psychiatrist. Bringing this background to the material, Fanon does not shy away from unleashing a bevy of personal

anecdotes, particularly treatment of mental illnesses among Martinique Blacks as a result of French colonialism. That Fanon was a Pan-Africanist and Marxist humanist thinker and writer is at once crucial to recognizing some of the dimensions of his analysis of colonization and

for large chunks of the book barely discernible at all. Fanon could perhaps be charged with certain flaws, like anyone else, but he rather clearly refused to put the ideological cart before the “lived experience” horse. Reading this one senses that he is driven by a number of the

encounters with patients. He shares dramatic anecdotes as a way of explaining why he is mounting this written scaffolding with the intent of opposing colonization.

The book has a highly argumentative style; Fanon does not shy away from straightforwardly underlining how _Black

Skin, White Masks_ is a rebuttal against what he categorizes as the limitations, understatements, or even falsehoods of writers such as Mayotte Capecia. Capecia was the writer of _I Am a Martinician Woman_, which Fanon viciously attacks. Cepecia advocates on behalf of Black women

mating with White men, subsuming the personal relationship proclivities of the women of Martinique under the political framework of colonization, but for one notable case.

Fanon’s book seems like something of a response to Aime Cesaire’s _Discourse on Colonialism_ (1950).

_Black Skin, White Masks_ opens with a Cesaire quote from _Discourse on Colonialism_: “I am talking about millions of men whom they have knowingly instilled with fear and a complex of inferiority, whom they have infused with despair and trained to tremble, to kneel and behave

like flunkeys.”

As Fanon writes in the Introduction, “We shall see that the alienation of the black man is not an individual question. Alongside phylogeny and ontogeny, there is also sociogeny. In a way, in answer to the wishes of Leconte and Damey, let us say that here it is a

question of sociodiagnostics,” referring to Maurice Leconte and Alfred Damey’s 1949 _Cricial Review of Current Psychiatric Nosographies_.

As Fanon continues, “The black man must wage the struggle on two levels: whereas historically these levels are mutually dependent, any

unilateral liberation is flawed, and the worst mistake would be to believe their mutual dependence is automatic.”

In Chapter One, “The Black Man and Language,” Fanon skillfully paints a picture of colonial dependency that is demoralizing: “Among a group of young Antilleans, he

who can express himself, who masters the language, is the one to look out for: be wary of him; he’s almost white. In France they say ‘to speak like a book.’ In Martinique they say ‘to speak like a white man.’” Two paragraphs later: “There is a psychological phenomenon that

consists in believing the world will open up as borders are broken down. The black Antillean, prisoner on his island, lost in an atmosphere without the slightest prospect, feels the call of Europe like a breath of fresh air. For we must admit that Cesaire was overly generous in

his _Notebook of a Return to My Native Land_. The city of Fort-de-France is truly lackluster and shipwrecked.” A pair of pages later: “The black man entering France changes because for him the _metropole_ is the holy of holies; he changes not only because that’s where his

knowledge of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire comes from, but also because that’s where his doctors, his departmental superiors, and innumerable little potentates come from—from the staff sergeant ‘fifteen years on the job’ to the gendarme from Panissieres. There is a kind of

spell cast from afar and the black man who leaves in one week for the _metropole_ creates an aura of magic around him where the words Paris, Marseille, the Sarbonne, and Pigalle represent the high points. On departure, the amputation of his being vanishes as the ocean liner comes

into view.”

Fanon writes of how the Black man becomes an alien among his people upon return: “So here is our new returnee. He can no longer understand Creole; he talks of the Opera House, which he has probably seen only from a distance; but most of all he assumes a critical

attitude toward his fellow islanders. He reacts differently at the slightest pretext.”

Seeing the unifier, language, turned upside-down as a kind of weapon is the theme of the first chapter.

Chapter Two, “The Woman of Color and the White Man,” Fanon attacks the aforementioned

Capecia and her book by quoting it: “…Mayotte loves a white man unconditionally. He is her lord. She asks for nothing, demands nothing, except for a little whiteness in her life. And when she asks herself whether he is handsome or ugly, she writes: ‘All I know is that he had

blue eyes, blond hair, a pale complexion and I loved him.’ If we reword these same terms it is not difficult to come up with: ‘I loved him because he had blue eyes, blond hair, and a pale complexion.’”

A great friend recently noted to me that as he, corralled by a mutual other

great friend to watch an NFL game a week and a half ago, found himself noticing that almost every commercial during the football game paired a female “POC” with a White male, with extra emphasis on Black females with White males. He asked me, “What do you make of it?” Not having

subjected myself to such a dismal waste of time—but for cultural examinations such as this—I could only surmise, “As dating apps demonstrate, the only group of females who do not consistently move toward White men are Black women. It fits that they would be targeted with

advertising in an effort to break down the loyalty Black women tend to exhibit toward Black men.” He agreed; I noted that this fit with what Fanon was writing in _Black Skin, White Masks_. Colonialism has perhaps mutated and looks remarkably different from how it did decades ago,

and yet perhaps not so different, after all.

