Black Skin, White Masks

"Fanon was a psychiatrist by training. In fact, he originally wrote Black Skin, White Masks as his final-year dissertation for his medical degree, but was promptly told by his supervisor that there was no way he would pass with a paper like that. So he wrote something different on neuropharmacology for that instead. He was black, and was born and raised in Martinique, which was a French colony that then became a département of France. He fought for the French forces in the Second World War and in recognition of his service in the war he was awarded a scholarship to the University of Lyon where he trained to be a psychiatrist. He’s especially well known for his second book, The Wretched of the Earth , which came out in 1961 and is a central text in anti-colonial political thought. But his first book doesn’t take the same kind of political perspective. Rather it focuses on the individual person. It was very much influenced by existentialism as a movement, and was published in the same year as Saint Genet . Fanon was particularly interested in the psychiatric problems you could face if you were a victim of racism , particularly of anti-black racism in France. This book is often misunderstood, I think, and its existentialism is usually completely overlooked. Both of those things are important features of its existentialism. What he develops is an existentialist view, that existence precedes essence, that people don’t have fixed personalities. It follows that there are no ethnic natures, or essences of particular groups of people, and that anything that might appear to be this way is therefore the result of social construction. That operates, in his view, through a kind of sedimentation of the idea that there are different races of people with different fixed natures. Fanon places a lot of emphasis on childhood and upbringing here, so there’s a strong similarity between Black Skin, White Masks and The Second Sex in that regard. The underlying theory of the whole book does seem to be that same kind of existentialism you get in Beauvoir’s work from the late 1930s onwards and in Sartre’s work from Saint Genet onwards. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Each chapter in the book develops work of a different kind of analysis: he has some literary criticism, some historical analysis, some psychoanalytic and political theory, followed by short chapters on Hegel and Adler. So, it’s often been seen as quite an eclectic work that’s trying to address racism in a number of ways but doesn’t really have any theoretical unity to it. Some people think that’s the point of the book, that there is no correct single way to address these problems; but I think that’s mistaken, that what he’s doing consistently throughout the book is developing this existentialist viewpoint of the sedimentation of a social racism into the outlook of the individual. Again, it’s quite an odd book. He changes literary register all the time, and he’s drawing on a wide range of intellectual sources, both academic ones in psychology, history and anthropology, and literary sources, novelists, poets and musicians. And he’s not only drawing on those influences, but also switching between those literary registers himself. So, some of it is quite autobiographical and confessional, almost meditative. Much of it is objective and forensic. So it can be a challenging read, trying to keep up with him as he keeps shifting gears. I think that’s definitely what’s going on with Black Skin, White Masks . The actual writing of the text is a kind of performance of the theory itself. So, who is Frantz Fanon, the author? Well, he’s the person who has all these influences and whose outlook is developed through all this sedimentation, and when he expresses himself authentically, as the person that he is, he must express himself in these different registers and draw on all these influences, because otherwise it’s only a partial presentation of his thought and his voice."

"Franz Fanon was born and raised in Martinique, part of the French empire. It’s still a ‘département d’outre-mer,’ in other words, it has the same status in France as Isère does, or Calais. It is essentially a European island. Fanon was a man of colour raised in a culture where blackness was a stain. Blackness was regarded as useless to the state, useless to commerce, useless to education. And he fought against that. He was a disciple of the great thinker Emile Césaire. Fanon was not just a thinker, he was an activist, a doer. He later moved to Algeria. He wanted to bring about change, not just think about it. Unfortunately he didn’t live long enough to see that happen. I read this book first in French, when I was an undergraduate studying in France. I was so taken by this book, with its beautiful use of language. You didn’t read many books written by black people, and he had such a facility with language, and I thought how amazing this was. Then, when I delved into the meaning of the book, I realised that essentially he was saying that black people are re-burdened by skin colour in a white-dominated society. They learn to live as white people, but underneath they are really black people. That’s a contradiction, a kind of self-denial. But it’s a plausible proposition, particularly in the 1950s when it wasn’t straightforward for people like me to be professors in universities. It wasn’t impossible, but it was very difficult. The opportunity for people of colour to play a part in the life of Britain or France or North America wasn’t there. He was railing against that. He gave people like me, raised in the 1970s, learning about the world in the 1980s, something to hold on to. It wasn’t so crazy to ask myself: ‘Am I living a lie?’ ‘Is this mauvaise foi [bad faith]?’ Being educated, in my case in premium institutions such as the London School of Economics, but never talking about race, never talking about difference, never being asked what I thought, as a person of colour, about the education I was receiving, never reading a book by a black person unless you went out and found it, not looking at the experiences of the diaspora. Still today, in our curriculum, there’s very little of that. Franz Fanon, being a person of colour living in an outpost of France, made me think there were some common threads here. “What matters? What’s on the surface? Does my black skin determine who I am?” This was the kind of alternative narrative I felt I had to pursue in order to understand my role in this society. What was I going to do with my learning? Was I going to work for a bank and make lots of money, and just hide myself away in a little private world? Or was I going to contribute to a more public wealth that tries to challenge and channel some of these ideas into public discourse? I chose the latter, and stayed an impoverished journalist for twenty-five years. Nevertheless, looking back at Fanon, this book still resonates for me. In a way, that’s an indictment of how little the academic world has done, in Europe, to try and take on board his ideas and channel them into the curriculum and help our cosmopolitan society, that is rooted in its history, to come to terms with the modern diverse nations that we are – I’m talking about France , Britain , Germany to a lesser extent, Spain , Portugal, the United States ."