Black Skin White Masks

So I followed my own advice and looked up Frantz Fanon.  And it’s a good thing I did–as soon as I read some of the webpages on him, I went, Ohhhh, so that was his position on racism.  While reading, I felt like he had never solidified a stance.  I thought, maybe that’s the point of the whole piece.  But I doubted it.  Several sites said that Fanon wrote from a postcolonial viewpoint. Duh.  Ever have those days when you’re looking so hard for something that’s right in front of you? Yeah, that was me. 

At www.english.emery.edu, the author of Fanon’s bio page, Jennifer Poulos, mentions that Fanon believed the white culture desired to “alienate the consciousness” of the black man.  Heard that before.  Althusser suggests that this is exactly what the State Apparatuses are doing–the capitalists alienate the working class from the relations of production.  Which actually makes perfect sense because Fanon, in the fifth chapter of Black Skin White Masks, relates the domination of whites over blacks to the control of the workman by the bourgeoisie. Fanon writes, “when I tried, on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to recalim my negritude, it was snatched away from me” (132).  Jean-Paul Sartre is the thief.  Sartre writes, “The idea of negritude ‘passes,’ as Hegel puts it, into the objective, positive, exact idea of proletariat” (132-3).  He continues, “The most ardent poets of negritude are at the same time militant Marxists” (133).  But it’s not the same, cries Fanon.  The alienation is different. 

Which leads me to my biggest stumbling block of Fanon’s work.  Does he want blacks and whites to recognize the similarities in each other and band together under their common struggles, or does he want the black culture and struggle to be recognized for what it is, which is wholly separate from whiteness?  Can both of these concepts coexist?  It seems impossible for blacks to reconcile themselves with a white culture that has taken away blacks’ collective identity and replaced it with one that whites see fit.  Blacks, says Fanon, are defined by whites.  Blacks do not exist as a separate entity anymore, but they need to find a way to get there.  “I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency…and above all else, “Sho’ good eatin’.” Fanon writes.  This made me think of W.E.B. DuBois’ idea of double consciousness: You are yourself, and then you are what you are through others’ eyes.  The soul is divided according to your own standards, and the ones held up to you by scrutinizers.  So what does one do? He puts on a white mask, says Fanon, whether he’s aware of it or not.  The white man is industry, mechanisms.  The black man is emotion, earth.  Fanon said that after white scientists “reluctantly conceded that the Negro was a human being,” the white race still had no desire for interracial contact and connection (119).  But Fanon himself doesn’t seem to want that, either.  He wants not only to be seen as a member of the human race, but to “reclaim my negritude.”  But maybe it’s the same thing as some types of feminism–we don’t hate men, but we hate the patriarchal system.  Perhaps Fanon has the same mindset, where he hates the white culture and all it’s done to him, but doesn’t necessarily want to forgo connections with white people individually.