Question

From Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks

There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.”

What does this quote mean to you

Answer 1

Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief.

This is simply not a historic landscape, although Black Skin, White Masks is a historic text, firmly located in time and place. Fanon’s anger has a strong contemporary echo. It is the silent scream of all those who toil in abject poverty simply to exist in the hinterlands and vast conurbations of Africa. It is the resentment of all those marginalized and fi rmly located on the fringes in Asia and Latin America. It is the bitterness of those demonstrating against the Empire, the superiority complex of the neo-conservative ideology, and the banality of the “War on Terror.” It is the anger of all whose cultures, knowledge systems and ways of being that are ridiculed, demonized, declared inferior and irrational, and, in some cases, eliminated. This is not just any anger. It is the universal fury against oppression in general, and the perpetual domination of the Western civilization in particular. This anger is not a spontaneous phenomenon. It is no gut reaction, or some recently discovered passion for justice and equity. Rather, it is an anger borne out of grinding experience, painfully long self analysis, and even longer thought and reflection. As such, it is a guarded anger, directed at a specific, long term desire. The desire itself is grounded in self-consciousness: when it encounters resistance from the other, self-consciousness undergoes the experience of desire—the first milestone on the road that leads to dignity. Black Skin, White Masks offers a very particular definition of dignity. Dignity is not located in seeking equality with the white man and his civilization: it is not about assuming the attitudes of the master who has allowed his slaves to eat at his table. It is about being oneself with all the multiplicities, systems and contradictions of one’s own ways of being, doing and knowing. It is about being true to one’s Self. Black Skin, White Masks charts the author’s own journey of discovering his dignity through an interrogation of his own Self—a journey that will not be unfamiliar to all those who have been forced to endure western civilization.

The architecture of this book is rooted in the temporal Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks when he was 27. Published in 1952, it was his first and perhaps most enduring book. And it was ignored. Its significance was recognized only after the death of the author, particularly after the publication of the English translation a decade and a half later in 1967. It was a year when anti-war campaigning was at its height; and student strikes and protests, that began at Columbia University, New York, started to spread like wildfi re across the United States and Europe. Martin Luther King was leading the civil rights movement and was to be assassinated a year later. Advocates of black power were criticizing attempts to assimilate and integrate black people. The book caught the imagination of all who argued for and promoted the idea of black consciousness. It became the bible of radical students, in Paris and London, outraged at the exploitation of the Third World. Black Skin, White Masks was the first book to investigate the psychology of colonialism. It examines how colonialism is internalized by the colonized, how an inferiority complex is inculcated, and how, through the mechanism of racism, black people end up emulating their oppressors. It is due to the sensitivities of Fanon, says Ashis Nandy, that “we know something about the interpersonal patterns which constituted the colonial situation, particularly in Africa.” Fanon began a process of psychoanalytic deconstruction that was developed further fi rst by Nandy in The Intimate Enemy and then by Ngugi wa Thiong in Decolonising the Mind (1986). Other theorists of colonial subjectivity have followed in their footsteps. Fanon writes from the perspective of a colonized subject. He is a subject with a direct experience of racism who has developed a natural and intense hatred of racism. When it comes to experience, this is no ordinary subject: already the author has fought for the resistance in the Caribbean and France, has been wounded near the Swiss border, and received a citation for courage. He has a professional interest in psychoanalysis and speaks of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Gustav Jung without much distinction. He is going to offer us a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem, he says. But we can be sure that this is not a therapy session. Fanon is no armchair philosopher or academic theorist. He has a more urgent and pressing thing on his mind: liberation. There is an urgency to Black Skin, White Masks that bursts from its pages. The text is full of discontinuities, changes in style, merging of genres, dramatic movement from analysis to pronouncements, switches from objective scientific discussion to deep subjectivity, transfers from theory to journalism, complex use of extended metaphors, and, not least, a number of apparent contradictions. As a genuine, and dare I say “old fashioned” polymath, Fanon is not afraid to use any and all the tools and methods at his disposal: Marxism, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, medical dissection, and good old aphorisms. And he is just as happy to subvert them—a livid subversion that some would see as contradiction. But above all the text has an immediacy that engages and stirs us. We can feel a soul in turmoil, hear a voice that speaks directly to us, and see the injustices described being lived in front of our eyes. This is most evident in the chapter on “The Fact of Blackness.” Here, Fanon breaks out of all convention and simply lets his stream of consciousness wash on to the paper. All this whiteness that burns me. I sit down at the fi re and became aware of my uniform. I had not seen it. It is indeed ugly. I stop there, for who can tell me what beauty is? This directness, this simmering anger, makes us uncomfortable because “civilized society” does not like uncomfortable truths and naked honesty. But this is exactly what makes Black Skin, White Masks such a powerful and lasting indictment of western civilization. There is little point, I think, in accusing Fanon of sexism and gender bias. It is indeed true, as Bart Moore-Gilbert suggests, that Black Skin, White Masks “discriminates pointedly between the experiences of men and women of colour.”3 But who used gender neutral language in the 1950s? And yes, Fanon can be used both to attack and defend European humanism. That’s because European humanism does have a few redeeming features along with its totalizing tendencies. He is critical of European universalism yet uses the discourse of psychoanalysis to reveal the emotional anomalies responsible for the resulting complexes because one can distance oneself from certain varieties of universalism and get closer to certain other notions of universal thought and values. Fanon is a contextual thinker and embraces that which makes most sense to him in the context of his dilemmas. When reading Black Skin, White Masks one ought to keep the time and circumstances in which it was written firmly in mind. This is a dynamic text written in the heat of an intense, and often bloody, liberation struggle. It emerged from a life and death struggle, an individual as well as a collective struggle, concerned with the survival of the body as well as the survival of the soul. The struggle is concerned as much with freedom from colonialism as with liberation from the suffocating embrace of Europe, and the pretensions of its civilization to be the universal destiny of all humanity. The text changes and unfolds itself as the experiences of the author transform and change him, as he suffocates, gasps, twists, struggles, and turns his back on the degradation of those who would make man a mere mechanism. For Fanon, the struggle is nothing less than an attempt to survive, to breathe the air of liberty. We need to see the context. But we also need to lift our perceptions to see its global message. For we all desire what Fanon wants.

