Black Skin, White Masks

Black Skin, White Masks was written in French by Frantz Fanon and first published in France in 1952. It has been translated into many languages, including English, as it has become a classic reference text on the issue of European colonization and subsequent black alienation. Fanon was born in 1925 in Martinique, a Caribbean country colonized by the French since 1635. In 1947, Fanon left Martinique to study psychiatry in France. Black Skin, White Masks was originally written as part of Fanon's medical thesis.

Fanon was primarily concerned with the devastating impact of colonial racism on African people. According to Fanon, in order to justify and maintain their colonial supremacy over Africans, Europeans conveniently constructed two social categories, blackness and whiteness. The first one was equated with fundamental inferiority and animality. The second one conferred a monopoly over humanity. Thus, for Fanon, blackness and whiteness are purely social constructs, with no basis in reality. What does exist, however, is the human. The human's determining characteristic, wrote Fanon, who was heavily influenced by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, is to be free. Colonialism, by creating racial categories from which no one may escape, gravely interferes with freedom and must be destroyed.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon described in particular the reification of African people in Martinique and its terrible consequences. Defined by the colonizers as cannibals, backward, rapists, fetishists, inferior, and so on, it became impossible for blacks to avoid white people's definition and perception of them. Thus, racism literally, and in the most fundamental way, ascribed an inferior, subhuman status to blacks. As a result of having internalized this negative discourse, many black people became convinced that they could only achieve human status if they imitated those who claimed to define humanity (i.e., white people). Thus, what followed were tragic and pathetic attempts on the part of some blacks to appropriate whiteness in an effort to redeem their humanity.

Black Skin, White Masks focused particularly on the issue of the prestige associated with speaking a European language and having a white lover. After having noted how language plays a vital part in life, Fanon explained how the rejection of Creole, the mother tongue of African people in Martinique, and the worship of French was a case of linguistic alienation caused by blacks' attempt to escape blackness and be reborn into whiteness. Similarly, those blacks who engaged in love or sexual affairs with whites did this to prove their human worth. In other words, the colonized subjects, victims of the psychological violence inflicted by the colonizers, aped the colonizers, thus wearing “white masks.” All of this, Fanon claimed, was quite unhealthy. His recommendation therefore included destroying blackness and whiteness alike, through the destruction of colonialism, to redirect our focus on the cultivation and nurturing of the human that is within each person, regardless of skin color. Fanon rejected Négritude, that is, the belief that there exist specific [Page 148]black cultural values. Similarly, he thought of the past as an unnecessary and false burden that could only compromise the realization of that individual freedom so dear to him at the time of his writing.

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