Chapter Three, “The Man of Color and the White Woman,” begins, “Out of the blackest part of my soul, through the zone of hachures, surges up this desire to be suddenly _white_. I want to be recognized not as _Black_, but as _White_.”

Jean Veneuse becomes one of Fanon’s primary subjects here, as the author weaves the psychological tale of Black male inferiority. Much of this part of the book could have been written by a racist White man loathing the imagery of Black men lusting after White women, chronicling

how Black men, upon visiting France, head off to the bordellos at once, and fornicate with White women as a kind of rite of passage.

Chapter Four, “The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized,” takes the French empire to task for hypocrisies. A running theme is a compare-

and-contrast with the U.S. For instance, “At the end of a performance of _The Respectful Prostitute_ in North Africa a general remarked to Sartre: ‘Your play should be shown in black Africa. It’s a good illustration of how much happier the black man is on French soil than his

counterpart is in America.’”

Telling tales of disparate Black people’s dreams in which they are terrified or feel threatened here, Fanon informatively depicts the casting of the shadow of colonization on so many Black psyches.

Chapter Five, “The Lived Experience of the Black

Man,” starts off on some unconvincing notes, drawing too many parallels that seem questionable between anti-Black racism among White Europeans and anti-Semitism. However, the psychological extrapolations are reasonably well-founded, with Fanon speaking primarily of what could be

called today the “petty racists” among us (which we could, for these purposes, extend even to the “petty anti-Semites”). Written in the early 1950s, Fanon’s work is continually marked by the recency of what came to be known as the Holocaust: myriad anticolonial arguments are

provided rhetorical buttressing by drawing comparison with that event. Leopold Sedar Senghor is liberally quoted in this chapter, particularly his 1945 work _Shadow Songs_, many quotes from which serve as moralizing arguments on behalf of the “Experience of the Black Man.” _Black

Orpheus_ by Sartre is charged with marking “a date in the intellectualization of black existence. And Sartre’s mistake was not only to seek the source of the spring, but in a certain way to drain the spring dry.”

Here Fanon analyzes the meaningfulness of Black poetry under the

shared existence of White colonialism, demonstrating how moralizing these works are in contrast with certain films that he attacked for their depictions of Blacks in the 1940s early in the book.

Chapter Six, “The Black Man and Psychopathology,” Fanon returns again to popular

culture. How Blacks portray the Devil or Wolf or Wicked Genie or Savage or Evil in cartoon adventures of Mickey Mouse or Tarzan movies and so many others aimed at White children. What Black children were subjected to in the educational realm of the French Antilles is vividly

depicted by Fanon’s writing, noting with sadness the consistent message that Whites—the explorer, the “civilizing colonizer” to use Fanon’s words, etc.—gifted Blacks with civilization. Fanon goes on to reference Charles Odier and Odier’s description of disparate values between

Blacks and Whites as being so impossibly far apart. Fanon tries to comprehend this by arguing that the process of colonization engenders a process by which Blacks view Whites as “the Other,” not unlike how Whites see Blacks, and this creates irreparable harm for Blacks: “So what

are we getting at? Quite simply that when Blacks make contact with the white world a certain sensitizing action takes place. If the psychic structure is fragile, we observe a collapse of the ego. The black man stops behaving as an _actional_ person. His actions are destined for

‘the Other’…” Fanon analyzes the colonial legacy through the prism of Freudian complexes, discussing the Oedipal complex, and tries to answer the riddle as to whether or not Blacks are “phobogenic” in one of the book’s strongest parts. Fanon posits that what he calls the

“phobogenic object” endows the subject with the agency with which to constitute itself in opposition to the world through orchestrating the aggression of the super-ego.
Fanon presents the case of Blacks representing wickedness in White history (one wonders if director Spike Lee

read this book, though Fanon’s influence was ultimately so great that many threads of his were picked up by the Nation of Islam, as depicted in the 1992 film _Malcolm X_ with Malcolm Little’s mentor saying much the same).

“Beautiful blond baby” and “beautiful Black girl” seem

impossible to put together, Fanon insists, due to the legacy of racism and historic realities between the races, contending that the latter sounds incongruous and nonsensical. It’s a sobering account, and worth diving into.

Chapter Seven, “The Black Man and Recognition,” and

Chapter Eight, “By Way of Conclusion,” play out to the reader as one sprawling conclusive statement. Fanon packs a fierce punch in general, but the standout part here is his analysis of how disadvantaged Blacks were in the U.S., where the fight between the groups was so brutal

compared to France. And yet Fanon says, ruefully, that for Blacks in France, the situation is truly unbearable, arguing that being absorbed into a kind of borderline-deracinated existence is worse than what U.S. Southern Blacks were experiencing at the same time.

Fanon’s

arguments tend to hinge on language, and the quality of language. He contends that merely speaking the White man’s language is to devastate African heritage. The only way for Blacks to even begin to achieve a sort of sense of “equality” is to forego their blackness.

Fanon in _Black Skin, White Masks_ contends forthrightly that Blacks need to “retvrn” to their heritage, to their traditions, to their languages, to their customs, to their ancestors.

68 years later his case remains compelling.