What does the black man want? At first sight, Fanon is rather hard on the “black man.” He is supposed to be a good nigger (black or dark-skinned person) who even lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell. But Fanon’s anger is directed not towards the “black man” but the proposition that he is required not only to be black but he must be black in relation to the white man. It is the internalization, or rather as Fanon calls it epidermalization, of this inferiority that concerns him. When the black man comes into contact with the white world he goes through an experience of sensitization. His ego collapses. His self-esteem evaporates. He ceases to be a self-motivated person. The entire purpose of his behavior is to emulate the white man, to become like him, and thus hope to be accepted as a man. It is the dynamic of inferiority that concerns Fanon; and which ultimately he wishes to eliminate. This is the declared intention of his study: to enable the man of color to understand … the psychological elements that can alienate his fellow Negro. Whiteness, Fanon asserts, has become a symbol of purity, of Justice, Truth, Virginity. It defines what it means to be civilized, modern and human. That is why the Negro knows nothing of the cost of freedom; when he has fought for Liberty and Justice … these were always white liberty and white justice; that is, values secreted by his masters. Blackness represents the diametrical opposite: in the collective unconsciousness, it stands for ugliness, sin, darkness, immorality. Even the dictionary defi nition of white means clean and pure. We can fi nd, in Roget’s Thesaurus, over 134 synonyms for whiteness, most with positive connotations. In contrast, Roget’s Thesaurus tells us black means dirty, prohibited and funereal. It provides 120 synonyms for black and blackness, none with positive connotation. This is why a white lie is excusable; and black lie is all that is wicked and evil. Evolution itself moves from black to white. Indeed, even the Merciful God is white, with a bushy beard and bright pink cheeks. The conclusion: One is white as one is rich, as one is beautiful, as one is intelligent. And the corollary: he is Negro who is immoral. To become moral in this scheme of the universe, Fanon tells us, it is necessary to cease being a Negro, cease being true to history and himself. But Fanon’s anger is not directed simply at the black man who wants to turn his race white. He is equally dismissive of the man who adores the Negro: he is as “sick” as the man who abominates him. The idealized Negro is equally a construction of the white man. He represents the fl ip side of the Enlightenment: he is constructed not as a real person with real history but an image. The idealized Negro, the noble savage, is the product of utopian thinkers, such as Sir Thomas More, who comes from “No place” and is in the end “No person.” This Negro was born out of the need of European humanism to rescue itself from its moral purgatory and project itself, and displace, the original inhabitants of Latin America and the Caribbean. Not surprisingly, Fanon does not look on lovers of Negros with favor. Liberation begins by recognizing these constructions for what they are. The first impulse at the arrival of awareness is self floating: as I begin to recognize that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. Here, Fanon is articulating a common feeling. If all you represent—your history, your culture, your very self—is nothing but ugly, naïve and wicked, then it is not surprising that you do not see yourself in a kindly manner. But this neurotic situation is not the route to emancipation. There is only one solution: to rise above the absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal. So the first thing that the black man wants is to say no. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom. And, above all, no to those who attempt to build a definition of him. While it is understandable, Fanon asserts, that the first action of the black man is a reaction, it is necessary to go beyond. But the next step brings us face to face with a dilemma. Should the black man define himself in reaction to the white man thus confirming the white man as a measure of all things? Or should one strive unremittingly for a concrete and ever new understanding of man? Where is the true mode of resistance actually located? How should the black man speak for himself?